Transport from Sompolno, Kolo, Lodz, Poland to Chelmno, Extermination Camp, Poland on 08/12/1941

The first deportations of Jews from Sompolno apparently occurred in February 1940; after the war, Samuel Stopnik testified to the USC Shoah Foundation that he was deported to the Dachau concentration camp on February 20, 1940. The next known deportations took place in the summer of 1941. One hundred and fifty strong young Jewish men and fifty women between the ages of eighteen and forty were deported in several waves to three forced labor camps in different parts of the Wartheland.

The next Sompolno Jews to be deported were thirty men who were transported on December 8, 1941, the date of the Chełmno extermination camp’s establishment. This, allegedly, was the very first transport to the first Nazi death camp. It consisted of Jews who were used as gravediggers in the so-called Waldkommando (forest commando). The main source for this information is the Bulletin of the Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland. Among the Jews from Sompolno were members of the Grosmanowicz, Słodkiewicz, and Kolski families. The men were selected from among the fifty daily workers who had to report to the Judenrat. It is not known how many Jews were taken in the entire transport, but it can be assumed that some sixty to ninety Jewish men from neighboring towns were added. How exactly the deportation occurred—what the Jews were told, what they were allowed to carry, and what they went through after they had been selected—is also unclear. ...