Transport from Sobibor, Extermination Camp, Poland to Krychów, Camp, Poland on 09/08/1942

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]  By the end of April 1942, all the forced laborers at Krychów were Jews.

Although no transport lists, or other official documents pertaining to incoming and outgoing transports, have been preserved, witnesses who survived the brutal living and working conditions in Krychów recall a constant stream of arriving and departing workers, especially in 1942.^[7] There were transports with several hundred deportees from Rejowiec and Theresienstadt;^[8] transports with probably more than a thousand Jews from Slovakia, Lemberg, and different areas of the Reich,^[9] and many transports with only several dozen forced laborers from the network of Water Works camps in the Kreishauptmannschaft Cholm.

The Sobibor extermination camp was the destination of most of the transports from Krychów^[10] until the liquidation of the latter camp, probably in August 1943.^[11] However, there were also several transports, mostly smaller ones, in the other direction, from Sobibor to Krychów. Not all the deportees were gassed immediately upon arrival in Sobibor; some of them were sent to one of the forced labor camps of the Water Works Management. This happened for two main reasons: When the Wasserwirtschaftsverwaltung reported an urgent need for forced laborers, or when Sobibor could not process the planned number of deportees. At times, half or more of the deportees from an incoming transport would be selected for further deportation, as in the case of a transport from Theresienstadt on April 18, 1942, which carried 1,000 Jews via Rejowiec to Sobibor. 500–600 of them were transferred to the Water Works camp in Sawin.^[12]  The incoming transports were often "parked" outside the gates of Sobibor, since the extermination camp could only process a maximum of eleven railway cars (or 550 Jews in total) every 3-4 hours....