Deportatios to the Lodz ghetto,
October/November 1941
October/November 1941
Within the framework of the mass deportations to Lodz of 20,000 Jewish men, women and children, ordered by the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), rather more than 5,000 Jewish victims from Vienna arrived in Lodz between October 15 and November 2, 1941. The Jewish deportees came from the "Altreich", from Austria, from the "Protektorat" of Bohemia and Moravia and from Luxembourg, and included 5000 Sinti and Roma. Over 78 percent of them were older than 45, over 41 percent over 60, and almost 9 percent were over 70. Well over half of them were women.
Within a few weeks the mortality rate among the Viennese Jews rose sharply. By May 1942 771 of them had died of hunger, disease, exhaustion and despair.
Many of the Viennese Jews were categorised as "incapable of work" simply because of their age and were therefore transported from May 1942 onwards to Chelmno/Kulmhof were they were murdered in mobile killing installations, the "gasvans". By the beginning of summer 1942 the SS had killed about half of all the people who had been deported in October/November 1941 from Germany, Austria, Bohemia and Moravia. Of the 5,000 Viennese Jews only 615 were still alive in the autumn of 1942. When the ghetto in Lodz was broken up in August 1944 and all the inmates deported to Auschwitz, only between 300 and 400 were still alive. "Selection" in Auschwitz and forced labour in the various concentration camps cost further lives. Only 34 of the 5,000 Jews deported from Vienna to Lodz were still alive when the camps were liberated.
Photograph of Leopold Gelb (standing on the left, born on March 1, 1870) and the married
couple Mathilde (born on October 6, 1878)
and Wilhelm Gelb (born on August 18, 1873) who were deported to Lodz on Oktober 23, 1941.
Leopold Gelb died on May 19, 1942, and Wilhelm Gelb on August 7, 1942. The date of death of Mathilde Gelb cannot be
established.
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