In January 1942, a total of 2613 people left Pilsen in three mass transports to the Terezin ghetto. Most of them were soon deported from Terezin to other destinations, either directly to Auschwitz-Birkenau and other death camps or to small ghettos in occupied Poland where they lived until murder capacity was freed in camps such as Majdanek, Belzec, Treblinka or Sobibor. Some were deported to find their death in Estonia, Latvia and Belarus. Only 209 of the deported Pilsen Jews survived till the end of the war.
Pilsen transports were marked with the letters R, S and T. Each of the deportees had a card on their neck with the transport designation and their transport number. Their luggage was marked with the same number.
Absolutely unique photographs depicting the deportations of the Jewish population from Pilsen and the surrounding area were apparently taken by the young Pilsen photographer Mirko Kren at the request of the Nazi authorities. Documenting the fate of the Jewish population was otherwise strictly forbidden.
Shortly after the war, Kren apparently handed over most of the photographs to the Documentation Project (Dokumentacni akce), a group of Jewish activists documenting the events of the Holocaust in Czechoslovakia. But other copies were also made. After the communist coup, the Documentation Project’s collection went to Israel together with the witnesses, other photographs were stored in the Jewish Museum in Prague and in the Ethnographic Museum of the Pilsen Region, now the Ethnographic Department of the West Bohemian Museum in Pilsen.