The railway line from Luxembourg to Belgium was inaugurated in 1866. The Luxembourg-Ulflingen-Liège railway line runs directly next to the Monastery of Cinqfontaines, so that Nazi deportation trains can stop directly at the “Jewish Retirement Home”. On 5 April 1943, baggage cars of the Deutsche Reichsbahn are parked there to transport the last inmates from Cinqfontaines. They become part of the last large deportation train that leaves Luxembourg for Theresienstadt on 6 April 1943. About 100 Jews are deported on this transport, 88 of them from Cinqfontaines. In his memoirs, Hugo Heumann, the director of the “Jewish Retirement Home”, reports on this transport:
“We built a toilet in each wagon with board crates and night chairs, 4-5 of which were placed in each wagon, lined the floors with straw and in this way tried to make the journey as easy as possible. On 6 April at 10 a.m., under the eyes of the Stapo, the loading began, first of all of the bed-ridden, walking-impaired and other invalids, whereby the authorities probably got a picture for the first time of what it was really like here, how much illness and misery there was. It was also sad to see how everyone dragged along what little luggage they could take with them as their last possessions, which was often beyond their strength, despite the shortness of the journey”.
(Hugo Heumann: Erlebtes-Erlittenes. Von Mönchengladbach über Luxemburg nach Theresienstadt. Tagebuch eines deutsch-jüdischen Emigranten, published by Germaine Goetzinger/Marc Schoentgen, Mersch 2007, pp. 64.)
