Events in Chełmno.
In the second half of November 1941 news spread in the towns of Koło
County (Kreis Warthebruecken) that all their Jewish residents would be resettled
to the Pińsk area or to eastern Lesser Poland. The German authorities
imposed a poll tax on all Jewish inhabitants to the amount of 4 Reichsmarks
per person, while all men aged 14–60 and women up to the age of 50 were subjected
to an examination to determine if they were able to work. Upset by such
news, the Jewish communities endeavoured to obtain at least some details
about the resettlement but their efforts proved unsuccessful. The only thing
that they managed to discover was that similar preparations had preceded
the transport by lorries of the 3,000 residents of the Jewish centre in Zagórów
(Konin County) to the nearby Kazimierzowskie forests, after which they disappeared
without a trace.
The entire Jewish population of Koło (2,000 souls) and Dąbie on the River
Ner (1,000 souls) was resettled in mid-December of last year. The resettlement
included all Jews without exception. Babies, children, the elderly, and
the bedridden were all loaded onto lorries. They were all transported with
their possessions to the village of Chełmno, located 12 kilometres from Koło
on the way to Dąbie. The Jewish communities in Kłodawa, Izbica Kujawska,
Bugaj, and Sempolno⁸⁰⁴ sent messengers to find out what had happened with
the resettled. The only thing that they managed to learn was that the resettled
were placed into a palace in Chełmno, from which they never emerged.
According to the local peasants, no food was brought to the palace and a grey
lorry pulled up in front of it a few times per day and then left in the direction
of the Luborodz forests.⁸⁰⁵
Further details about the events in the Chełmno palace could not be
obtained until later. Jews were brought over in groups of 60 and then 90 people.
Their luggage was put in the church and the surrounding buildings requisitioned
by the Gestapo. Lorries pulled up in front of the palace. The resettled
alighted and walked into a designated room. The Chełmno palace is
a ruin of a single-storey little palace destroyed during the previous war.
804 I.e. Sępolno. Today this locality is called Sompolno.
805 “Lubrodz” in the 1st copy in ARG I 25. It is a reference to forests near Ladorudz (Koło
County).
