Transport from Dabie, Ghetto, Poland to Chelmno, Extermination Camp, Poland on 15/12/1941

Starting on December 14, 1941, the Dąbie Ghetto was liquidated. The Nazi Mayor Fellenberg first informed Josef Dyament that the Jews would be sent "to the East." German Gendarmerie forces then rounded up approximately 900 Jews in the market square (approximately 200 had succeeded to escape) and locked them inside the local theater and the Catholic church where they were beaten and humiliated. Rabbi Yaakov Auerbach was threatened with a revolver and forced to scream that the war was the fault of the Jews. They stayed overnight in these two buildings without any food or water. The following morning, everybody, except six young men, was released and given their bags back. The six men were deported to the Chełmno extermination camp in order to dig additional mass graves for the Jews of Koło of whom the last ones had been gassed on December 12.

Dąbie is only 6 kilometers from Chełmno (Kulmhof) and 11 kilometers from the mass burial site. The Chełmno camp on the Ner River was established in the autumn of 1941 for the sole purpose of mass murder. Until March 1942, the extermination camp was commanded by SS Herbert Lange, the leader of the special SS detachment which had murdered the elderly and sick Wartheland Jews by carbon monoxide in mobile gas vans from the end of 1939 onwards....