Transport from Lodz, Ghetto, Poland to Auschwitz Birkenau, Extermination Camp, Poland on 30/03/1943

On March 30, 1943, a transport with 945 Jews left the Łódź ghetto for Auschwitz-Birkenau. Our research shows that this was the first transport from the ghetto bound for Auschwitz. However, the reason behind this particular transport is not known, as historian Andrea Löw points out. Hitherto researchers have only assumed that the destination was the death camp, but cross-checking now makes it possible to say definitively that Auschwitz was the arrival point.
Most of the deportees in this transport belonged to a group of 855 Jews (30 of whom were women) who had been sent to forced labor camps near Poznań (Posen) in October–November 1941 from the Łódź ghetto and other ghettos in the Wartheland. On March 15, 1943, after this period of slave labor, they were transported to (in some cases back to) the Łódź ghetto. Upon arrival they were incarcerated in the ghetto’s central prison on Czarnieckiego Street. The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto described them as “decrepit,” and within days of their arrival fifteen of them died from exhaustion. Rumors claimed that they would be assigned to demolition work. However, 18 year-old Dawid Siearkowiak noted in his diary that the new arrivals “are, however, in such a deplorable state that for now they can’t be employed anywhere. They were in a camp that was literally a death house. Eighty to ninety percent of them died there.”
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