Towards the end of November 1941, the Nazi authorities began to deport the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia (the Protectorate) to the fortress city of Theresienstadt, about 60 km north of Prague. The city’s 18th century fortress now served as a ghetto. Thousands of deportees were housed in the army barracks under terrible conditions. By depicting Theresienstadt as a "model of Jewish settlement" and thus concealing its role as a transit camp for Jewish deportees, the Nazis were able to camouflage their true objectives and policies namely, the mass annihilation of the Jews.
Show more Commencing in January 1942, transports started to leave Theresienstadt for Riga. Later, some of the transports were sent to extermination camps and murder sites, including Auschwitz, Treblinka and Maly Trostenets.

In June 1942, the RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt – Reich Security Main Office) embarked on mass deportations of Jews from Germany and Austria to Theresienstadt. The Jews sent there were mostly elderly (above the age of 65). They belonged to various groups consisting primarily of those who had earned high military decorations and citations during the First World War, people of international renown, and Jews who had formerly been married to non-Jewish spouses. Included in the last group were what the Nazis coined Mischling, that is, the offspring of Jewish and non-Jewish unions (a term literally meaning "crossbreed"). Essentially these were Germans deemed by the Nazi racist laws to be Jewish because they did not have full Aryan ancestry.

The Central Office for Jewish Emigration (Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung), headed by SS-Hauptsturmfuehrer Alois Brunner, was responsible for conducting the deportation of Jews from Vienna. The first step was to send out orders to potential deportees indicating when they were to report at the assembly point. At the same time the local Jewish community instructed the deportees that they were allowed to take baggage and personal effects not in excess of 50 kilograms. Each deportee was allowed to take 100 Reichsmark on his/her person.
According to existing documentation, Jews deported to Theresienstadt during the summer-autumn of 1942, reported either to the assembly site at the Jewish school on Kleine Sperlgasse 2 or to Malzgasse 7/Miesbachgasse 8.
Transport No. 38 departed from Aspangbahnhof in Vienna (Wien) on August 27, 1942 at 7:08 pm and arrived in Theresienstadt on August 28 at 7:19 am. The majority of the 1,000 Jewish deportees on this transport that was given the definition “Alterstransport”, were elderly. 881 deportees were older than 61, the average age was 72 years. It was the ninth transport from Vienna to Theresienstadt in the summer of 1942 and included Rosa Graf, a sister of the eminent psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Rosa Graf had been born in 1860 and her number on the transport was IV/9-990. On September 29, 1942, just one month later, she was transferred from Theresienstadt to the Treblinka extermination camp. Six armed uniformed police (Schutzpolizei) guards under the command of Lieutenant Alois Wolf reported at noon at the station where the Jewish deportees were being held and watched over them throughout the journey.
The train's route took it through Vienna’s Nordbahnhof, Floridsdorf, Jedlersdorf, Stockerau, Absdorf-Hippersdorf, Gmuend, Tabor, Prague (Praha) and Bohusovice. At the rail station in Bohusovice, the Jews were taken off the train and forced to make their way to Theresienstadt on foot, a distance of about 3 km. The transport was given the reference IV/9 in the Theresienstadt ghetto listings; in this regard the Roman numeral IV refers to Vienna.
Many of the elderly Jews among these "old-age transports" (Alterstransporte) succumbed in Theresienstadt to starvation and disease during the summer months of 1942. Others were deported in October 1942 from Theresienstadt to Treblinka, where they were murdered.
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