Deportations from the Theresienstadt Ghetto to the Treblinka and Auschwitz extermination camps commenced in October1942. They marked the beginning of a wave of deportations that did not end until the autumn of 1944, when the gas chambers in Auschwitz were shut down. The hopes of Jewish leaders, that the deportations from the Protectorate to the ghetto would spare these Jews from brutal deportation to the East, were proven false. When the transports ended, only 11,000 Jews out of the nearly 140,000 who had originally inhabited the ghetto were still there.
