Wave of Deportation from Dabie, Ghetto, Poland to Hardt, Camp, Poland on 07/1941

At the beginning of the war, about 1,100 of the 4000 inhabitants living in the small town of Dąbie were Jews. After the Germans occupied the city on September 18, 1939, they renamed it Eichstädt and in the summer of 1940, they established a ghetto. During these deportations, 100–150 men and 50 women were transported from Dąbie to forced labor camps. There are two known survivors: Leon Sontag (b. 1916) and Martin Gruenfeld (b. 1922). In their postwar testimonies, they reported that they had been sent to Hardt (Wąsowo) and Buchwerder-Forst (Bolewice/Bollwitz), which were two of the Reich’s highway labor camps (Reichsautobahnlager, RAB) located in close proximity to each other. Thus there may have been one transport to both labor camps, although there seems to have been two separate transports aside from that of the 50 women, whose destination remains unknown. The survivors recounted that the Germans had demanded that the Judenrat provide them with 100 men for a labor task that would last six weeks. The families of both survivors were forced to choose which family member would go. According to a report dated November 2, 1941 and signed by the commander of the gendarmerie in Grätz (Grodzisk Wielkopolski), and relating to the county of Grätz, 1,730 Jews were imprisoned in seven "Judenlager" (Jewish camps), including 350 in Buchwerder-Forst and 350 in Hardt, at the end of October 1941. The Jews in these camps were subjected to hard labor and received meagre rations of food. Most of them either perished or were sent to their deaths in camouflaged operations called “Rücktransports” (“back [home] transports”; a euphemism for deportations) which after December 1941 ended partly in the extermination camp of Chełmno (Kulmhof). Only thirty-five members of the Jewish community of Dąbie survived the Holocaust.