Te fate of the transports in general.
After the women and children were separated from the men upon the arrival of a transport at the Auschwitz station, the usual selections for employment took place. It must be assumed that in general, i.e. except in a number of exceptional cases, even among the direct Auschwitz transports in the Cosel period, only men were assigned for work and that women, as well as children and men who were not considered "workable", were immediately assigned to work. were killed by gassing. The latter is deduced from the fact that:
1): only very sporadically the names of women deported by these transports are found in the Auschwitz administration;
2): statements by survivors have only revealed the existence of very few women after the day of arrival;
3): Of the approximately 20,000 Jewish women who were deported from the Netherlands to Auschwitz in the period August-December 1942, none returned or were even found (after the evacuation of Auschwitz) in one of the western camps.
To determine the time of death of the women, of whom individually nothing is known, the greatest accuracy is therefore obtained from the point of view of probability theory if the date of death is taken as the day of arrival at Auschwitz, i.e. 3 days after the date departure of the transport involved from Westerbork. The same date of death therefore applies to children and to men who were not selected for employment.
In connection with this, this chapter need only be concerned mainly with determining the time of death of the men who are known or must be assumed to have been among those employed, insofar as there is no information regarding their death. individual data are available.
This task is somewhat easier than with the Cosel transports, because almost all of the selected men are employed in the camps (sub-commands) of the actual Auschwitz complex, i.e. in the "Stammlager" Auschwitz I, in Birkenau (Auschwitz II) or in the Monowitz-Buna, Jawischowitz and Golleschau labor camps (Auschwitz III), and therefore not, like the men who were taken off the train in Cose I, were spread over a large number of widely separated "Zwangsarbeitslager". They are also all included in the Auschwitz administration from the day of arrival and appear under separate maricule number series, which can usually be determined quite accurately.
It has emerged that also in the case of direct Auschwitz transports, the age limit that was taken into account during the selection for employment can generally be set at approximately 15-50 years.
The fate of the transport of 21-09-1942.
Only 1 man of this transport survived, namely someone of Polish descent. A witness statement has not been obtained from him. It is remarkable that only from him and from 2 other Poles deported with this transport "Fragebogen" have been found, which could be an indication (but not proof) that only these 3 Poles were still alive at the time of the evacuation. goods.
None of the other men on this transport were ever heard from again after January 1943. This again indicates that the Poles in Auschwitz were in a more favorable position than their Western camp companions, and that therefore often no consequences can be drawn from the fate of Poles deported with the Dutch transports with regard to determining the fate of the deportees. other deportees.
Letters were received from 2 men, namely on 1 December 1942 from Birkenau. No trace of the women of this transport has ever been found since the day of deportation.
With regard to the number of employed men, the well-known matricule series, which runs from 64925 (A) to 65052 (W), shows that this number was slightly more than 128. Since there were 112 men in the age group of 15-50 years in this transport, the selection limit taken into account was therefore even slightly higher than 50 years, and a few men above that age must therefore have been selected for employment.
However, it is difficult to determine a more precise limit upwards, because a relatively large number of men aged just over 50 were involved in this transport (for example, 43 from 51-55 years). It is therefore preferable to adopt the usual limit of 15-50 years for this transport as well, and to consider cases in which older men are selected for employment as exceptional cases. The statistical error to be made in this way is smaller than if the age limit were raised upwards, partly because any increase to a certain limit would only be arbitrary.
Of the 28 "numbers" for whom the dates of death are known, some died in: October 1942: 1 - November 1942: 16 - December 194: 5 and in January 1943: 6.
After January 1943, as has already been said, except for the 3 Poles mentioned above, no one has been reported. This leads to the conclusion that the group of employed men of this transport must have been virtually extinct by the end of January 1943. For this transport, therefore, those employed, of whom no further individual data are known, must be deemed to have died no later than 31 January 1943.
Source: Publication Auschwitz III from October 1952, carried out by the Dutch Red Cross, Chapter 3, pages. 62, 63, 64, 65, 69 and 70.