Wave of Deportation from Zychlin, Ghetto, Poland to Chelmno, Extermination Camp, Poland on 03/03/1942

Żychlin was occupied by the German army on September 17, 1939. On October 26, it was annexed to the so-called Wartheland, and administrated as part of the Landkreis (county) of Kutno. The county numbered approximately 110,000 people; some 10 percent of them were Jews. In Żychlin, the Jews’ relative proportion was even higher; estimates speak of between 2,400 and 2,800 Jews, constituting a third of the city’s population. By January 1, 1940, their numbers had risen to 3,000, 600 of whom were refugees; by March 1942, there were 3,200 Jews in the town. As in other places in Kutno County the persecution in Żychlin began immediately with the occupation. A ghetto was established on July 20—the last ghetto to be erected within Kutno County. Between August 1941 and the end of that year, several hundred young Jewish men were sent to forced labor camps in the Poznań (Posen) vicinity and some sixty Jewish women were sent to field labor outside Żychlin. Operational killing began in the Chełmno death camp (Kulmhof) in December 1941, and Jews who escaped the camp reached Żychlin, among other places, most probably around the beginning of 1942. Their reports generated panic among the Jewish inhabitants of the Żychlin ghetto. At the same time, conditions for the Jews under occupation were deteriorating. Some Jews succeeded in buying their way to the Warsaw ghetto, but others were caught and shot to death. Żychlin’s Jewish inhabitants were required to pay 8 Reichsmark per person by February 22, 1942. It was in the same month—certainly by the time Alter Rosenberg, chair of the Judenrat (Jewish council), and Yosef Oberman, head of the Order Service (Jewish police), were murdered —that the Jews must have understood the Nazis’ mass murder plans. This is reflected in letters, such as this anonymous one from the Żychlin ghetto dated February 24, 1942: ...