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 number 45 departed from Aspangbahnhof in Vienna at 8:25 pm on October 9, 1942 and arrived at Theresienstadt on October 10. This transport was the thirteenth to be sent to this destination and consisted of 1,324 Jewish deportees; it was defined Alterstransport because of the large number of elderly people it included. 411 deportees were older than 61, the average age of the deportees was 51 years.
This transport signified the last of the special trains (Sonderzugfahrten) ordered by the RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, Reich Security Main Office) that began in August 1942 for transports from Vienna and Germany to Theresienstadt.
The train traveled along a route that took it through Vienna’s Nordbahnhof, Floridsdorf, Jedlersdorf, Stockerau, Absdorf-Hippersdorf, Gmuend, Tabor and Prague (Praha). In the station at Bohusovice, the Jewish deportees were removed from the train and forced to walk about three kilometers to Theresienstadt. On its arrival in Theresienstadt, the transport was registered in the ghetto register as IV/13. The Roman number IV represented the city of Vienna.
The following is an excerpt from the diary of an anonymous prisoner in Theresienstadt, in a book by Mary Steinhauser, p. I-44:
The transport I was on left Vienna on October 9 and consisted of 1,323 people. I was allowed to take with me a backpack weighing 25 kilograms. What can one pack when one doesn’t know what one will need? We traveled by train to Prague and then on to Bauschowitz in a cattle car. To Theresienstadt we were forced to walk. Twenty corpses were left lying by the roadside. My backpack, which contained everything I would need from today and probably until the end of my life, weighed heavily on my shoulders. My yellow Star of David shone on my chest and my number swung as if on a cow’s neck. From now on, this is my name. From now on this number is me. My name and my past have been eradicated. I am moving toward darkness.
Further testimony from: Frances Tritt, Hollocaust [sic!] … Diary 1942-1945, pp. 34-36.
From Sperlgasse, the assembly site for deportees destined for Theresienstadt, we were taken by bus to the train station, where were made to stand like animals. [On our way] to the station, we were accompanied by rabble that gradually filled every street corner in Vienna, with loud cries of “Die Jew.”
At ten o’clock at night we were loaded on to horse trucks and arrived the following morning at 10 am at Bauschowitz. There was no direct rail line to Theresienstadt. The younger ones among us were forced to make the journey on foot, with the SS man Seidel leading them. He egged us forward with a whip, as if we were a herd. The older people had the chance to get transported. Young Czech prisoners from the camp were sent to the station at Bauschowitz to help the older Jews. They took our property and disappeared with it. In Theresienstadt the doors of the houses were shuttered; only those people who were involved in receiving the transport were allowed to be out on the street. The windows were left open to allow the people inside to see the new arrivals.
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