When David Schor, an attorney-at-law, received confirmation following his joint research with German historian Jürgen Sielemann, he felt a sigh of relief. It was as if hundreds of anguished Jewish souls arose from the abyss of doom and uncertainty following late acknowledgment of their horrific fate.
"A sense of deep duty, perseverance and determination, a mistake of a Gestapo clerk and an old suitcase led us to unravel a mass murder mystery that the Gestapo managed to keep secret for so many years," he wrote on Facebook recently after discovering the fate of a special case of Jews who were sent to Auschwitz with no official record and were sent directly to their death.
On Saturday, July 11, 1942, a train carrying 295 Jews pooled out of the cargo terminal of Hannoverscher Bahnhof (Hnnoversche Railway Station) in Hamburg to an unknown destination.
According to deportation orders the deportees had received a few days earlier from the Gestapo, they were to bring along with them working boots.
Unlike earlier and subsequent deportation transports from Hamburg to Riga, Minsk and Theresienstadt – the Gestapo kept the destination of this transport secret. None of the deportees had been seen since, and their fate was unknown. One of them was Betty Levi, Schor's great-grandmother.
For years, the assumption was that the destination was probably Auschwitz. Nobody disputed this assumption, until the historian Alfred Gottwaldt, an expert on deportations during the Holocaust, published his assumption that the destination of this transport was probably Warsaw.
Gottwald's assumption was based on a postcard that one of the deportees, Irma Burchardt, managed to send to her relatives, in which she wrote that "tomorrow morning we will go to the Warsaw Ghetto," and another postcard that deportee Rachel (Rosa) Süss sent in which she expressed a speculation
according to which they were being deported to Warsaw.
Gottwaldt also relied on a diary entry dated July 15, 1942 of Adam Czerniakow, head of the Judenrat in the Warsaw ghetto, according to which he was ordered to evacuate German Jews eligible for work, and testimony of Fred Weinstein, a ghetto survivor who testified that a few days later, on July 20, 1942, many German Jews were seen led through the ghetto with their belongings.
Gottwaldt's conclusion bothered Schor, in part because it was difficult to accept the fact that if Warsaw was the destination, why was there no sign of life from any of the deportees after they left Hamburg?
After thorough examination of the Gestapo documents, Schor noticed a surprising finding on the margin of the printed transport list of deportees from Berlin: a handwritten note in pencil of a careless Gestapo man, probably unaware of the secret he violated. The note clearly stated: "Transport v. 11/7/42 zu Hamburg nach Auschwitz," ie from Hamburg (via Berlin) to Auschwitz.
The next challenge was to find evidence that this collective transport, which, as proven, was intended for Auschwitz (and not Warsaw), did arrive in Auschwitz and was not intercepted or diverted on the way to another destination.
The difficulty was that in Auschwitz there was no record confirming that this transport had indeed arrived there, possibly because the German destroyed it.
Comparing the lists of names of deportees in this collective transport with lists of prisoners at Auschwitz, ended up with the frustrating conclusion that none of them were admitted to Auschwitz as inmates.
In the absence of records in Auschwitz about this transport ever arriving there, with no witnesses nor survivors, it seemed impossible to determine whether this transport did in fact arrive in Auschwitz.
A surprising turn of events occurred following the identification of a personal item of one of the deportees of this unfortunate transport at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp: Among hundreds of suitcases found after liberation, Dr. Bernard Aharonson's suitcase from Hamburg was miraculously found there too.
His name, address and details, including the deportation number, marked on his suitcase, are identical to his name and details as listed on the Gestapo deportation list from Hamburg of July 11, 1942.
As part of the efforts of the Germans to deceive the deportees, they were told that they were being sent to work in the east.
As in other instances, the Gestapo instructed them to clearly write on their suitcases their personal details so that they could identify and collect them when they arrive there.
This, of course, did not happen: upon arrival at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, most likely on July 13, 1942, selection did not take place (none of them were admitted as inmates to Auschwitz).
All, without exception, were sent directly to the gas chambers. This was the first transport of its kind, in which German Jews were transported directly from cities of domicile to the gas chambers rather than through ghettos or labor camps. This is also the reason why the Gestapo kept the destination of this first-of-a-kind transport under wraps.
Ironically, the Gestapo's intention to conceal mass murder by deceiving the deportees to mark their names and personal details on their suitcases ultimately revealed their fate.
Dr. Bernard Aharonson's suitcase – the only evidence of the fate of 697 Jews who were deported on July 11, 1942 from Hamburg, Bielefeld and Berlin to an unknown destination – is currently on display at the museum of the former Nazi death camp in Auschwitz.
The day Betty Levi, Schor's great grandmother, was ordered to report to this transport, she managed to send a postcard to her daughter in Copenhagen (Schor's grandmother) and to tell her, in despair and under censorship restrictions, that she had to leave.
She did not specify where to, because she did not know. The postcard sent from Hamburg arrived at the Copenhagen Post Office on July 15, 1942, two days after Betty was no longer alive.
This article is based on a Facebook post written by Attorney-at-Law Schor and reprinted with his permission.
