Transport III from Lodz, Ghetto, Poland to Chelmno, Extermination Camp, Poland on 24/02/1942

Three days before the impending deportation, most of the deportees were informed by mail about where to assemble. The transport on February 24, marked as "Transport III", listed 1,003 Jews to be removed from the ghetto. The deportation list included prisoners serving sentences in the ghetto; people on welfare; sewage workers; and "socially harmful individuals," such as notorious informers. It is not known with certainty to which assembly areas the Jews of this transport were summoned, but it can be assumed that at least 1 or 2 of the known locations from the first deportation wave were among them — the school building on Młynarska Street (Mühlgasse); the place on Szklana Street (Trödlergasse) near the central prison; and the collection point in Marysin. At the assembly area, everybody was initially registered and then had to hand over their ration cards. This time, neither bags, nor money, was allowed. The Austrian-Jewish writer Oskar Rosenfeld, since November 1941 in the Łódź Ghetto, observed that the Jewish police stormed the dwellings of those who had failed to show up at the assembly point and prevented them from taking any luggage. Jews who arrived with knapsacks or bags were forced to discard them. Some of the children destined for deportation were discovered frozen to death in their rooms. An anonymous girl in the ghetto wrote in her diary on February 24, 1942 (in Polish): "The deportations are continuing. They are deporting 500 people per day, still the unemployed and the merchants. They are deporting only small families up to 3 people." In an entry preceding this day (the diary is incomplete, and it is unclear what exact date she is referring to), the diary states: "I am very depressed because of this situation. Can one be indifferent to such suffering… look indifferently at how every moment friends, the sick, the elderly and the children are being deported?"...