Transport from Sieradz, Ghetto, Poland to Zdunska Wola, Ghetto, Poland on 04/04/1942

Approximately 30,000 Jews lived in Sieradz County at the outbreak of the war; in Sieradz itself there were 2,536 Jews, some 21 percent of the town’s population. The German army entered Sieradz on September 3, 1939. Friedrich Rippich was nominated landrat, county commissioner, and held the role until the end of 1941. The first deportation from Sieradz took place in mid-November 1939, when the local police chief sent between 300 and 400 Jews (eighty families) to Lublin. According to a letter from the HSSPF (Höherer SS- und Polizeiführer, Higher SS- and Police-leader) office in Poznań to Rippich, another deportation of some 1,000 people was ordered to take place on December 12–13, 1939, as part of the so-called Nahplan (short-term plan). By January 1940 there were 1,418 Jews left in Sieradz. The Sieradz ghetto was established at the end of February and beginning of March, 1940. One of the nuns from the local Ursuline monastery wrote in the monastery's wartime chronicle on February 29, 1940:...