Rosa Wolf

Entered at the Jewish assembly camp on August 16, 1942, they spend only 2 days there. They leave the Dossin barracks on August 18 in a 3 rd passenger trainclass. They land on the 20th of August on the Judenrampe , in open country, halfway between Auschwitz and Birkenau. It is here that the SS select those they intend for immediate gassing or extermination by working at Auschwitz, Birkenau or in additional camps. © Pieter-Jan De Pue

And the selection of Transport IV deportees is the deadliest of the Mechelen deportations. His immediate extermination rate is almost 83%. The SS of the "final solution" leave no possibility of survival for a mother with two small children. All three disappear forever without a trace: they are murdered as soon as they arrive in the small gas chambers of the Birkenau kill center. In this convoy, children under 15 are 245. Half of them are not yet 10 years old. For the first time, babies are deported. We are there at the heart of the genocide: we do not kill children, we kill them especially. As well as their mothers ...

Their father, Isak Wolf, diamond cleaver, was put to obligatory work in the north of France as of June 1942. Escaped in October, he was arrested on 1 st June 1943 in Brussels and jailed in the prison of Saint-Gilles. From there he was delivered to the Dossin barracks on 22 February 1944. Expelled by Transport XXIV to Auschwitz, he was repatriated to Belgium on 8 May 1945. He survived, but his family was devastated.