In her last, incomplete diary entry from March 18, 1942, an anonymous girl living in the ghetto wrote: "The deportations are continuing. Now they are deporting families, in which the husbands or the children…"[1]
Unlike the previous transports in March, when approximately 700 deportees were taken daily, on March 18, around 300 Jewish women, men and children were taken in addition to the 700 people who had been previously selected. These 300 people were deported without prior notice: they were taken directly from their homes and brought to the train. On March 19, Jozef Zelkowicz noted in his diary: "And we can only imagine the way in which those 300 Jews were taken from their homes and sent off within thirty minutes."[2]
According to the documents from the ghetto's Jewish self-administration archive, 1,000 Jews were deported on March 18, 1942.[3] An invoice for the transport submitted by the Reichsbahn Verkehrsamt (Transportation Authority of the German national railway) to the Gestapo Litzmannstadt notes the slightly higher figure of 1,001 Jewish deportees.[4] The former is consistent with the number of deportees given on the deportation list for this transport, no. XXV, which was probably compiled by the Aussiedlungskommission (deportation commission) after the transport left.[5]...