Death Statistics from Ghetto Theresienstadt
The total number of Jews transported
from their homes to the Theresienstadt ghetto from the day it
opened on November 24, 1941 until April 20, 1945 was 139,654,
according to a 1991 book called "The Terezin Ghetto"
by Ludmila Chladkova, which I purchased from the Theresienstadt
Museum. Out of the total who were originally deported to Theresienstadt,
there were 33,430 persons who died in the ghetto. There were
207 babies born in the camp, despite the fact that the men and
women were housed in separate barracks.
There were also 13,454 persons who arrived
at the ghetto after April 20, after being evacuated by the Nazis
from other concentration camps that had to be closed before the
Soviet Army arrived.
In the first week of May 1945, the Nazis
turned the camp over to the Red Cross, and the SS staff left
the camp on May 5, 1945. At that time, there were 16,832 of the
original 139,654 who had been deported to Theresienstadt that
were still alive and living in the ghetto. The book by Ludmila
Chladkova, which is sold at the Theresienstadt Museum, has no
explanation for the discrepancy between this number of 16,832
and the number of survivors which her book says was 17,472.
About half of these 16,832 prisoners,
or 8,565 persons, had arrived in Theresienstadt after October
28, 1944, so they had been in the ghetto for only seven months
or less. The last transport out of the ghetto left on October
28, 1944.
The majority of the Jews sent directly
to Theresienstadt were from the German protectorate of Bohemia
and Moravia which is now the Czech Republic and from Slovakia
which became an independent country when Czechoslovakia ceased
to exist in 1939. There were 75,666 Czech and Slovak Jews sent
to Theresienstadt and 8,542 of them were still alive in the ghetto
when the Red Cross took over in the first week of May, 1945.
From Germany, there were 42,104 Jews transported to Theresienstadt,
and 5,221 were still alive in the ghetto on May 9, 1945. There
were 15,253 Austrian Jews, most of them over 60 years old, who
were sent to the ghetto but only 1,293 of them were still there
on May 9, 1945. The total number of Jews deported to Theresienstadt
from the Netherlands was 4,897, out of which 1,285 were still
alive in the camp on May 9, 1945.
The deportation of the Hungarian Jews
did not begin until the end of April 1944 and 1,150 of them were
sent to Theresienstadt. Because of the short length of their
stay in the ghetto, there were 1,138 still there on May 9, 1945.
There were 117 Jews sent to Theresienstadt
from Gdansk, which was the former German port city of Danzig
that was made into an international port under the control of
Poland after World War I, and 11 of them were still there at
the end.
According to the book "The Terezin
Ghetto" by Ludmila Chladkova, the 466 Danish Jews who were
sent to Theresienstadt were all sent back to Denmark by the Nazis
on April 15, 1945, shortly before the ghetto was handed over
to the Red Cross. Other sources give the number of Danish Jews
sent to Theresienstadt as 481, 475, 456 and 464. No two web sites
or books agree on the number of Danish Jews sent to Theresienstadt
or the number who returned to Denmark. Other sources give various
numbers for the Danish Jews who died at Theresienstadt: 31, 43,
51, 52, 53, 58 and 116.
Not counting the Danish Jews, there were
17,472 survivors of the 139,654 Jews originally sent to the ghetto
who were still there when the Russian army arrived on May 8,
1945, according to Ludmila Chladkova.
Out of the 139,654 Jews who were originally
deported to Theresienstadt, 86,934 were subsequently transported
to the east to various concentration camps, not counting the
1,260 children from Bialystok in eastern Poland.
According to Martin Gilbert in his book
"Holocaust Journey," the Bialystok children were survivors
from the Bialystok ghetto. They arrived in Theresienstadt on
August 24, 1943 and on October 5, 1943 they were sent out of
the camp, along with 53 volunteer doctors, nurses and attendants.
According to Gilbert, the Nazis claimed that these children were
going to be exchanged in neutral Switzerland for German POWs
held by the Allies, but instead "they were taken to Auschwitz
and murdered." These children were not counted in the official
Nazi records of those who were transported to the east.
In addition, there were 1,623 Jews from
Theresienstadt who were sent, before the end of the war, to the
neutral countries of Switzerland and Sweden with the help of
the Red Cross. Out of the 86,934 Jews who were sent farther east,
there were 3,097 who returned to their home countries.
There were 701 Jews who managed to escape
from Theresienstadt and 336 others who violated the rules of
the ghetto and consequently were sent to the Gestapo prison in
the Small Fortress across the river. Those who served their time
in the Small Fortress, and survived, were later sent to concentration
camps in the east.
When the concentration camps in the East
closed, because the Russians were advancing into Poland during
the last months of the war, all the inmates who could walk were
marched to Germany and crowded into the camps there. This caused
a disaster in Germany because they brought the typhus epidemic
with them from Poland. In the last three weeks of the war, there
were 13,454 prisoners from the concentration camps in the east
who were admitted into the Theresienstadt ghetto, and the typhus
epidemic spread to Theresienstadt.
According to the Ghetto Museum, a total
of 34,396 prisoners died in Ghetto Theresienstadt including 966
who had just arrived from the camps in the east after April 20,
1945. When the war ended on May 8, 1945, the total number of
people in the ghetto was 29,320 which included the survivors
from the eastern camps who had arrived in the last weeks of the
war and the 16,832 survivors of the original transports.
This page was last updated on November
24, 2007
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