Transport from Lodz, Ghetto, Poland to Chelmno, Extermination Camp, Poland on 20/01/1942

The Deportation Commission decided that the first ones to leave the ghetto would be those serving sentences in the ghetto prison, along with their families; deportees from Włocławek and vicinity, who had arrived in Łódź in October 1941; relatives of those who had been sent to forced labor in Germany; prostitutes; and others. The assembly point was at 7 Szklana Street, near the ghetto's central prison on 14-16 Czarnieckiego Street. There the deportees registered for the transport. Subsequently, they were held for 2-3 days in a building adjacent to the central prison on Czarnieckiego Street, or in the Marysin area, or in a school building on 25 Młynarska Street. The deportees were to begin assembling on January 13, 1942; the first transport for Chełmno was due to leave on January 16. Oskar Rosenfeld, one of the chroniclers of the ghetto, described the beginning of the deportations in his diary. An entry from February 20, 1942, noted the following: "… Preparations are being made for the outsettlement of, for the time being, ten thousand ghetto residents (natives). Whose turn will it be? Answer: convicts, those receiving assistance, those unwilling to work, and other "inconvenient" people. Among the convicts are primarily those who had been incarcerated a few weeks for selling the food rations allocated them. (…) The saying went: The evacuees would be transported to Polish villages for agricultural work, but that was merely a rumor. The only thing the ghetto knew and saw was that seven to eight hundred Jews a day were driven from their huts, their holes, and their rooms. The temperature had dropped to 15 degrees below freezing. Jews were also caught in the streets and taken directly to the railway station. (…) The police stormed the lodgings of the Jews marked for evacuation. (..) A shock had gone through the ghetto. Only 12.5 kg of luggage and 10 marks in money were allowed to be taken along. Therefore the order to the ghetto to deliver all currency in reichsmarks. People sold, squandered, the little they had to supply themselves with food, especially bread."...