The first deportees to the Theresienstadt Ghetto arrived at the end of November 1941. By the end of May 1942, 28,887 Jews, one-third of the Jews in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, had been banished to this camp. The Czech Jewish leadership initially supported the plan to establish this ghetto, hoping that it would spare the Jews from deportation to the East. In the first few months, conditions in Theresienstadt resembled those in other Nazi concentration camps, and the hopes that the ghetto would prevent deportation to the East were also dashed. After the first deportation of 2,000 Jews to Riga in January 1942, the inmates of the ghetto lived in dread of deportation at all times.
Between November, 1941 and April 20, 1945, 140000 Jews had been expelled to Theresienstadt. Of these 32,497 people died there from the intolerable conditions. Of the 86,934 who had been deported from the Ghetto to Auschwitz, 3097 survived. At the end of October 1944, only 11,068 inmates remained in Theresienstadt.
