JERUSALEM — Nini Ungar clearly recalled that Friday in February 1942 when the Nazis loaded her, her husband and her parents on a cattle cart and transferred them, standing upright, to the railway station in Vienna.
She was in her mid-20s and did not yet know that she was pregnant. The family had already spent days in the squalid compound of a school where thousands of Jews destined for deportation were warehoused. She was among 1,000 on the transport that set out that day for the ghetto in Riga, Latvia.
“The Viennese were standing and laughing. ‘Finally they got the Jews out!’ ” Ms. Ungar, who was born Mina Tepper and was one of only 36 from that transport to survive the war, recounted in video testimony. “We scraped the ice from the windows — we were so thirsty. We didn’t have water. We didn’t have anything,” she said of the train journey.
Her journey across a wintry Europe can now be traced on a database that documents about 1,100 transports, searchable by train (or boat or bus) or victim’s name. A project of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and research center, the database sheds new light on the cross-border, Europewide nature of the stages leading to the mass extermination of some six million Jews, known in Hebrew as the Shoah.
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