how to redirect homepage with .htacces

[Pike80]

I have a question about 301 redirects with a .htaccess file. I have read the sticky, but I just can not seem to find the right answer.

I am working with a .htaccess file to realize 301 redirects from several pages of my old site to the relevant pages in my new site.

my script looks like this:
redirect 301 /page1 http://www.newsite.com/page1
redirect 301 /page1 http://www.newsite.com/page2
redirect 301 /page1 http://www.newsite.com/page3

this is working correctly. But how do I make a redirect from my old homepage to my new one?

This doesn't work:
redirect 301 / http://www.newsite.com/
(it screws up the other redirects)

This doesn't work either:
redirect 301 /index.html http://www.newsite.com/
(maybe because my old site doesn't show index.html in de url, i dont know my old site is like www.oldsite.com and not www.oldsite.com/index.html)

Can somebody help me? Thanks in advance!