Transport 1 from Lodz, Ghetto, Poland to Chelmno, Extermination Camp, Poland on 08/1944

In August 1944, the Germans began the final stage of the Łódź ghetto’s liquidation. Thousands of Jews were deported to Auschwitz almost daily. By the end of the month, only about 1,000 people remained of the 68,516 who had been in the ghetto in early August. At the same time, the extermination camp in Chełmno (Kulmhof) continued functioning. Although the last big transport of 700 Jewish men, women, and children had left the Łódź ghetto’s Radegast train station for Chełmno on July 14, 1944, and although the deportations to the camp officially ceased on July 15, some forty-seven Jewish men were forced to work at the camp, and the members of the Kulmhof Sonderkommando were also on site. According to the testimony of Shimon Srebrnik, who was forced to work in the Chełmno camp between May 1944 and January 1945, a few “smaller” transports with some fifty to sixty Jews arrived from Łódź after July 23, 1944. One oven was left operational to burn the victims’ bodies. Walter Piller, the deputy commander of the camp, later testified that three transports arrived in Chełmno in the late summer of 1944. ...