Transport IV from Lodz, Ghetto, Poland to Chelmno, Extermination Camp, Poland on 30/06/1944

Łódź’s Ghetto Chronicle reported that there was some uncertainty on the morning of Friday, June 30, 1944, as to whether the scheduled transport would indeed depart; the train had not yet arrived at Radogoszc station. But the Deutsche Reichsbahn finally provided the train, and the 700 deportees were loaded onto the train towards 9:00 A.M.^[1] This was confirmed by Jakub Poznański, who wrote in his diary that “700 Jews were deported for work outside the ghetto. The train arrived at 9 o’clock in the morning.”^[2] It was the fourth transport from the Łódź ghetto to the Chełmno death camp.

The physician on the transport was Dr. Elisabeth Singer, originally from Prague.^[3] Dr. Singer and her two brothers, Otto and Gustav, seem to have been last-minute additions to the deportation list. The Singers appear last on the list, completing the quota of 700 people for the transport. The brothers joined their sister, the transport doctor. Dr. Elisabeth Singer was thirty-four years old; her brothers were twenty-nine (Gustav) and thirty-nine (Otto).^[4]

Most of the Jews deported on June 30 were young people in their twenties. Sister and brother Malka (twenty-one) and Marjan (twenty) Althaus, who lived on their own at 24 Cranach St., were among the deportees. But some deportees were families; a mother and her three children, who resided on 6 Am Bach St., were on board—forty-seven-year-old Golda Fraja travelled with Abram (thirteen), Frajda (twelve), and Estera (ten). Remarkably, the transport also included some older people, travelling on their own: Erich Redlich, fifty-eight years old, who lived on 38 Alexanderhof St.; sixty-one-year-old Karolina Wolf-Winter, who lived at 2 Richter St.; and sixty-year-old Laja Basista, who lived at 3 Kirch St. The oldest person on the deportation list was sixty-six-year-old Majer Pietrkowski, who was deported together with his fifty-nine-year-old wife, Frajda; they lived at 30 Alexanderhof St.^[5]...