Transport from Lask, Ghetto, Poland to Lodz, Ghetto, Poland on 27/08/1942

The Jews of Łask, the capital of Łask County, were among the tens of thousands of Jews from Wartheland communities who were murdered in the Chełmno death camp (Kulmhof). At the outbreak of WWII, more than 3,800 Jews lived in Łask, comprising nearly two thirds of the town’s population. From the beginning of the German occupation on September 7, 1939, however, the Jews in Łask were systematically tortured and raped; their property was ruthlessly pillaged.^[1]

According to the Jewish Council (Judenrat) of Łask, 3,467 Jews lived in the town on October 10, 1940.^[2] On November 18, they were forcibly restricted to a ghetto.^[3] Slave labor had begun with the occupation, including child labor;^[4] in the summer of 1941, deportations to slave labor camps in the Poznań area began as well.^[5] In the winter of 1941–1942, lists of Jews living in the ghetto were compiled.^[6] It was during this time that the first reports of the annihilation of the Wartheland communities began to reach Łask.^[7] In June 1942, the bulletin of the Warsaw ghetto’s underground archive reported on the persecution of Łask’s Jewish community.^[8] The Jewish population reached some 4,260 souls in August of 1942, and it included Jews from other locations in the Wartheland such as Sieradz, Szczercow, and Widawa.^[9]

On August 24, 1942, the Łask ghetto was destroyed. The liquidation took place in the middle of the day when, with no warning, some 100 SS and Schupo men arrived at the ghetto in trucks. They came from the direction of neighboring Zduńska Wola, whose ghetto had been liquidated that morning.^[10]...