The Virtual Historian

In December 1943, the Freund family was deported from Theresienstadt. None of the deportees knew where they were being sent, or what had happened to those who had been deported previously. They were told only that they were being sent “to the East.” Their journey took two days crammed and locked into a cattle car. They arrived and were told that they had come to a place called Auschwitz. John writes, “It seemed like another planet.” It was. John was thirteen.

The Jews who came from Theresienstadt had a different reception from the hundreds of thousands of other Jews who were deported to Auschwitz between the summer of 1942 and November 1944. Rather than the normal routine of facing immediate Selektion after disembarking from the train—the separation of those who were considered able-bodied and therefore capable of work, from the elderly, the infirm and the very young with their mothers to be murdered — the Jews from Theresienstadt were allowed to remain together as families. They were taken to Camp B-IIb in the Birkenau section of Auschwitz, which became known as the Czech Family Camp.

The Czech Family Camp had been established at Auschwitz with the arrival of 5,006 Jews from Theresienstadt on September 8, 1943. These Jewish prisoners were kept together and had slightly better conditions than elsewhere in Birkenau. Again, as with Theresienstadt, this was intended by the Nazis as a way to counteract news of the mass murder of Jews that was starting to trickle out to the West. To maintain the lie that they had only been “resettled” in the East, these Czech prisoners were encouraged to write postcards to members of their families still in Czechoslovakia. Of those in the Czech Family Camp who had been there since September, 1,000 died during the winter. Physicians and pairs of twins forced to undergo medical experiments were removed from the group. The rest were killed in the gas chambers on March 7, 1944, six months after their arrival.