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Lask was occupied by the Germans in September 1939. Immediately
afterwards, the persecution and degradation of the Jewish community began. The
synagogue officials were executed and the beit midrash was turned into a
slaughterhouse for horses. An area for a ghetto was designated and set up in
stages. On November 18, 1940, the Germans forced all the Jews of Lask into the
ghetto. By the end of 1941, the order was given that any Jews leaving the ghetto
would suffer the penalty of death. Soon after, the food situation deteriorated and the Judenrat
set up a soup kitchen, as well as a hospital and kindergarten. In August 1942,
the order for the final liquidation of the ghetto was given. Approximately 3,500 Jews were
locked in a church
for several days, after which 800 craftsmen were selected for deportation to the Lodz
ghetto. The remaining Jews were sent to the death camp at Chelmno.
From The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe
During the Second World War:
-
"In 1941, some three thousand Jews had been deported
into Dzialoszyce from Cracow, Warsaw, Lodz, Poznan and Lask. 'Hunger and
starvation was the order of the day,' [Martin] Rosenblum recalled. 'People
risked their lives for a few potatoes or a piece of bread'...Of the ten
thousand Jews in Dzialoszyce on September 2 [1941], two thousand had been
slaughtered in the mass graves outside of the town. The remaining eight
thousand had been deported to Belzec
and gassed."
-
"At Lask, on August 24 [1942], the Jews were locked
into a church. One woman gave birth to a baby. Both she and the newborn
child were killed. Three Jews managed to escape. Of the rest, about eight
hundred were sent to factories in the Lodz ghetto, more than two and a half
thousand to Chelmno, where they were gassed."
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"Into the Lodz ghetto...were brought the remnants of
the Jewish ghettos from a dozen small towns around Lodz, among them those from
Lask and Zdunska Wola. 'Pale shadows trudge through the ghetto,' the
chronicler noted on August 28 [1942], 'with endemic swellings on their legs
and faces, people deformed and disfigured, whose only dream is to endure,
survive -- to live to see a better tomorrow without new disturbances, even if
the price is a small and inadequate ration.'"
This remnant of the Lask Jewish community suffered the same fate as the Jews in the Lodz
ghetto.
Sources
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Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe
During the Second World War. New York: Henry Holt and Company Inc., 1985
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Encyclopaedia Judaica. Jerusalem: Keter, 1971.
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