Transport X from Lodz, Ghetto, Poland to Chelmno, Extermination Camp, Poland on 14/07/1944

On Friday, July 14, 1944 Jakub Poznański, one of the inhabitants of the Łódź ghetto, wrote in his diary, “We here in the ghetto are exhausted. We go on with the little strength we have left. It is difficult to describe our state of agitation. Yesterday can serve as a good example.”^[1]

He was referring to the morning of Thursday, July 13, 1944, when not enough people had gathered at the main assembly site, the ghetto’s Central Prison at 14–16 Czarnieckiego Street. This was in advance of the tenth transport, slated to leave the ghetto on the next day—while ostensibly meant to take people to work in Germany, it was, in reality, bound for the Chełmno death camp. As the Ghetto Chronicle noted, “People did not turn up [for the transports], with the vague hope that everything is ‘coming to an end’ and therefore turning up in the Central Prison is utter rashness.”^[2] 

The task of providing the quota of deportees every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday was forced by the German authorities upon the ghetto’s Jewish administration. Heads of all of the work departments were made to select those who were deemed less necessary than others, and to provide a list of between 20 and 25 percent of their workers. Some of these lists, along with statistics giving the number of names each work department had provided, have been preserved among the files of the ghetto’s Jewish administration.^[3]...