to Palestine after the war. 101,761 prisoners arrived at Theresienstadt in 1942, causing the population to peak, on 18 September 1942, at 58,491. The death rate also peaked that month with 3,941 deaths. Corpses remained unburied for days and gravediggers carrying coffins through the streets were a regular sight. To alleviate overcrowding, the Germans deported 18,000 mostly elderly people in nine transports in the autumn of 1942. Most of the people deported from Theresienstadt in 1942 were killed immediately, either in the Operation Reinhard death camps or at mass execution sites in the Baltic States and Belarus, such as Kalevi-Liiva and Maly Trostenets. Many transports have no known survivors. The Germans selected a small number of healthy young people for forced labor. In all, 42,000 people, mostly Czech Jews, were deported from Theresienstadt in 1942, of whom only 356 survivors are known. 1943 In January, seven thousand people were deported to Auschwitz concentration camp. During the same month, the Jewish community leaders from Berlin and Vienna arrived, and the leadership was reorganized to include Paul Eppstein, a German Zionist, and Benjamin Murmelstein, an Austrian rabbi; Edelstein was forced to act as Eppstein's deputy. At the beginning of February, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the RSHA, proposed the deportation of an additional five thousand elderly Jews. SS chief Heinrich Himmler refused, due to the increasing desire for Theresienstadt as an alibi to conceal information on the Holocaust reaching the Western Allies. There were no more transports from Theresienstadt until the deportation of 5,000 Jews to the Theresienstadt family camp at Auschwitz in September. The inmates were also allowed slightly more privileges, including postal correspondence and the right to receive food parcels. On 24 August 1943, 1,200 Jewish children from the Białystok Ghetto in Poland arrived at Theresienstadt. They refused to be disinfected due to their fear that the showers were gas chambers. This incident was one of the only clues as to what happened to those deported from Theresienstadt. The children were held in strict isolation for six weeks before deportation to Auschwitz; none survived. On 9 November 1943, Edelstein and other ghetto administrators were arrested, accused of covering up the escape of fifty-five prisoners. Two days later, commandant Anton Burger ordered a census of the entire ghetto population, approximately 36,000 people at that time. All inmates, regardless of age, were required to stand outside in freezing weather from 7 am to