Transport from Strykow, Ghetto, Poland to Lodz, Ghetto, Poland on 12/05/1942

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 1940, at the order of the German town's administration, Kościuszki Street was turned into a closed ghetto. After the Praschke & Seidel leather factory was shut down, male and female Jews aged fifteen and up were registered to build ponds at a fish farm. One of the cruelest agents in charge of Jewish forced labor was a Volksdeutscher (ethnic German); originally named Knapczynski, he had changed his name to Oskar Knappe and joined Stryków’s German administration. Knappe is described in several testimonies as brutal, mistreating, torturing, and murdering the town’s Jews.^[3] All Jews were made to assemble at Berek Joselewicz Square, where they were assigned to different forced labor battalions and tasks. Moshe Blusztein, the head of the local Jewish community, recalled that Knappe was the representative of the town's administration responsible for the Jewish inhabitants.^[4] One example of his cruelty related to a sixteen-year-old boy, Bialek, who was amongst the group of twenty-five Jews doing turf work near Zgierz. When Bialek managed to escape, he was murdered by Knappe.^[5] In 1942, maybe already before, Amtskommissar Steineck headed the German administration of Stryków.^[6]...