The Kutno Ghetto

On Sunday 16 June 1940 the Jews of Kutno (PL) were ordered to leave their homes at once and move to the grounds of the disused Konstancja sugar factory on the edge of town. Poles were told not to leave their houses that day. The exception was owners of horses and carts, who had to report at five in the morning with their wagons to carry Jewish belongings. There were too few carts, and the people being moved were guarded by German policemen, the SA and the Gestapo, who mocked and beat them. By evening several thousand people were behind the fence of the old factory. This was how the Kutno Ghetto (PL) came into being, one of the most overcrowded ghettos in the Polish lands annexed to the Reich.

The date of 16 June comes from witness accounts and from historians’ work, including publications of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) and studies based on the encyclopedia of camps and ghettos of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Some sources, among them the Polish Wikipedia article on the town and one IPN text, give 15 June. The discrepancy may arise because the order was announced a day earlier, while the move itself began on Sunday morning and, according to some accounts, took two or three days.

Kutno under occupation

Before the war Kutno had, depending on the source, between about 6,700 and about 8,000 Jews, more than a quarter of its inhabitants. In mid-September 1939, after the Battle of the Bzura, fought largely around the town, the Wehrmacht entered Kutno. Under Hitler’s decrees, which came into force on 26 October 1939, Kutno county, before the war part of Łódź Voivodeship, was annexed to the Reich. It was placed in the Regierungsbezirk Hohensalza (PL) of the Reichsgau Posen, renamed the Wartheland in January 1940. The authorities of the Gau, headed by Reich Governor Arthur Greiser, wanted to make it a purely German land. In December 1939 the expulsion of Poles from Kutno began, and Germans took over their homes and workshops.

From the first weeks the occupiers forced Jews to work unloading goods, cleaning streets and on building sites. The work was often humiliating, such as clearing horse dung with bare hands. On 3 November 1939 the Germans set up a Judenrat in the town, headed by Bernard Holcman, and with it a Jewish police subordinate to it. The council had to register all Jews and their property, much of which was soon looted. On 7 November the German mayor ordered Jewish men aged 18 to 50 to report for forced labour, and in January 1940 the obligation was extended to young women. From 8 December 1939 the Jews of Kutno had to wear a yellow star, in line with the rules then introduced in the Wartheland in place of armbands. They were also forbidden to walk on pavements or to be in the street after six in the evening.

Even so, historians judge that in the first months of the occupation the situation of the Jews of Kutno was relatively bearable compared with other towns of the annexed lands. Refugees from nearby places came into the town. In December 1939 Kutno had about 27,700 inhabitants, more than 7,700 of them Jews. In other towns of the Wartheland the Germans were already creating ghettos. In Łódź, renamed Litzmannstadt in April, the ghetto was sealed on 30 April 1940.

The day of the move

Rumours of a ghetto at Konstancja had been going round the town for some time, but few believed them. The sugar factory had been built in 1865 by the industrialist Leon Epstein on the road to Krośniewice (PL), on the outskirts of Kutno. In 1940 it was not working and its buildings were damaged, partly by bombing in September 1939. There were only five dwelling houses on the factory grounds, on what is now Mickiewicza Street. The order to create the ghetto was issued by the German Oberbürgermeister of the town, Wilfried Schürmann. The Jews had to move within one day and could take only a small part of their belongings. Cash and valuables were confiscated.

Łucja Stuczyńska, who was herself taken to the ghetto, described that day after the war as “unforgettable”: a crowd of people driven along under escort, carts with the remnants of their belongings, “children screaming, sobbing and the helpless wringing of women’s hands”. At the town hall, where carts were handed out, people fought over wagons, knowing that only those who arrived first would find a roof over their heads. According to her account, on the first night 95 per cent of those moved had no shelter, and children slept on bundles under the open sky. The next day people began building makeshift shelters: huts of boards, plywood and paper, dugouts, hovels of brick and clay. The most valuable piece of furniture in the ghetto became the bed, on which people slept, ate and kept all they owned.

Two of the buildings went to the Jewish Council. One housed the hospital and offices; in the other lived council members, officials and those who could afford to pay. Activists of the Jewish socialist party, the Bund, bitterly called it the “house of lords”. The Germans photographed the move. A dozen or so pictures survive in the album of an officer of the Kutno Gestapo, SS-Oberscharführer Hermann Baltruschat, captioned “Evacuation of the Jews in Kutno” and “Jews out!”. Colour photographs of the ghetto were also taken by Hugo Jaeger, one of Hitler’s personal photographers, who after the war sold them to the American magazine Life. A short silent film shot by an unknown cameraman has also survived.

Konstancja

The ghetto was enclosed by a brick wall, a fence and barbed wire, and watchtowers with searchlights were put up around it. Studies give its area variously, from about 2 to about 5 hectares. According to different sources, between about 7,000 and about 8,000 people were crowded into it, including more than a thousand refugees from other towns and Jews from the surrounding villages. The historian Janusz Wróbel calculated that the population density was higher than in the Łódź ghetto, reaching the equivalent of 160,000 people per square kilometre. He also wrote that the Jews of Kutno, who had previously been envied, found themselves in the worst position of all Jewish communities in the lands annexed to the Reich. German documents sometimes called the ghetto a camp, Judenlager Konstancja, and its inmates also remembered the German nickname “Krepierlager”, the camp for dying like animals.

The ghetto had only one well and three latrines, and there were constant queues for water. It was guarded by the German Order Police, and Jewish men and women went out to forced labour in the town, cleaning, doing repairs, building roads and unloading wagons. The Judenrat ran a soup kitchen for the poorest, a hospital, a pharmacy and even a library. Official food rations were not enough, and outside help, including a few deliveries from the Joint, was meagre. People survived thanks to smuggling, in which, according to accounts, corrupt members of the council and the Jewish police and the Germans guarding the ghetto were also involved. There was clandestine schooling in the ghetto, and Bund activists organised plays and concerts.

Disease and hunger

Soon after the move abscesses, inflammations and tuberculosis, which mainly struck children, spread in the ghetto. The first cases of typhus were recorded in the autumn of 1940, and in January 1941 an epidemic broke out. Some 800 cases were recorded between 23 January and 28 April. The Germans then sealed the ghetto completely, cutting its inhabitants off from contact with Poles and from food obtained outside the official rations. In the first half of 1941, 412 people died in the ghetto. People were shot while trying to escape and for no reason at all. The civil registry records the deaths of 15 people who were shot, five of them on a single day, 19 May 1941.

In February 1941 hunger and helplessness erupted in a revolt against the Judenrat. A crowd beat one of the council members, Sender Falc, who was in charge of finances. The riot was put down by the German police. Several smugglers were arrested, sentenced to death and executed in Włocławek, and the ghetto guard was reinforced. In 1941 some of the men were sent to forced labour camps near Poznań. In July that year the Germans carried out a census in the ghetto: according to the encyclopedia of camps and ghettos it had 6,015 inhabitants, while the list preserved at the Jewish Historical Institute contains almost 6,600 names, including about 1,300 people from outside Kutno, from more than a hundred places.

Liquidation

The Kutno Ghetto lasted less than two years. In March 1942 typhus was still raging: a letter of 21 March spoke of 1,369 sick and 313 dead. It was then that the Germans began to liquidate the ghetto. Sources give different dates. According to some studies it began on 19 March; an underground paper published in the Warsaw ghetto wrote of 23 March; a report from the Warsaw ghetto for the Polish government in London named 26 March; and the encyclopedia of camps and ghettos of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum gives, in general terms, the end of March or the beginning of April. People were assembled in alphabetical order, taken by lorry to the station and from there by rail via Koło to the Chełmno extermination camp, where all of them were killed with exhaust fumes in gas vans. The old and the sick were shot on the spot. By mid-April 1942 the Germans had deported more than 6,000 Jews of Kutno in this way. At the end the Jewish policemen were shot, most probably in the Jewish cemetery, and according to some accounts the members of the Judenrat as well. Thirty Jews from the Łódź ghetto were brought in to clear the ghetto site.

Of the several thousand people shut up in Konstancja, only a few survived the war, among them Łucja Stuczyńska, whose account is one of the most important testimonies about the ghetto. Today a plaque on the wall of the former sugar factory commemorates the ghetto.