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. 43 left Aspangbahnhof in Vienna (Wien) on train Da 522 on October 1, 1942, at 8:20 pm and arrived in Theresienstadt on October 2. The train carried 1,299 people. It was the twelfth of thirteen transports from Vienna to include a large percentage of elderly people and was defined “Alterstransport”. 299 of the deportees were older than 61, the average age of the deportees was 47 years. Six armed policemen (Schutzpolizei), under the command of Lieutenant Robert Rill reported at 11:30 am at the station to which the Jewish deportees had been led and guarded them throughout the journey. The train followed a route that took it through Vienna’s Nordbahnhof, Floridsdorf, Jedlersdorf, Stockerau, Absdorf-Hippersdorf, Gmuend, Tabor, Prague (Praha) and Bohusovice.
At Bohusovice the Jews were removed from the train and forced to walk three kilometers to the Theresienstadt ghetto, where the transport was noted in the ghetto records as IV/12; the Roman numeral IV representing Vienna.
The following is an excerpt from the testimony of Reuven Singer:
We received an order in late September, my parents and I, to report at a certain school in the second district, for relocation […]. We were given a luggage quota that did not exceed 50 kilograms and no more. We had to close the house, to hand over the apartment and to supply the key at the [assembly point]. We arrived; our documents were taken […] and stamped “Verlegt nach Theresienstadt” (relocation to Theresienstadt). And that is when we knew were being taken to Theresienstadt. We spent two or three days at that [assembly point]; we were taken to the train, we didn’t travel in freight trucks but in regular passenger cars […]. We departed from Vienna on October 1; we traveled at night and arrived the following day at Bohusovice, a train station that is located two to three kilometers from Theresienstadt. This transport contained a large number of [Jewish] community workers and their families. When we arrived and disembarked from the train, there were some SS men there, as well as several Nazis and Czech gendarmerie, ostensibly to stand guard […] we walked to Theresienstadt, a distance of about three kilometers from this place; an extraordinarily depressing place. […] All around were walls made of some kind of reddish bricks. The town was under curfew when we entered and there was no one in the streets.
The following is an excerpt from Frederica Spitz and Ruth Weisz’ book:
We were among those fortunate ones who were given a further two or three days of grace in order to make arrangements […] to pack our best belongings in suitcases and boxes and to store them with various non-Jewish friends […]. A further order was issued in the morning, “We are now going to pass under the machine.” This of course meant that we were going to have our hair cut; quite simply we all had to pass through a kind of turnstile, like in a football pitch […], after which we were taken out of the building and into waiting open, trucks; we were packed in and set off; traveling through the streets of Vienna, the sight of people packed tight into trucks attracted much attention and the streets were filled with passersby staring at us in astonishment […]. By this time it was evening and the train was already standing there […] it was a passenger train with small compartments, each of which had been designed to accommodate six people. Thirteen people were pushed into each compartment […], half the night had passed. There were attempts to sleep a little, but most people didn’t have the nerves for it, a rumor spread that we were being taken to a fortress town in Czechoslovakia […] but no one could provide any accurate details. It had been October 2 when we were loaded onto the train, a hot day and we had nothing to drink, and everyone was thirsty. The train pulled up at a few stations; they all had taps, of course, but how could anyone reach them? We were locked in and the people waiting on the platforms looked at us but hardly dared approach us because they were afraid of the SS. At one station a few people showed initiative […]; a couple of men in our compartment had with them peaked caps, which they handed out to the people [on the platform], who returned them, two or three times, full of water. Thus the cap passed from mouth to mouth […]. A few times the train made lengthy stops midway between stations. We crossed the Austrian-Czech border […]; after a journey that lasted a few more hours, the train drew up at its final destination. After a journey of 24 hours, we arrived at Bohusovice, where we were awaited by men of the SS and the Czech gendarmerie together with a group of young people. We climbed off the train and, although we could hardly stand on our feet, we were forced to walk a distance of four kilometers – young people and old – laden down with our rucksacks and bedrolls, to Theresienstadt. Only those who were unable to walk were taken in trucks […]. At last we walked through a giant gate into the fortress. The thing that amazed us most was the silence in the streets. There was no one to be seen; everyone was behind locked doors and windows.
Show less