Transport to Auschwitz

Throughout the Holocaust years, Ostrowiec residents were sent to Auschwitz. Details of Ostrowiec residents sent to Auschwitz can be found here.

The below photo is an excerpt from the book Auschwitz Chronicle as pictured at right.

It relates to the last major transport to Auschwitz from the remainder of the Jewish Ghetto when the Nazis deported the many Jews working at the Zaklady steel factory.

transport aug 1944
auschwitz chronicle
Aug 3+4, 1944
On these days, over 1700 men and women, most of the remaining of the Ostrowiec Jewish Community (including both my parents, grandmother and aunts and uncle), were sent to Auschwitz.
It should be known, in the days before the transport, many Jews heard they will be sent away and some tried to escape to the forests. Some did succeed, but others were caught and immediately shot dead.
"Many started running away from the camp into different directions.
One day brothers Kopel and Moshe Stein … ran away from the camp. .. The Schutzpolizei at once went chasing them and had caught them. The whole day they underwent terrible tortures and in the evening they were shot dead in front of all the internees.
… Three days after having been closed up we began suffering hunger, as no provisions reached the camp any more, as they used to be brought by the Jaeger workshop employees. On the fifth day the camp leader Abraham Seifman and his 2 brothers Leibush and Motl, escaped, and this caused an even greater panic amongst the internees.
Several Jews, whom the news of cease work reached while on a night shift in the factory (on the 2 4th July), did not go back to the camp and hid inside the factory. They were later detected there by the Polish and Ukrainian police and murdered in a beastly manner. The victims of the Jaeger Works were buried in the brick works, where they used to work.
When it became clear that escape is the only way to save life… an anarchy broke out in the camp. The hungry men attacked the food stores and the kitchen to still their hunger. 'Civil militia' was established to keep order in camp, and to stand watch at the exit to prevent people from leaving. At the head of the militia stood Hersch Meir Rabinovitz (the son-in-law of Pinhas Lederman) who himself ran away in the end, leaving a brother in the camp. …. "
Ostrowiec Yizkor Book, 1971 (pg 87 English section)