A Jew named Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski had been forced to become the ghetto’s administrator. Torn between German demands and his own loyalty to the Jewish community, he was forced to announce a roundup of children and old people in 1942. “The ghetto has been struck a hard blow,” he said in a chilling speech. “They demand what is most dear to it—children and old people….In my old age, I am forced to stretch out my hands and to beg: ‘Brothers and sisters, give them to me! Fathers and mothers, give me your children.’” Forced to comply, parents handed over 20,000 residents, many of them children. They were taken to Chelmno and killed in gas vans. Parents “yelled, wept and went wild.” Link to his speech to the Jewish people http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-deportation-of-the-children-from-the-lodz-ghetto-september-1942