Travel Stories - Poland

When German troops occupied Łódź in September 1939, the city had a population of 672,000 people, more than a third of them Jews. Łódź bordered the Warthegau region of the Empire and was renamed Litzmannstadt in honor of a German general, Karl Litzmann, who in 1914 operated with German troops (successfully) in the area. As such, the city had undergone a process of arization: the Jewish population would be deported to the General Government and the Polish population would be significantly reduced and transformed into a slave laborers' population.

The ghetto that would be temporary built in the northern (old) part of Lodz was where most of the Jews lived. Bridges were applied to the various parts where, among other things, trams drove underneath. Two German police units patrolled the ghetto and a Jewish police force was led by an autocratically-led Jewish Council. Any contact between the Jews in the ghetto and people out there was strictly forbidden. Contacts with people outside the ghetto were also affected by the fact that Łódź had a 70,000 strong German minority loyal to the Nazis. In other ghettos throughout Poland, a thriving underground economy developed between the ghetto and the outside world on the basis of the smuggling of food and manufactured goods. In Łódź. However, this was practically impossible and the Jews were completely dependent on the German authorities for food, medicine and other vital supplies. The special situation of the Łódź ghetto prevented expressions of armed resistance that have become synonymous with the last days of the Warsaw ghetto, that of Wilna and Białystok, and other ghettos in occupied Poland. Rumkowski's presumptuous autocracy, the failure of attempts to smuggle food, and therefore weapons, and the belief that productivity would bring survival, excluded any attempted armed uprising. To put the situation even further into focus, a special auction was created as the only legal tender. After the deportation to the ghetto was completed on 1 October 1940, the “judenfrei” (free of Jews) city was declared. Because many Jews had fled the city, the population of the ghetto after its establishment was 'only' 164,000. In the years that followed, Jews from Central Europe were deported to the ghetto, even as far as from Luxembourg; there was also a small Roma population resettled (Porajmos).

Heinrich Himmler called for the final liquidation of the ghetto in 1943, when a handful of employees had to move to a concentration camp outside Lublin, while the armament minister Albert Speer argued for the ghetto to continue as a source of cheap labor, which would certainly be necessary. now that the tide of war was against Germany. In the summer of 1944 it was finally decided to gradually liquidate the rest of the inhabitants of the ghetto. From 23 June to 5 July, approximately 7,000 Jews were deported to the Chełmno death camp where they were murdered. On 15 July 1944 the transports were interrupted for two weeks because, due to the advance of the Soviet troops, the Chełmno facility was dismantled and moved. As soon as the Soviet front troops approached, it was decided to take the remaining Jews, including Rumkowski (leader of the Jewish Council), on transport to Auschwitz, and to liquidate the ghetto. On August 28, 1944, Rumkowski and his family were murdered in Auschwitz. Some Jews were left in the ghetto to clean up, some fled. Only 877 Jews were left when the Soviet army liberated Łódź on 19 January 1945. It is estimated that 10,000 of the 204,000 Jews and a dozen Roma who passed through the ghetto survived.