Willy Nathan

Biographie

(YV)Transport 50 from Drancy, Camp, France to Sobibor, Extermination Camp, Poland on 04/03/1943

On February 13, 1943 at 21:10, two Luftwaffe (German Air Force) officers were shot on their way to the Hotel du Louvre and died that night at a military hospital. In retaliation, the Germans decided to arrest and deport 2,000 Jews. (...)

At 9:15 on the morning of March 4, 1943, a train designated number 901 departed from the Le Bourget Drancy railway station with 1,000 Jews on board. Approximately 900 of the deportees had arrived in Drancy earlier from Gurs. Lieutenant Ott of the Order Police (Leutnant der Ordnungspolizei Ott) was tasked with supervising the train.
The destination of transport 50 — and transport 51, which had left on March 6 from Le Bourget Drancy — has long been the subject of inquiry amongst historians.
Danuta Czech's study records two transports that arrived in Auschwitz from Drancy on March 6 and 8, 1943, and it is thought that all deportees were sent to their deaths immediately upon arrival.
However, on the day of the deportation, a routine telex (XXVc-211), signed by Heinz Roethke, head of the Jewish Affairs Department at the Sipo-SD, announced to the recipients—among them the commander of Police Security Services (BdS Sipo-SD) in Krakow and in Lublin and Adolf Eichmann in Berlin—that on March 4, a train with 1,000 Jews had left the Le Bourget/Drancy station for Cholm. The destination—Auschwitz—was crossed out at the order of Lieutenant Ott.
Furthermore, as historian Serge Klarsfeld has noted, the telex was not addressed to the inspector of the KZ in Oranienburg and the Auschwitz camp, but rather to the head of Security Services (BdS Sipo-SD) in Krakow and in Lublin, and the destination indicated was Cholm (Chełm) in the Lublin district, some 50 kilometers from Sobibor.
Moreover, a list from the National French Railways indicates ''Solibar" as the destination of the two convoys (March 4 and 6), most likely referring to "Sobibor," in Lublin. The accounts of the few survivors from these two transports, and in particular the 1981 affidavit of Maurice Jablonsky (who was deported on March 6), report that the trains stopped at Sobibor. There, on the ramp, a selection was conducted and a number of young people were chosen for labor and transferred to Majdanek (they were later sent to Budzyn or Auschwitz-Birkenau, in July 1943). The rest of the deportees were taken directly to the Sobibor death camp; none survived.
We have no information as to how many people were selected for labor at Majdanek and Budzyn nor about how many were sent to Sobibor.
The convoy presumably took the following route: from Le Bourget-Drancy, the train went through Bobigny, Noisy-le-Sec, Epernay, Chalons-sur-Marne, Revigny, Bar-le-Duc Lerouville, and finally Noveant-sur-Moselle (Neuburg), located at the German border. At the border, the train was handed over to a Schupo detail (Schutzpolizei-Kommando). After crossing the border, the train most likely traversed Metz, Saarbruecken, Mannheim, Frankfurt Main, Fulda, Erfurt, Leipzig, Dresden, Görlitz, Liegnitz (Legnica), Breslau, Oels, Konstadt (Wołczyn), Kreuzburg, Czestochowa, Kielce, Skarżysko-Kamienna, Radom, Lublin, and Chelm, finally arriving at Sobibor.
On March 6, commander of the Sipo-SD in Metz, Kuever, reported that a Jew named Jacob Silber had jumped from that particular train on March 4. He was injured and taken into custody. Roethke asked the Sipo-SD in Metz to put Silber on another transport to Auschwitz.
Only four men from this transport, all of whom had been sent to Majdanek and later to Auschwitz, survived the war.

Q: https://collections.yadvashem.org/en/deportations/5092623