Uhersky Brod is situated in the southeast of the Czech Republic, on the border with Slovakia. In March 1939, on the eve of the German occupation of western Czechoslovakia, there were 136 Jewish communities there, with a total of some 118,000 Jewish residents. With the occupation, the Germans changed the area's name to “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia". The Nuremberg Laws applied to the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia, and they were slowly stripped of their property and rights.
In June 1939, Adolf Eichmann came to Prague and established the central office for Jewish emigration. The Jews were ordered to register, sell their property, and hand over their investments. Their factories were confiscated as part of the Aryanization. They started to emigrate from the Protectorate, and some 26,000 Jews left the occupied area until emigration was forbidden in October 1941.
In September 1941, some 88,000 Jews remained in the Protectorate. They were ordered to wear the Yellow Star. In October, Reinhard Heydrich, Acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, announced his intention to deport 5,000 Jews to Eastern Europe. He chose the fortress city of Terezin, some 60 km north of Prague, as the location for a new transit camp where Jews would be gathered pending deportation.
In October and November 1941, deportations left Prague for Lodz, and in January 1942, deportations left Terezin for Riga. Most of the deportees were murdered in the extermination camps of Belzec, Chelmno, Treblinka and Majdanek. Others were murdered in the Ninth Fort near Kovno.
The first deportation from Uhersky Brod to Terezin left on 23 January 1943. 1,000 Jews were on the transport. On their arrival at the train station near Terezin, the deportees were removed from the train and forced to march the three km to Terezin. About half of the deportees were deported from there to Auschwitz within three days.
By 31 January 1943, all 2,800 Jews from Ohersky Brod and the surrounding areas had been deported to Terezin and from there to Auschwitz. Just 81 of them survived the Holocaust.
By March 1945, some 73,000 Jews had been deported from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to Terezin. Approximately 60,000 of them were sent from there to Auschwitz and other extermination camps. Some 3,000 survived. When the area of the Protectorate was liberated by the Red Army in May 1945, there were some 2,800 Jews remaining there.
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