7 Kulmhof
In August 1941, the month that Avram died, 976 people perished in the Ghetto. Most of the deceased were over the age of forty-five, and the leading causes of death were officially listed as heart disease, malnutrition and pulmonary tuberculosis.1 Deterioration in living conditions, chief among them starvation and exhaustion, were the real reasons for the high toll. One would have assumed that the high mortality rate would make more food available for others, an assumption soon to be found wrong. Demanding weekly records, the Germans kept count of population fluctuation to control the amount of food supplied, which was tied to workshops’ production and the number of people employed.
The people who perished made room for new transports who arrived at the Ghetto in the summer and fall. As part of their plan to free the Reich and its satellite nations of Jews, the Nazis rounded up and deported entire communities. Named “resettlement,” to gain the deportees’ full collaboration and obedience, they were promised better living conditions, food and work at their new destination. The Judenrat was charged with the enormous task of housing, feeding and assigning a workplace to the new arrivals.
First to arrive were people who lived in the Wartheland in relative proximity to Litzmannstadt. Small towns’ ghettos were emptied, and their inhabitants sent by trains with their basic belongings. Some three thousand arrivals from Włocławek underwent a mandatory disinfection and were assigned apartments. In the months that followed, German Jews arrived from Berlin, Cologne, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Dusseldorf. This was followed by transports from Vienna, Prague and Luxembourg. The deportation helped the Reich solve a local shortage of housing in those cities due, among other reasons, to the destruction caused by Allied bombing.2
In early November 1941, some twenty thousand people were added to the Ghetto population, most of whom were foreign to the culture and language. Upon arrival they encountered deplorable urban and housing conditions, far inferior to the places they had left, especially the German and Austrian Jews, who were known to have high living standards. Schools closed and classrooms were turned into makeshift housing. People from the same city were housed in sparsely furnished apartments of a single building.3 Often, some twenty people were made to share a room, perfect conditions for the spread of infectious diseases. At night, people of all ages and genders lay next to each other on damaged wooden floors, often waking up to let those who needed to get to the outhouses pass through. As for the rest of the Ghetto’s population, food soon became the chief preoccupation of the new arrivals. First, people ate what they brought along but soon ran out of it. Next, they began to trade valuables, including warm clothing that was much needed in the fast-approaching winter. When these were exhausted, the Ghetto-supplied food and the soup that was given at workplaces to which the able-bodied were assigned became their main source of calories. Hunger and illness took their toll and, for many, life expectancy amounted to six months.4
In addition to clearing the Reich, as well as occupied and annexed nations, of Jews, the Nazis rounded up so-called “Gypsies,” better known as Roma and Sinti, who they regarded as criminal, disease-infected people, and sent them to the Ghetto. In early November some five thousand Roma and Sinti from regions in Austria, half of them children, arrived. They were housed in fifteen buildings in appalling conditions even by Ghetto standards, with no outhouses or water. Surrounded by barbed wire in what was known as the Zigeuner-Lager (Gypsies-camp), they were excluded from Ghetto life. Lack of food and a typhus epidemic soon ravaged the camp, killing some six hundred in just a few weeks after their arrival.5
Fearing that infectious diseases could spread to Litzmannstadt areas outside the Ghetto, for the city’s administration soon made sanitation a high priority. With an increased population and no central sanitary system, the outhouses soon overflowed. Collected manually, refuse carts pulled by people left a putrid trail on their way to a dumping ground. For those tasked with the cleaning, it meant an almost-certain death as they often contracted typhus. It was a matter of time until an outbreak would engulf the entire area. Indeed, in the spring months, when warmer weather arrived, close to three thousand died of dysentery. Despite the introduction of several measures, there was little that could be done in such a dense place with poor living conditions.6
The cold, starvation and diseases made life in the Ghetto grimmer than ever. Children sitting along sidewalks in torn-up clothing stared at passersby and begged for food. Mothers whose husbands were sent to forced-labour camps or left widowed, unable to care for their children, grew desperate. Not being able to continue under such conditions, many took their own lives. Scenes of people leaping to their death from an upper-storey window and remaining on the sidewalk for a long while were common in late 1941.7
As the cold months neared, keeping warm became another preoccupation for the Ghetto inhabitants. With hardly any coal delivery, people resorted to other means. Mass raids in which they dismantled unoccupied wooden structures and removed doors and roofs from outhouses were common. When caught, the Ghetto’s Order Police, imprisoned people and sent them to forced labour camps and later to their deaths. For those attempting to escape or having dealings with people from the outside, smuggling for example, public hanging by the Gestapo was also a common occurrence.8
In late 1941 and early 1942 the Germans were ready to implement the next stage in their plans for the Litzmannstadt Ghetto: killings. Having turned the area into a giant slave-labour operation, they had conflicting interests. On the one hand, they wanted to keep the production that enriched the Reich and contributed to its war machine. On the other hand, following the Nazi ideology they wanted to free the Wartheland of Jews. With their failure to expel Jews en masse to the General Government areas early on, it soon became clear that killing was to be the other option. The murder of civilians, Jews among them, had been a common occurrence in Poland since the German invasion. Some were random acts of violence by ethnic Germans or soldiers, like the ones that took place in Litzmannstadt and Białystok. Others were executions, such as the murder of the Polish intelligentsia and the Jewish community’s leadership. Semi-organized killings were also carried out by the Waffen-SS, the military arm of the Nazi Party, who murdered large groups. Yet, systematic mass killing on an industrial scale did not yet exist.
Preparation for the Ghetto’s liquidation began in mid-1941, with Hitler’s blessing. Key among the architects of the process were Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, and Hermann Göring, Hitler’s deputy, who in July 1941 authorized Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich’s Main Security Office (RSHA), which included the Gestapo, Kripo and the Security Service (SD), to draw up plans for a comprehensive solution. The objective was presented on January 20, 1942, in a suburban Berlin mansion during the notorious Wannsee Conference, to which representatives of several branches of government, including the Chancellery, Foreign Office, Justice, Interior, Security ministries and regional authorities were invited. The Wannsee gathering formalized the killing of Jews as a coordinated undertaking by the entire Nazi apparatus. At the meeting, Heydrich presented an estimated number of European Jews to be targeted and their evacuation to the east as a preparatory step to what became known as the Final Solution.9 Also present at the meeting was SS-Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) Adolf Eichmann, who was assigned to coordinate and put into action this massive task.10
Not waiting for directions and operational plans from his superiors, Arthur Greiser, the governor of the Wartheland, had his own solution to the “Jewish problem” in the territory under his control. In mid-1941, prior to the Wannsee meeting, he initiated direct discussions with Hitler and got his approval for his plan. He then informed Himmler and Heydrich about his intentions and got their collaboration and logistical support.11 The thrust of the plan was that, as a first phase, those in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto who were unable to work would be killed. It became obvious that, if killing thousands of people was to take place, in addition to the SS who would carry out the executions, collaborating offices including the city’s authorities in charge of security and the running the Ghetto’s day-to-day affairs under Hans Biebow and those responsible for regional transportation, would have to get involved. The plan coincided with a looming severe shortage of food that was about to make the feeding of the entire Ghetto population all but impossible in the winter of 1941-42.12
Two basic elements needed to be decided on before a killing process was to begin: method and place. As for a method, shooting was already used by the three thousand-man strong Einsatzgruppen (special task forces) that operated in the captured territories under the SS after Germany’s invasion of Poland and the Soviet Union. People were rounded up in the ghettos of small towns, taken to secluded forested areas, made to undress and face a deep trench, then shot. Entire communities, including mothers holding babies, were machine-gunned and fell into freshly dug trenches. Shooting from close range verified their death and soil-cover made for a mass grave. Although several mass killings were carried out by shooting, such as the September 1941 massacre in Babi Yar in Ukraine and in November 1941 in Rumbula in Latvia,13 it was ruled out as logistically too cumbersome for the Litzmannstadt Ghetto, and another method had to be found.
The method selected for the killing had its roots in the Nazis’ twisted ideology: the Euthanasia Program, later named the T-4 Program. Following their rise to power in 1933, and as part of their plan to create a pure Aryan race, the Nazis passed a law that mandated sterilization of physically and mentally disabled people. In May 1939, the Chancellery office initiated a program that required midwives and physicians to register children born with deformities, and later ordered their killing. The victims were put to death by lethal injection administered by nurses, by starvation or by gassing them in sealed gas chambers. Of these methods, gas was judged to be the most effective and easiest to handle. Shortly after, the operation was scaled up to include several regional centres throughout Germany and Austria. The SS was instructed to provide logistical support and to guard the program’s secrecy.14
The killing process was purposely made deceptive by having victims believe that they were participating in a medical examination for which they needed to undress and take a shower. Once naked, they walked into a chamber and carbon monoxide gas was turned on. After twenty minutes, fresh air was injected, and the dead were taken for cremation. Following the German invasion of Poland, the T-4 Program was expanded to the annexed territories, and the operation became mobile. A fleet of specially fitted vans with large wood-surfaced cargo holds travelled to regional mental hospitals for the killing. Gas was administered from either carbon-monoxide canisters or by channeling fumes from the exhaust pipes to the perfectly sealed hold.15 The person put in charge of the operation was a dedicated thirty-year-old Nazi by the name of Herbert Lange. Lange rose in the ranks of the SS Security Service (SD) to head the mobile killing unit, which was headquartered in Posen (Poznań), where the office of the Governor Greiser also was located. He assembled fifteen SS men to form a killing unit which came to be known as Sonderkommando Lange. The unit was helped by a group of civilian Polish prisoners who dug the victims’ graves.16
The sheer size of the Ghetto’s population set for killing and the time frame allocated to the process called for a suitable location that would make it both efficient and secretive. Whereas the mobile killing unit drove to various locations, a permanent site to which victims would be brought had to be found. The spot needed to be near Litzmannstadt and in relative proximity to other Wartheland small towns populated by Jews, have a reliable rail connection, be hidden and away from large centres, sparsely populated, have buildings to house the killing squad, a facility to process the arrivals, and a dense forest for burial and for concealing the actions from passersby.17
A place that satisfied those criteria was found by Lange in mid-1941. Located some sixty kilometres northwest of Litzmannstadt, between the towns of Dąbie and Koło, the village of Kulmhof (Chełmno) was an agricultural community and home to two hundred and fifty people. The pastoral place with narrow country roads and thirty to forty homes with sloping roofs also had a town hall, a grocery store, school and the Ner River that ran through it. Sprawling farmlands surrounded the village to which unpaved roads led. Two notable buildings in Kulmhof were a mansion on a three-hectare plot of land and a neo-Gothic-style white plaster church with a towering steeple some two hundred metres away. A ravine separated the two. The mansion dated back to the Czarist era and was later divided to house two families. The village was linked to Koło and Dąbie via a narrow-gauge rail line that made it accessible. Following several scouting visits to the area, Lange decided that the place and its various buildings would fit his killing plans.18
In October 1941, shortly after a decision about the choice of site was made, Lange’s Sonderkommando unit arrived and was housed in several village buildings to begin preparatory work. It included confiscation of large swathes of forest land near the village of Rzuchów, some four kilometres from Kulmhof, which were made off-limits to the public. During the month that followed, the mansion’s occupants were evicted, the interior was altered to accommodate the processing of large groups, some windows were sealed, and the ground’s perimeter was fenced. The actual building work was largely performed by the same Polish prisoners who had worked in the mobile operation and by forced Jewish laborers from Litzmannstadt’s Ghetto who later were assigned to gravedigging. The SS soldiers were informed about the purpose of the place and were divided into three groups: those who were to oversee the transport from the train, those who would help with the processing of the victims in the mansion and, finally, those in the forest camp tasked with overseeing burial and cremation.19
On December 16, 1941, Rumkowski, the elder of Litzmannstadt’s Ghetto Jews, was ordered to ready twenty thousand people for resettlement. Negotiating with his German masters, he was able to cut the number in half. Still, selecting and rounding up ten thousand people was not a simple task. Assuming that this might become a first of many such requests, he assembled a Resettlement Committee to help him decide who was to be deported and what selection process would be followed.20 Since the Ghetto existence and its food supply was tied to forced labour, it was established that the first to be deported would be the unemployed. The other groups added to the list were prisoners accused of crimes and their families, those labelled “troublemakers” and agitators, families of those sent to forced labour camps, the most recent arrivals from outside Litzmannstadt who were not yet integrated, and Roma and Sinti who were locked up in their own camp.21
Using Ghetto population census records, lists were drawn and those selected were sent a letter summoning them to an assembly location. The reason for the invitation, they were told, was a resettlement for forced agricultural work in farms in the east where lodging conditions and food would be much improved. The formality of the process made a few believe that this was indeed the place to which they are headed. Others, reaching a point of desperation, accepted their fate willingly acknowledging that any place but the Ghetto where cold, overcrowding, diseases and hunger dominated, would be an improvement. Those suspecting the worst rushed to the Ghetto offices to ask for exemption. An appeals process was introduced to review cases but rejected most. Some, notably decorated World War I veterans who had fought on the German and Austro-Hungarian sides, were successful in being exempted from deportation for a while.22
The deportees, carrying with them the allowable 12.5-kilograms of belongings per person, registered upon arrival at the assembly places and returned their food cards.23 They were then taken to one of three places for an overnight stay where they were also fed, and as part of the deception were offered warm clothing. The next day in early morning hours those who could were forced to march, while the weak and disabled people were taken by wagons or tram to the Radegast train station on the northeastern edge of Litzmannstadt, half a kilometre outside the Ghetto. A dark brown, single-storey wooden building with a sloped roof and a concrete platform, the station had four heavy sliding doors attached to a metal rail on either side of the building that reflected the industrial nature of the place and the goods that passed through it. Radegast was the main entry point of goods and people from afar to the Ghetto and an active point of departure for the resettlement transports. These transports numbered some one thousand people each. Scenes of families walking on snow-covered roads in below-freezing temperatures and later on sunnier days carrying suitcases, some holding infants or supporting old and disabled relatives escorted by the Ghetto’s Order Service and guarded by armed Germans, were common in early 1942 and the years that followed.24
When the families reached the train station, away from public view, brutality was unleashed. People were ordered to hand over their valuables at once to waiting soldiers. Those who took their time were severely beaten. Under harrowing commands and barking dogs, they were then pushed toward and forced onto the packed third-class cars where some could only stand. When the doors closed and the train started to move, from the train windows they got a last glimpse of the city on their voyage to a place unknown.25
7.1 Litzmannstadt Ghetto deportees marching to the train station.
In mid-1942 people grew fearful of the deportations. After not hearing from those who left but learning rumours about the brutality in the station, many concluded these were highly worrisome signs. The rapidly deteriorating conditions in the Ghetto obviated even a minimal trust in what the authorities told its inhabitants. Their inability to fulfill the resettlement quotas set by the Germans was best expressed in a speech that Rumkowski gave on September 4, 1942, when he asked the assembled audience to give him their children. Addressing the crowd he said:
I come to you like a bandit, to take from you what you treasure most in your hearts. I have tried, using every possible means, to get the order revoked. I tried – when that proved to be impossible – to soften the order. Just yesterday, I ordered a list of children aged nine – I wanted at least to save this one age-group: the nine to ten year olds. But I was not granted this concession. On only one point did I succeed: in saving the ten year olds and up. Let this be a consolation to our profound grief . . . I understand you, mothers; I see your tears, alright. I also feel what you feel in your hearts, you fathers who will have to go to work in the morning after your children have been taken from you, when just yesterday you were playing with your dear little ones. All this I know and feel. Since four o’clock yesterday, when I first found out about the order, I have been utterly broken. I share your pain. I suffer because of your anguish, and I don’t know how I’ll survive this – where I’ll find the strength to do so. I can barely speak. Help me carry out this action.26
No one did.
7.2 Children from a Litzmannstadt Ghetto’s orphanage deported to Kulmhof.
Rumkowski was by than hated by Litzmannstadt Ghetto-dwellers. With his “Give me your children” speech, these sentiments intensified greatly, especially given its contrast to the cautious promise based on workshop placements that Rumkowski had offered in a speech on May 31 of that year. Children of young age were part of the Ghetto slave labour workforce, but not the very young ones. As the intention was to “resettle” those who did not contribute to production and were considered a burden on food distribution, after the old and the sick were send away, toddlers were next on the resettlement list. The speech captured the cruelty of the Ghetto situation and that of its leader. Parents were asked in plain language to sacrifice their children.27
7.3 The Radegast train station from which deportees were sent from Litzmannstadt Ghetto to Kulmhof and to Auschwitz.
The cruel request effected the Frydmans directly. Malca and Dawid Gmach, Perla and Aron Bimke, Chaja and Dydie Kane and Szmul and Tauba Frydman all had children that at the time of the speech were either infants or younger than seven years old.
An especially brutal raid on the hospital took place in early September when children were seen being thrown from upper floors. People avoided deportation at all costs, and finding people who would submit willingly for resettlement was soon impossible. Aggressive means of rounding up people, such as night raids, had to be employed. The raids were usually an operation conducted by the Ghetto’s Order Service jointly with SS units who, under curfew, blocked entries to and exits from streets and surrounded buildings to eliminate escape routes. Woken up by the sounds of terrifying sirens and screams and violent knocking on their doors, families were given a few minutes to collect some belongings, then were loaded on trucks and taken to assembly points for a next-day deportation. Disobeying orders or attempted escape resulted in being shot on the spot. After daytime raids, when heads of families returned from work, they sometimes found their apartment empty and their loved ones taken. Many, especially mothers who lost children, took their own lives.28 Being assigned to a workplace was preferable to not working. Those essential to the operation of the workshops were spared, but there was no exemption from deportation for simple labourers. Sometimes, the occupants of an entire building were either summoned or rounded up in raids regardless of whether they worked or not. Elimination of Jews trumped the benefit from their work, and resettlement quotas had to be met.
The occupants of Sulzfelder Straße 32/34, where the Frydmans lived, and those of a few neighbouring buildings were summoned to submit to deportation on March 5, 1942. A special messenger had delivered a formal letter three days earlier. Naming Rachla and her three children, the summons pointed out where and at what time they must present themselves. The letter stated that the order must be obeyed and detailed the weight of the luggage that each could carry. Most of those who rushed to ask for exemptions were flatly refused, but some were taken off the list due to illness or work considerations.29 Rachla rushed to share the bad news with her married daughters and son who, without success, tried to pull some strings they had in the Judenrat. They could not come up with a viable excuse and were rejected. The days prior to the departure were extremely hard to bear. With her husband gone, Rachla was left to make all decisions. She panicked at first, then looked confused and even detached from her surroundings. Despite knowing about other deportees, it did not occur to Rachla that her family’s turn would come so abruptly. While accepting her fate, she wondered what she would do in her old age in a new place. Her children comforted her, saying that any location would be better than their miserable existence here.
Packing for the voyage came next. On the back of three suitcases, they marked their names and address and debated what to take, wondering if new clothing would be given at their destination. Helped by Manya, Rachla selected items and in each piece of luggage placed some beddings they might need. They chose their favourite winter and summer wardrobes. In her suitcase Rachla put the silver Kiddush cup that her father gave Avram and her on their wedding day. Most of the other silverware was already traded for food. In their clothing they carefully hid some jewelry and money. The mother gave the remaining things to her daughters. She looked again to see if something of value was left in the apartment. The furniture and the photos of her and Avram’s parents and those of the entire family in better times remained on the wall. Rachla then went to her married children’s homes for goodbyes and to give long teary hugs to each of her grandchildren.
On the afternoon of March 5, the Frydmans walked with some of their neighbours to the appointed assembly place. It was crowded with people like them, and families with children. They registered, returned their Ghetto cards, and handed the keys to their apartment to representatives of the Judenrat.30 They were also asked to leave their suitcases in one of the hall’s corners and were told that it would be returned to them upon arrival at their destination. Their names were struck from the Ghetto list. They were then made to spend a sleepless night in the hall, lying on the floor next to each other. On the morning of March 6, ersatz coffee and bread were given. Someone went over the list and counted them all. In the early morning of a brutally cold day, 812 deportees were lined up outside.31 They began a slow march on snow-covered roads to the train station. Lea walked by and held her mother’s hand. Meir and Ruven walked quietly ahead. Parents held infants and extended their hands to toddlers. Disabled and very old people sat in horse-drawn wagons. In the station, a black locomotive attached to decrepit passenger cars waited. Each of the cars was marked as “Pj-Zug”, a German abbreviation for Polnischer Judenzug – a train with Polish Jews. The Litzmannstadt’s Gestapo then demanded they hand over their money. When some refused, they were beaten. They were then forced into ten cars where many could only stand. The last car was reserved for the thirteen accompanying police officers. It was mid-morning when a whistle sounded, and the train left the station.
Trains similar to the one that Rachla and her children boarded left Radegast and headed to the Koło station some 14 kilometres north of the Kulmhof camp, where killing had begun on December 7, 1941. In support of their plan to keep the actions secret, the region adjacent to the camp was liquidated first. It started with five transports numbering seven hundred people each from the Town of Koło and continued with groups from Dąbie and Dobra.32 People were rounded up in local ghettos, held overnight and transported in the morning. The early weeks provided Sonderkommando Lange with an opportunity to practise their method and time it for maximum efficiency. The scheduling of days and hours had to be coordinated with the various delivery spots so that, for handling purposes, only the right number of people would arrive. A holding place to keep the arrivals for hours, a day or, if needed, several days, also had to be secured. It required the participation and contribution of many in the Nazi civic machine, including those responsible for the Ghetto management such as Hans Bibow.33
On January 2, 1942, transports started to arrive from Litzmannstadt Ghetto. It began with groups of Roma and Sinti totalling 4,300. Claiming to minimize the “risk of infection,” they were gassed or taken to the forest and shot upon arrival.34 The first transport of Jews was made up of 780 men, 853 women and 154 children who had arrived at Koło, now free of Jews, on January 16. Their brutal departure also characterized their arrival. The station, an ornate white building with three-floor sections on either end and a middle single-storey section with a sloping roof, was the place of arrival. The name of the town was marked in big letters under a clock above an arch entrance. Screaming and beaten, they were ordered to disembark from the train and pile their luggage on the platform. Knapsacks were ripped off people’s backs. Lined up in columns, people were made to march one kilometre on the small town’s main road to the local synagogue for an overnight stay. It was a procession of hungry, cold and weak people who suspected the worst, yet still had no choice but to comply. Those left behind were shot or beaten. The synagogue, a single-storey building with tall arched windows in the heart of Koło’s Jewish district, faced a park that was framed by homes. In the morning, the deportees were taken to the mansion in trucks.35
7.4 Passenger train from Litzmannstadt arrives at the Kolo station in 1942.
Following complaints by locals who watched with horror the processions through Koło’s streets, changes were made. Upon arrival, the passengers boarded a narrow gauge open-roof train cars that ran parallel to the regular trucks, installed to ferry agricultural produce to the main station. They then began a new ride of about five kilometres to a stop in the village of Powiercie. The stop, in the heart of the village, was surrounded by a farmers’ homes from which the villagers could see the arriving passengers disembarked. From there, they were made to walk one kilometre on an unpaved road with a dense wall of trees on either side. Parents carried babies or held the hands of toddlers and helped the elderly march silently. At the road’s end they were locked in a large mill house in the neighbouring village of Zawadka for a night or sometimes several nights’ stay. The mill was in a pastoral area next to a water-filled ravine and village homes. Villagers were strictly instructed not to watch the arriving people from their windows.
7.5 Deportees being transferred to a narrow-gauge train in 1942.
Then the deportees were taken to the mansion by truck in the daytime, with 3 p.m. as the last departure. Some were also taken by trucks upon arrival, from the Koło Station directly to the mansion for a night’s stay. The Sonderkommando made people keep to the schedule using extreme brutality. When they arrived at the mansion and lined up outdoors, they were given a speech by the commanding SS officer, which was translated into Polish. As part of the deception to make them drop their guard and obey, they were told that what was about to happen next was part of the resettlement process. Prior to being sent for work in Austrian farms, they would have to undress and take a bath as part of a disinfection procedure. They then entered the mansion’s main door, which faced the ravine and the church in the distance.36
7.6 The foundations of the large mill house in the village of Zawadka where deportees from Litzmannstadt Ghetto were held for a night or sometimes several nights’ stay before being taken to their death at Kulmhof. The building no longer exists.
The fourteen-by-forty-metre mansion had two levels, each divided into rooms with thick cinderblock walls, two of which on the upper level were set for undressing and kept heated for deception. First, the transportees were again asked to hand in their valuables, then to disrobe. Once naked, they were told that they were headed to a bath, and they were directed into the basement, from which they walked in a three-metre-wide corridor to the building’s edge, where a door was open. Exiting, they marched atop a wooden ramp and into the dark hold of a van. Depending on the hold’s size, between eighty and a hundred men and women, some holding babies or supporting those who could not stand, were crammed in. The van’s metal doors then shut, and the engine turned on. Carbon monoxide slowly began to fill up the hold. Realizing what was happening, people began shouting and punching the van’s sides, desperately grabbing each other, gasping for air. The van began its move, turning right toward the gate and then exiting the ground’s fence to the left in the direction of Koło for the four-kilometre drive through fields to the Rzuchow forest.37
7.7 The location and ground of the Kulmhof death camp.
7.8 Floor plan of the second level of the mansion from which victims were loaded on a gas van.
The screaming died down when the van turned from the main road to a side path and into the forested area. After a short drive between tall trees, the van arrived at a clearing and stopped near a long and wide trench where another group of forced-labour Jews were waiting. When the doors opened a cloud of gas dissipated. In the hold, people were piled on top of each other. A strong stench of excrement and urine blew out from the van. Under SS guard, the removal of the corpses began. In the quiet of the forest the forced labourers, shackled at the legs to prevent escape, began to unload the van. They dragged the dead by the hair or limbs into the trench. Gold teeth were removed from those who had them. People still alive were shot from close range. A supervising SS officer stood near the trench, instructing workers how to place the corpses compactly. When they could no longer work, at the end of the day, members of the work force were themselves shot and thrown into the trench. Those able to work were taken to the mansion where they were locked in the basement for the night.
7.9 Magirus-Deutz van found near the Kulmhof extermination camp, the same type as those used as gas vans.
Processing each group of victims took between sixty and ninety minutes, from the time they arrived at the mansion to their asphyxiation and departure to the forest. Special forced-labour groups emptied and cleaned the undressing rooms, collecting the clothing and readying them for shipping to the Ghetto for sorting, then readying the space for the next group. In the forest, the process also had to be done rapidly. The van was emptied, cleaned and driven back to the mansion where another group waited to be gassed. It was a well timed, highly efficient extermination process, without need for a newly built complex infrastructure or barracks, that used existing rudimentary facilities and saw thousands led to their death. The Kulmhof camp, the first to be used by the Nazis exclusively for killing, set the stage for others that were to be built and used later.38
In summer 1942, as the massive number of bodies began to decompose, there was a threat of an epidemic. A strong stench engulfed the area and drew unwanted attention from the nearby villagers. After some discussion, it was decided to build crematoria. Four such brick-lined structures, each measuring eight metres by eight metres, were dug. The victims were placed in them with layers of wood in between, gasoline was poured and set ablaze. Attempts were also made to exhume the buried bodies and to grind their bones to erase any sign of the enormous crime committed in that place.39
Deportations from Litzmannstadt Ghetto to Kulmhof ended on May 15, 1942. The camp was in operation until September during which Jews from small ghettos in the Wartheland were killed. As for Litzmannstadt, the Nazis seemed to have reached their immediate goals: to liquidate the Ghetto of unproductive residents who they no longer needed to feed and to free the Wartheland of Jews. Hans Bothmann, the Sonderkommando’s new head, was given an order to eliminate all traces of the camp’s existence. The coverup included blowing up the mansion and the crematoria, removing the perimeter fence and planting seeds on the mass gravesites.40
With the liquidation, the Ghetto lost approximately half of its population and in late 1942 numbered some eighty-nine thousand, of which seven thousand were employed by the administration while the rest laboured in workshops. With fewer children, sick and old people, there was no longer need for orphanages, hospitals and an old-age home, which were closed. In the months that followed, the harsh life in the Ghetto continued, with severe shortages of food that saw many die of starvation and exhaustion.41
7.10 A map of the forest’s mass grave site.
Several events critical to the war took place in 1944 that made the Nazis introduce new plans for the Ghetto. Losses suffered at the hands of the Red Army and the Allies indicated that the fortunes of Germany were about to change. Hopes that their miserable existence was nearing its end grew louder among the remaining imprisoned inhabitants of the Ghetto. Unfortunately, the opposite took place. In his drive to exterminate Jews, Heinrich Himmler pushed Greiser, the governor of the Wartheland, to effectively turn the Ghetto into a concentration camp and reactivate the killing in Kulmhof. Under the command of Hans Bohmann, who led the first round of killing and was now called back, a new SS Sonderkommando team was brought in to oversee rebuilding of some of the facilities destroyed earlier, beginning with a fence around the mansion’s perimeter. Also, a group of Jewish forced labourers was brought in from the Ghetto for work and housed in the granary building which was still standing. Two weeks later, the gas vans arrived by train to resume operation.42
On June 23, 1944, the first group of deportees arrived from Litzmannstadt. With the mansion destroyed, a change to the earlier killing process took place. Upon reaching Koło, people were taken for an overnight stay in a local church and from there taken by trucks directly to the forest where they heard a deceptive speech about resettlement for work in Germany. In preparation, they were told, they must undergo a medical examination, disinfection and take a bath. They then proceeded to two barracks that were constructed in the forest for undressing. Believing that they are being transported to a bathing place, they climbed into the van. The doors closed, the engine was turned on and the asphyxiation began while the van was driven to a nearby trench for a mass grave. The renewed killing at Kulmhof lasted about a month during which 7,196 people from Litzmannstadt Ghetto were murdered. When the operation ended, once more a meticulous cover up of the evidence took place.43
The number of Ghetto residents shrank and, as per Himmler’s plans, a final liquidation began in August. Between August 3 and 30, 1944, some sixty-seven thousand people were deported to the Auschwitz II-Birkenau death camp. Very few survived the selection, and the majority were sent to their deaths in the gas chambers. Among those deported from the Ghetto in one of the last transports, on August 28, was Rumkowski and his family. It was said that upon arrival at a barracks where he waited his turn to go to the gas chamber, he was beaten to death by the Jewish Kapos (prisoners assigned to administrative and supervisory positions within the camps), for his role in running the Ghetto and its liquidation.44
Records of deportation from the Ghetto residency lists were found for Rachla, Meir, Lea and Ruven Frydman. Additional records show that, following their deportation, their vacant apartment housed another family. In faint handwritten letters on that list the number XIII was noted next to the Frydman household. The transport departed Radegast with its human cargo to the Kulmhof killing centre on March 6, 1942. For Hela (Chaja), Dydie Kane and their nine-month-old son Falek residency record shows a deportation date from their Ghetto apartment in September 1942, which indicates that she, her husband and their child were sent to Kulmhof. Also found was a work card for Aron Szmul Bimke on which the word GESTORBEN (died) was stamped, and near which a date of death ‘30 April 1944’ was scribbled. No records were found regarding the fate of the Gmach and Yossel Frydman families. One can only assume that the parents and their children were rounded up and sent to their death in Kulmhof over several months. Since no records exist of those who were deported to the Auschwitz II-Birkenau killing centre during the mass liquidation of the remaining Ghetto population, it can also be assumed that they could have been sent to their death in that place and not in Kulmhof.
To clear the Ghetto of incriminating evidence, the Germans selected a group of 750 men and women for cleaning operations. A few others were able to evade raids and to remain in hiding. On January 19, 1945, the Red Army liberated Litzmannstadt, now renamed Łódź. Only 870 people of the Ghetto population that had numbered one hundred and sixty thousand at the start of the war lived to see its end.45 By some accounts, only between seven thousand five hundred and twelve thousand people of Łódź’s prewar two hundred and thirty thousand Jews had survived.46
7.11 Aron-Szmul Bimke (Pola Frydman’s husband) Ghetto’s work card. When he died in the Ghetto in 1944 the word GESTORBEN (died) was stamped across it.