Transport X left the Radegast station at 7 A.M. on May 13, 1942, with 1,000 Jews on board. This was the sixty-fourth deportation of Jews from the Łódź ghetto to Chełmno.[1]
The last deportations of the Jews from the Łódź ghetto to Chełmno in May 1942 were more chaotic than the earlier ones. There were a number of reasons for this. First, it was unclear as to when the deportations would cease and who would be selected. Furthermore, unlike the previous deportations, the Jewish police were involved in rounding up the deportees the night before the deportations. Rumors spread through the ghetto that deportations would continue until May 16 and that Polish Jews were to be included. Mass panic caused the price of food and other goods to soar. Yet on May 12, some people, among them the diarist Oskar Rosenfeld, hoped that the end was in sight. Indeed, Rosenfeld noted in his diary that "the danger of being deported now has passed. I can feel it, I know it…"[2]
On May 13, the Germans announced that the transports would continue until Friday and Saturday (May 15 and 16).[3] On May 13, Rosenfeld's fifty-eighth birthday, he wrote that the "ghetto has become almost all Polish, since the Germans are gone."[4]...