The Lost Train

The Lost Train is a memorial site in Tröbitz, Brandenburg, marking a transport of prisoners from Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The site stands beside the village church and documents the fate of those who arrived in April nineteen forty-five, when Soviet forces discovered abandoned railway cars and freed the survivors.

The transport left Bergen-Belsen carrying about twenty-five hundred Jewish prisoners and was originally intended for Theresienstadt, but could not continue past the Black Elster river due to a destroyed bridge. The guards fled as Soviet troops approached, abandoning the weakened people, and one hundred sixty died in the following days.

A mass grave containing 160 victims lies adjacent to the memorial, serving as a testament to the human cost of the Holocaust transportation system.

The memorial sits in the small village of Tröbitz south of Cottbus and can be reached by country roads. A walking path leads to the information panels and the cemetery where the victims were buried.

The people in this transport held foreign passports, while German Jews were registered in the lists as stateless. This distinction was meant to grant them special treatment, which never materialized.