Wave of Deportation from Krychów, Camp, Poland to Trawniki, Camp, Poland on 07/1942

The Krychów camp^[1] 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 (Water Works Management) of the Lublin District.^[2] 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.^[3]  With the onset of Operation Reinhard on March 17, 1942,^[4] all the remaining non-Jewish workers were supposed to be freed, and the camp be reserved for Jews.^[5] 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.^[6]

Sobibor remained the destination of most of the subsequent transports from Krychów,^[7] until the closure of the latter camp. Sources are inconclusive and suggest a range of dates for the dissolution of camp Krychów, between August 1943 and March 1944.^[8]

Sometime between July 1942 and the closure of Krychów, probably in mid-August 1943, SS-Unterscharführer Josef Napieralla carried out several transports, of a few dozen Jews each, from Krychów to the Trawniki concentration camp. The last of these transports to Trawniki seems to have taken place on August 16, 1943. On that day, some 300 Jews were marched from Krychów to Sobibor.^[9] Napieralla selected thirty Jews out of this group and deported them to the Trawniki camp, which was located some 50 kilometers southwest of Krychów, and 36 kilometers southeast of Lublin.^[10] The camp had been established shortly after the outbreak of WW2 on the grounds of a former sugar refinery outside the town of Trawniki, and it was originally intended to house Soviet POWs, before being converted into an SS training camp. It was expanded in the summer of 1942 adjacent to the training facility as a concentration camp for Jewish forced laborers within the Majdanek concentration camp system.^[11]...