Transport from Krychów, Camp, Poland to Sobibor, Extermination Camp, Poland on 15/04/1942

The Krychów camp in the Kreishauptmannschaft Cholm county, 33 km southeast of the Sobibor extermination camp, was part of the network of forced labor camps managed and operated by the Wasserwirtschaftsverwaltung (Waterworks Management) of the Lublin District.^[1] It became operational in the spring of 1940. The forced laborers, arriving in several deportation waves in 1940 and 1941, were used to drain the swamps in the area and rectify the flow of tributaries of the Bug River. In addition to Jews, the Krychów camp received various other groups of forced laborers, such as Sinti, Roma, and Poles. In early 1942, more and more of them were released.^[2]  With the onset of Operation Reinhard on March 17, 1942,^[3] all the remaining non-Jewish workers were supposed to be freed, and the camp be reserved for Jews.^[4] However, according to the recollections of the witness Józef Klauda, it was only on April 4 that most of the Poles detained at the Krychów camp were released.^[5] 

The exact date of the onset of transports from Krychów to the Sobibor extermination camp could not be determined. There are no known official documents pertaining to the various deportations. However, the first deportation can be narrowed down to mid-April 1942, for the following reasons:

The construction of the Sobibor extermination camp began in March 1942, under the supervision of SS-Hauptsturmführer Richard Thomalla and SS-Hauptsturmführer Franz Paul Stangl, both from the Operation Reinhard staff of SS and Police Leader Odilo Globočnik in Lublin. The first three gas chambers, erected in a solid brick building with a concrete foundation, had been completed by April. In mid-April 1942, Thomalla, Stangl, SS-Sturmbannführer Christian Wirth, and several lower-ranking SS men and technicians conducted experimental gassings to test the efficacy of the gas chambers. According to historian Yitzhak Arad, the first Jews to be murdered at Sobibor were brought there from the Krychów forced labor camp in mid-April.^[6] He refers to the testimony of Sonia Guter.^[7] Guter, a Krychów inmate from the city of Rejowiec,^[8] stated that 250 adults and children had been selected. "They were promised that they would be going home. Meanwhile, all of them were murdered, as part of the experiments conducted in the ovens that had just been built in Sobibor."^[9]...