Deportation of Jews from Slovakia

25 March 1942, 8:20 p.m., Poprad station

On the evening of 25 March 1942, Slovak authorities forced 1,000 young Jewish women and girls from eastern Slovakia aboard cattle wagons at Poprad station. The train departed at approximately 8:20 p.m. for Auschwitz.

They had been preselected and assembled at a temporary camp in former military barracks. Among them were 108 girls aged fourteen to seventeen; only eighteen of the women were over forty.

The Slovak state paid the German Reich 500 Reichsmarks for each person it deported.

999 arrivals, numbered 1000 to 1998

The train crossed out of Slovakia at about 4 a.m. on 26 March, and 999 women arrived alive at Auschwitz that afternoon. They were registered as prisoners and assigned the consecutive numbers 1000 to 1998 rather than being murdered on arrival.

The three figures are not interchangeable: 1,000 were reportedly forced aboard, 999 arrived alive, and 997 names are known from the surviving transport list.

What "first" means here

The deportations followed a February 1942 agreement between the Slovak government and Nazi Germany. This was the first transport of Jewish residents deported from the wartime Slovak state, and the first mass transport of Jews recorded in Auschwitz's camp records — the first sent there under Adolf Eichmann's RSHA Office IV B 4.

It was not the first transport of prisoners to Auschwitz, nor the first presence of Jews there.

It was not even the first women's transport to reach the camp that day: 999 women prisoners had arrived from Ravensbrück earlier on 26 March.