or less how that report should be dated, as it contains a sentence about “the
events in Lublin, which are still in progress at the time of writing this report”,⁸⁵
while the deportation campaign in the Lublin ghetto ended on 14 April. The
report was probably written by Eliyahu Gutkowski, which may be inferred
on the basis of comparison with the bulletin of 12 April, which is Gutkowski’s
manuscript. Hersh Wasser made handwritten corrections while bringing the
data up to date; for example, on one of the copies he crossed out a sentence
about the “Lublin events” being still in progress. Certainly compiled outside
the framework of Oyneg Shabes, a copy of the “Drugi etap” report, including
the attachment “Wypadki chełmińskie”, is stored in London in the archive
of the Polish Underground Movement Study Trust. Hence, the document must
have been transferred to the “Aryan” side and sent to Polish authorities, but
it remains unknown when that despatch reached London.⁸⁶
Both “Drugi etap” and “Wypadki chełmińskie” are components of another
Oyneg Shabes report titled “Gehenna Żydów polskich pod okupacją niemiecką”
(The Gehenna of Polish Jews during the German Occupation) (document 67). It is
a long description of German anti-Jewish policy at the beginning of the war,
illustrated with many examples taken from the material collected by Oyneg
Shabes, that is, with facts gathered from testimonies of refugees and displaced
persons, with statistics of, for instance, the mortality rate in the Warsaw
ghetto and with German ordinances. The section on the period of direct
extermination features tables showing the numbers of victims of executions
and deportations in individual towns until June 1942. The report contains
information about the death camp in Bełżec but does not mention the one in
Sobibór. The author then quotes verbatim the descriptions of the events in
Wilno, Słonim, Krośniewice, Żychlin, Hancewicze, Równe, and Lublin after
“Drugi etap”, incorporates the full report “Wypadki chełmińskie” into the
text, and adds information about the extermination of the Jewish population
of Kutno, Rohatyn, and Lviv. The number of Jews who died in the death camp
in Chełmno and the total number of its victims were estimated at 48,800 and
nearly a million respectively.
“Gehenna Żydów polskich” was typewritten in several carbon copies, four
of which have survived. Three were buried with the first part of Ringelblum’s
85 See document 66.
86 We wish to thank Dr. Adam Puławski for this information.
