Draft:First Jewish transport from Slovakia to Auschwitz

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Planning
The Slovak government was inspired by the Wanesee negotiations led by the SS Obergruppenführer on 20 January 1942 (note: SS - Schutzstaffel – paramilitary branch of the Nazi party NSDAP in Germany) and alternate Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich. The negotiations resulted in an agreement on "a job opportunity by which Jews will be worked to death".. In Slovakia, the deportations of Jews were prepared by Dieter Wisliceny, Alexander Mach, Vojtech Tuka and Isidor Koso.

Many historical sources confirm that the Slovak government had to pay 500 Reichsmarks to the German Reich for every single deported Jew. The 14th department was entrusted with solving transportation, respectively selecting specific types of cattle wagons. According to German calculations, one cattle wagon could fit twice as many people as horses. There were at least twenty wagons per thousand people. All requirements for the successful implementation of deportations were best met by the eastern Slovak city of Poprad.

The first victims of the plan to systematically kill Slovak Jews were the women and girls from Šariš-Zemplín county. One thousand Jewish women from Humenné, Michalovce, Poprad, Prešov, Stropkov and surrounding villages were on the lists of people intended for deportation to Auschwitz. Jewish families were told by the government that the girls were going to work in shoe factories in Poland. No historical document mentions any of the girls working in such a factory. However, it has been proven with certainty that in government documents, girls and women destined for transport figured as "contract workers".

Course
The first deportation directives were issued on March 12, 1942. The timetable on March 14, 1942 regulated the routing of transports, and ordered that each of them must pass through Žilina. The deportations were supervised by the gendarmes, but also by the HG and the Freiwillige Schutzstaffel. Concentration camps – Bratislava-Patrónka, Nováky, Poprad, Sereď, Žilina – operated from March 21, 1942. The decree summoning Jewish women "to work" read as follows: "All unmarried Jewish girls between the ages of sixteen and thirty-six are required to register (...) and appear for a health check-up on March 20 so that they can be assigned to three months' service. On the day of check-in, each girl brings with her luggage weighing no more than 40 kilograms."

In Humenné, registration occurred at the primary school on March 20, 1942. In Prešov, the registration was held in the fire station and in Bardejov at the town hall. The passenger train stopped on the night of March 21, 1942 at the station in Poprad, where guards were waiting for the girls. From the Poprad railway station, the guards moved them to one-storey barracks, where they were joined by another 224 older women and girls from Prešov. It is not possible to determine why older women signed up for the first transport, but historians think it is probable that they registered in place of their daughters, nieces or granddaughters. The oldest in the transport was fifty-six-year-old Etela Jagerová.

The list of names of all the girls deported in the first transport is a 34-page document. First on the list was Zlata Kaufmannová from Malcov, followed by two sisters from Beloveža, located a few kilometers from Malcov. In the first pages of the document, the girls are listed systematically, in order of enrollment by place of residence, since the towns and villages were twenty or thirty kilometres apart. However, there are later inconsistencies in the document, with some girls being listed alongside their friends. For example, Linda Reichová, who was among the last to arrive in Poprad, received the serial number 582, which indicated that the girls did not receive serial numbers according to when they were brought in. The numbers 377 and 595 are missing, which means that there should not have been 999 but 997 girls in the transport. Page twenty-six is almost entirely misnumbered, as 754 was followed by 765. The list ends with Giza Neuwirthová from Stropkov, who was assigned the number 9-9-9, the only one written with dashes.

March 25 – Day of transport of Slovak women and girls to Auschwitz
Government documents show that as of March 25, not a single request for exception had been confirmed by Slovakian president Jozef Tiso. On that day, two Jewish doctors, who were ordered to accompany the transport, were put to work. One of them, Dr. Weislovitz, was fired because according to commands, one doctor was enough for 999 girls. Only Dr. Izák Kaufmann, about whose presence in the transport there are disputes, was assigned to the transport.

According to some historians, Izák Kaufmann replaced the last girl on the list, Giza Neuwirthová, but this does not coincide with the historical records stored at Yad Vashem. None of the survivors remembered the presence of any doctor in the Poprad concentration camp or cattle wagon. The doctor's name does not appear on any of the pages of the name list made on March 24; his name appears only on a separate list, with a note that he is the only doctor per thousand "persons".

At 8:20 p.m on Tuesday, March 25, the train moved from Poprad station, and left the Slovak territory near Čadca shortly after 4 a.m. on Tuesday, March 26. A few hours later, the first Jewish transport arrived at Auschwitz concentration camp.

Arrival to Auschwitz
At the time of the girls' arrival at Auschwitz, there was no gate of death, but above the gate to the camp itself there was the inscription Arbeit macht frei. It was a quote adopted by Rudolf Höss in 1934 which, as commandant of Auschwitz, he had placed above the entrance gate six years later. The Polish prisoners who made the arch in 1940 deliberately welded the letter B in the word arbeit vice versa.

According to Professor Pavol Mešťan, the first victim of the transport was a woman who died while still in a cattle wagon. According to some testimonies, the girl should have jumped off the train while it was passing through Hungary, since at that time many cities in eastern Slovakia were part of Hungary. Survivor Edita Grosmanová is sure that she could not have done this on her way from Poprad to Auschwitz. There were two lists, Slovak and German, and they confirm that none of the girls who left Poprad on March 25, 1942 and arrived at Auschwitz on March 26, 1942

Although the sterbebücher (note: Auschwitz books of the dead) do not contain all the names of the deported prisoners, the first Slovak transport includes the name of Jolana Sára Grünwaldová, born on June 14, 1917. In the death book, the date of death is March 27, 1942, which was only the day after the girls arrived at Auschwitz. This figure coincides with the testimony of the survivor, Matilda Hrabovecká, who witnessed the diabetic shock of one of the deported girls on the day of her arrival at Auschwitz. According to Matilda Hrabovecká, the girl was dead the next morning because no one had given her insulin.

According to the documents traced, there is another discrepancy in the number of deported girls. 997 girls left the Poprad railway station, and on another list drawn up by the Germans on March 28, 1942, there are also only 997 names. It is therefore possible that the Germans included the name of a girl who died during the journey in the admission list at Auschwitz.

Registration
After a chaotic and violent exit from the wagons, the girls reached lagerstrasse (note: the main camp road, which later led directly to the gas chambers and crematoria ). From there, they had to cross between two rows of barracks into a space separated from the male part by barbed wire. At the time of the arrival of the Slovak transport, another 999 women were in this area. These were inmates from the Rävensbrück women's concentration camp, who were to be the new guards.

Behind the gate, the girls had to fold their luggage in one pile. Such procedures were also peculiar to the guards themselves, who were still accustomed from Rävensbrück to having their property searched but later returned to them. After solving the discrepancies, the Ravensbrück guards herded the girls into Block 5. They were provided with dirty straw, ten latrines, and water dripping from one rusty pipe in the cellar.

The next day, the first fifty girls were ordered to enter the barrack where the admission procedure was executed. At first, the girls had to undress naked, put all their clothes in a large pile and hand over the jewelry. This was followed by a brutal gynecological examination, which was carried out by the guards themselves without any medical practice.

Polish prisoners first shaved the heads, armpits, leg hairs and finally pubic areas of girls standing on chairs. This was followed by disinfection in a vat of ice water and chemicals burning on freshly shaved skin. After the cleaning process, the girls had to dress in Russian military uniforms in the next room, no underwear or socks. They were allowed to wear "clogs", a straight piece of wood with two strips of leather nailed at the edges. Already dressed, they were handed white strips of fabric with numbers and yellow stars, which they were supposed to sew on the front of the uniform so that they could be photographed with the numbers.

Opposite Block 10, in which the girls slept, was Block 11, called the Death Block. It consisted of solitary confinement, where political prisoners, prisoners of war and members of the resistance were tortured. Rena Kornreichová witnessed the execution of Russian prisoners of war, herself wearing the uniform of those executed before her transport arrived.

Life in Auschwitz
The only cooked food in the camp was soup made from rotten vegetables and from the meat of dead horses. In addition, the girls were given 150 grams of bread made from wood sawdust mixed with water. All the prisoners wanted to avoid the fate of the so-called Musulmans. Musulmanism represents the final stage of malnutrition. A distinctive feature for a person at this stage was that they began to talk about food. The next stage was characterized by malaise, weakness, sluggishness, passivity towards themselves and others. Altogether, it was a living corpse with very swollen legs. This term was encountered by a French prisoner, Dr. Leon Landau, for the first time in Auschwitz-Birkenau, to which the girls from the first transport were also transferred over time.

Auschwitz was the only camp where prisoners were tattooed at that time. For Orthodox religious girls, it wasn't just a  permanent intervention in their skin. Several believed that they were created becelem Elohim, that is, in the image of God, and from birth they avoided any intervention on the body, because the body was not one's property - it belonged to God. Survivors' testimonies about tattoos vary. Some recall being tattooed the day after the admission procedure, but others claim that they were tattooed only after the arrival of the second transport.

At appelplatz (note: location for the daily roll calls), girls had to put themselves into groups – agricultural, culinary, construction, cleaning. Labor included plowed manure, cleaning the surrounding ponds, sorting stones and bricks, demolishing houses, and digging ditches in which gassed dead were later burned, since there were no crematoriums in Brezinka at that time. The most demanded work activity was sorting clothes in separate barracks, known as Canada.

On August 8, 1942, half of the girls were moved to the newly built part of the camp, Brezinka. Weak and sick girls were loaded onto trucks and driven away. They were the first girls to be officially killed by Zyklon B.

After the other groups came out of the camp to work, the corpse collectors collected the bodies and carried them to the leichenhalle, the shelter behind Block 25. Block 25 was used for women who did not get to the lazareth and suffered from typhoid, tuberculosis or meningitis.

At one o'clock on the night of January 18, 1945, all the female prisoners were expelled for their last roll call. As part of the evacuation of the camp before the arrival of Russian troops, commanders planned a death march attended by a handful of survivors from the first transport. Multitudes of women walked in different directions for two to seven days. On 20 January 1945, the first group arrived in Wodzisław Śśłaski. They were further divided into trains that carried them in five directions – Gross-Rosen, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück, Buchenwald and Neustadt-Glewe.

Most of these transports were not accepted due to lack of space, so they were diverted to another death camp, Bergen-Belsen. On January 27, 1945, the Russians liberated Auschwitz and Birkenau, and later, on April 15, 1945, Bergen-Belsen was liberated by the Allies.

Survivors
The majority of the surviving girls from the first transport had nowhere to return. Most of their relatives died in transports in 1942, or in one of the two stages of transports in 1944.

Most women still suffered from autoimmune diseases of the lungs, skin and digestion for a long time after returning from Auschwitz, some even developed psychological disorders. The women who were subjected to sterilization and eugenics experiments by doctors Joseph Mengele and Carl Clauberg never became pregnant again. After 1945, few survivors remained to live in their hometowns. Most of them moved or emigrated to the USA, Canada or Israel.

More than 70,000 Jewish citizens deported from Slovakia died in Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.