Questions and answers

• Where was the document used and who created it?

  The Central Transport File (Ústřední Kartotéka – Transporty) was created and maintained in Prague from 1947 onwards by the RŽNO's records department. After the war, this department was tasked with compiling all documents and information containing clues and evidence (records) about the whereabouts and fate of members of Jewish communities in the territory of Czechoslovakia occupied by Nazi Germany between 1938 and 1945. Their work was made difficult by the fact that essential documents and evidence from both the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Prague and the Prague Council of Jewish Elders had been destroyed by the Nazis in the final days of the war, and the information contained in the destroyed documents now had to be reconstructed from other sources.

• When was the document used?

  The Central Transport Register served the RŽNO for the purpose of clarifying fates and providing information from its creation in 1947 until at least the end of the 1960s/beginning of the 1970s. Now digitised, it is used today for the same purpose, in particular by the staff of the Arolsen Archives. As part of the RŽNO's central index, it remains one of the most important sources on the history of the Holocaust in the territory of the former Czechoslovakia.

• What was the document used for?

  "The evacuation of the Jews tore families apart completely. After the war, every Czechoslovak Jew will probably search for their family members. It will be necessary to organise a register [i.e. proof] of all Jews, to determine their fates and whereabouts in order to reunite families, and to provide reliable information about the fates of individuals..." [quoted in translation from Hájková, 2000] – this is how unknown Czech-Jewish authors put it in a memorandum in 1942, shortly after the deportations to Theresienstadt began.

  To this end, immediately after the end of the war, the RŽNO began compiling all available information on the registration, imprisonment, deportation and fate of all those who had been persecuted as Jews by the German occupying forces in the territory of the former Czechoslovakia between 1938 and 1945. In addition to registration and census documents, death and cemetery records, the material evaluated also included lists of transports that had arrived at the so-called Theresienstadt ghetto from the end of 1941 onwards or had left for the extermination camps in the east. The information obtained from the transport lists was transferred to special index card forms and later integrated into an alphabetically sorted master file – the RŽNO's central card index.

  In the post-war years, the RŽNO used its central card index primarily as a basis for responding to inquiries from surviving Czech and foreign Jews about missing relatives, reuniting torn families, or issuing survivors with evidence of the repression they had suffered under German occupation (e.g. imprisonment). The cards in the central transport card index served, on the one hand, to document deportations to Theresienstadt, periods of imprisonment and, where applicable, survival there. On the other hand, the information they contained about deportations to extermination camps was often the last existing evidence of the whereabouts of the persons concerned.

• How common is the document?

  With more than 120,000 cards, the Central Transport Card Index makes up the majority of the RŽNO's Central Card Index, which comprises a total of around 160,000 cards and is now kept by the Federation of Jewish Communities in the Czech Republic (Federace židovských obcí v České republice, FŽO) in Prague, the successor organisation to the RŽNO.

  The Arolsen Archives have a digital copy of the complete RŽNO Central Card Index. In the online archive, it forms sub-collection 1.1.42.2.

  The Type I cards, numbering just under 71,000, make up more than half of the RŽNO Central Transport Card Index.

• What should be considered when working with the document?

  The Central Transport Register contains information only on those persons deported to Theresienstadt who were transferred from there to other camps or who witnessed the liberation of the so-called ghetto on 8 May 1945. The more than 30,000 people who died in the Theresienstadt ‘ghetto’ between November 1941 and May 1945 were documented separately from the RŽNO in various death records. These death records are also part of the RŽNO Central Card Index today.

  If you have any additional information about this document, please send your feedback to eguide@arolsen-archives.org. The document descriptions in the e-Guide are updated regularly – and the best way for us to do this is by incorporating the knowledge you share with us.