Jiri Munk's transport summons

This is a transport summons that I received during my stay in Terezin, in October of 1944. One usually got his summons at night. It used to have only a few sparse details - name, transport number and where you were to report. In translation in says roughly this: We are forced to hereby notify you that you have been included in a transport, so you must report to Lange Strasse 5. Upon reception of this summons you must immediately prepare your luggage, your luggage must not exceed 50 kg. If possible carry your luggage yourself. It is absolutely necessary to report in time, if you want to avoid sanctions.

In the lower part there's a narrow strip glued on, on which is written that I was subsequently excluded from the transport. Because it happened twice that my mother and I were summoned to a transport, but right before the train's departure Commander Rahm sent us away. The reason was evidently that my mother worked as a laborer with mica for the German military industry.

The dispatching onto transports took place in the Hamburg barracks, where my mother and I lived in the beginning, for this reason they later moved us elsewhere. Everyone that had been summoned had to gather in the courtyard of these barracks. They could have only one piece of luggage with them. They walked through the barracks to the other side, where there was a locomotive and freight wagons, that's where they embarked on the transport. None of us knew where the transports were actually headed. Each prisoner designated for transport had to have a card with his number and the transport number hanging from his neck. A person stopped being a person, and became just a number. I remember that already during the trip to Terezin, we had numbers, I was CM390. In the transports to Auschwitz, a person got a new number. I got number 11055.

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