Transport from Kalisz, Ghetto, Poland to Biernatki, Kalisz, Lodz, Poland on 27/10/1940

According to Moshe Gross, the deportations began on October 26, 1940, after Grabowski arrived in the ghetto and held a number of conversations with the Jewish representatives. He and two Gestapo officers informed Hahn and Landau that at 10 a.m. the following day, the patients they had selected for transfer to convalescent homes would be taken away. The patients had to be washed and dressed in fresh underwear. Gross reported further what some of the Jews who worked at the Kalisz Gestapo offices on Jasna Street had noticed: "That day, our mechanics related that when they returned from their work at the Gestapo headquarters, a large number of strange Gestapo men had arrived in a mysterious large black lorry, which was closed on every side, without any ventilation holes at all. It was easy to link these facts with the morning visit. We spent the day in feverish preparations, talks, discussions, and farewells." The gas vans were provided by the Sonderkommando Lange. SS-Sturmbannführer Herbert Lange from the Gestapo in Posen was previously tasked with the extermination of the mentally ill in the Wartheland. On Greiser’s order, he experimented with gas vans as a new form of mass killing from early 1940. Lange acted under the direction of SS-Standartenführer Ernst Damzog and the Higher SS and Police Leader, Obergruppenführer Wilhelm Koppe....