Transport from Strykow, Brzeziny, Lodz, Poland to Glowno, Ghetto, Poland on 29/12/1939

Stryków, a town situated 26 kilometers northeast of Łódź city in Łódź (Litzmannstadt) County, contained some 2,000 Jews—of its roughly 4,000 inhabitants—on the eve of World War II. On September 7, 1939, Stryków was occupied by Nazi Germany.^[1] Regina Gerszt, deported with her family from Stryków to Głowno when she was a young girl (b. 1930), testified in 1947 about life under the Germans:

“Gradually civilian Germans started ruling the town. The situation became worse; they began to take the Jews to work on Saturdays and beat them and tear their beards and send them to German houses to work. We already knew that this was the beginning of the end of our lives.”^[2]

In 1949, Mosze Blusztein, the head of the Jewish community in Stryków, who was deported to the Łódź ghetto in May 1942, testified before the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in Munich. He claimed that Knapczynski, a Volksdeutscher (ethnic German) who had changed his name to Oskar Knappe, had joined the German administration of Stryków, and was responsible for slave labor. In several accounts, survivors describe his rough appearance and his mistreatment of the Jews in the town: he was said to have both tortured and murdered people.^[3] Moshe Blusztein also recalled that Knappe was the representative of the town's administration responsible for the Jewish inhabitants at the time.^[4]...