Transport from Kolo, Kolo, Lodz, Poland to Steineck, Camp, Poland on 12/1940

At the beginning of the war, nearly half of the total population of 12,000 inhabitants of the town of Koło were Jews. After the occupation of the city on September 18, 1939, the Germans renamed it Wartbrücken. They deported more than 1,000 Jews in December 1939 to Izbica Lubelska in the General Government, and in October 1940, 150 Jewish families were deported to the ghettos in the nearby villages of Bugaj and Nowiny Brdowskie. In the beginning of December 1940, a ghetto was established in Koło and a group of Jewish men were sent to Poznań in compliance with the orders issued by Fritz Neumann, the head of the civil engineering office (Leiter des Tiefbauamtes) in Poznań who was responsible for several forced labor camps in the region. According to a testimony given in 1948 by Szymon Frajdlewicz (b. 1915) to the War Criminal’s Section in the Legal Department at the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in Munich, they were arrested and detained without food in the local synagogue in Koło for three days, guarded by SS men who had been ordered by Neumannn to shoot anyone who came to say farewell to the Jewish deportees. They were subsequently loaded into six trucks and taken to Steineck (Krzyżowniki), a labor camp, which was one of twenty-nine camps in the city of Poznań and its vicinity. One group of men was then sent further; their fate is not known....