Transport from Klodawa, Kolo, Lodz, Poland to Lodz, Ghetto, Poland on 24/06/1942

The first Jews to be deported from Kłodawa (Tonningen) were a group of approximately seventy-five young women sent to a farm in Wielka Krusza (Gross-Kruscha) as slave laborers on October 18, 1940. The next transport took place on June 6, 1941, when 150 men were deported to the Bolewice (Buchwerder/Bollwitz) forced labor camp, a construction site for the highway from Frankfurt Oder to Poznań. This deportation was followed by the August 1941 transport of fifty women to the agricultural forced labor camp Grüntal. The Germans subsequently deported two groups of men for the purpose of digging mass graves in the Chełmno (Kulmhof) extermination camp on January 2 and 4, 1942. The bulk of the deportations occurred between January 10 and 12, 1942, when the Kłodawa ghetto was liquidated; the vast majority of its over 1,000 Jewish residents were brought to Chełmno, where they were murdered in mobile gas chambers on trucks. At least four Jewish men were ordered to stay in Kłodawa. Although the purpose is not stated, it is fair to assume that these men were tasked with the job given those who remained after ghettos had been liquidated: cleaning out the properties of the Jews who had been deported and sorting and wrapping confiscated belongings. These were subsequently sold or auctioned to Germans and Poles, or sometimes moved to the German administration of the Łódź ghetto, which claimed to be the legal inheritor of the Jewish valuables. The Gestapo was in charge of the proceedings. The profits were then sent to a special account, “Sonderkonto 12300,” at the Stadtsparkasse Litzmannstadt bank. The funds were aimed, inter alia, at covering the deportation costs....