The smiling girl murdered by the Nazis

During my research, I found this passport application of a little girl. A little smiling girl murdered by the Nazis. smiling girl murdered Nazis

Who was the little girl who wanted to travel? A Holocaust victim database reveals some data about her. She was born on 29 October 1930 and was put on Transport B, no. 411 on 21. 10. 1941, Prague to Łódź, where she was murdered. Her name was Eva Abelesova, a girl with a smiley face. The passport application is dated 20 April 1939.

Before the start of the war, 34% of Łódź’s 665 000 inhabitants (223,000 people) were Jewish, and the city was an important center of Jewish culture. The arrival of German troops on 8 September 1939 meant the start of a campaign of terror against the Jewish and Polish inhabitants of the city. In February 1940, the creation of a Jewish ghetto on the northern edge of the town, in the former Jewish poor quarter, was announced. Jews were driven out of the other parts of the city, and on 30 April, the territory of the ghetto was closed off. 164 000 Jews from Łódź had to squeeze into an area of four square kilometers, of which over a third had no building on it. In 1941 and 1942, a further 38 500 Jews were deported to the ghetto, 20 000 of whom came from the Reich and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the rest from nearby towns.

In November 1941. 5 000 Roma from Burgenland (including many children) were deported to the ghetto. They were interned in a special section of the ghetto, separated off by double barbed wire. smiling girl murdered Nazis

The Jewish administration of the ghetto, led by the dominant figure of Mordechai Rumkovski, tried to ensure that labor productivity in the ghetto was as high as possible and that all prisoners capable of working were doing so to the maximum. Not even this, however, could prevent overcrowding and starvation, and improve the utterly inhuman living conditions of the Łódź prisoners. Epidemics, fuel and food shortages, and inadequate sanitation led to the fact that some 43 500 people, 21 % of the ghetto’s population, died of malnutrition, cold, and disease. smiling girl murdered Nazis

From January 1942 on, deportations flowed from the ghetto to nearby Chełmno, where prisoners were killed in mobile gas chambers. By May 1942, 55 000 Jews and 5 000 Roma temporarily interned in Łódź had been murdered. In the second wave of deportations in September 1942, almost 20 000 prisoners were killed, mostly children, older people and the sick. The whole operation started with the closing of the hospital, whose patients became the first victims. From September 1942 on, the ghetto became one giant factory, and the prisoners were forced to work for the German war economy. At the beginning of 1944, the Germans decided to close the ghetto. In the summer of 1944, the remaining prisoners were sent to extermination camps in Chelmno and Auschwitz. Between 16 October and 3 November 1941, 5 000 Czech Jews were deported to Łódź. Only 277 of them survived. smiling girl murdered Nazis

Eva’s mother – Zdenka was on a transport the same day!

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