The city of Łódź is located 130km of Warsaw in Poland. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Łódź was a thriving, multicultural manufacturing city. Its population was made up of Poles, Germans and Jews. Łódź had the second largest Jewish population in Poland: in 1939, 231,000 Jews lived there.
Łódź was occupied by German troops on 8 September 1939, following the invasion of Poland by Germany in August 1939. German occupying forces renamed the city with a German name, Litzmannstadt, and began to repress the local Jewish population, carrying out violent attacks on inhabitants, imposing forced labour and burning synagogues. In February 1940, 160,000 Jews living in Łódź were forced into a four square kilometre area of the city – one of the most impoverished neighbourhoods and sealed off from the rest of Łódź by a barbed wire fence, creating the Łódź or Litzmannstadt ghetto .
From 1941 to 1942, another 40,000 Jews were deported to Łódź from Germany, Austria, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and Luxembourg, alongside 5,000 Roma and Sinti, who were confined to a specific ghetto block.
Ghetto inhabitants were obliged to perform forced labour predominantly in the textile industry. In July 1942, 74 workshops were active in the ghetto, producing textile for Germany.
Jews and Roma in Łódź experienced terrible living conditions. The ghetto was severely overcrowded, there was no running water or sewage system, and not enough food. In 1941 alone over 2,000 Jews in Łódź died of starvation. Diseases such as tuberculosis, dysentery, typhus and pneumonia were also widespread. Over the period of the ghetto’s existence, over 20 per cent of the population died as a result of poor living conditions.
In January 1942, deportations began transporting Jews and Roma from Łódź to the Chełmno extermination camp , which was only 60 kilometres away from the ghetto. By the end of September 1942, 70,000 Jews and 4,300 Roma had been deported from Łódź. After September 1942, thousands more were deported, including elderly and infirm ghetto residents, as well as children under the age of ten.
Similarly to other ghettos such as the Warsaw ghetto and Theresienstadt, the Łódź ghetto was administered by a Jewish Council or Judenrat, led by ‘Jewish elders’ and which reported to the SS. The Judenrat under the leadership of Chaim Rumkowski organised the forced labour, and was forced to organise roundups and lists of those to be deported.
In the spring of 1944, the Łódź ghetto was ‘ liquidated ’. At the time it was the last remaining ghetto in German-occupied Poland. 75,000 Jews remaining in Łódź were deported to Chełmno and Auschwitz and murdered there. By the end of August 1944, only 1,500 Jews remained in the Łódź ghetto, less than 0.6 per cent of the city’s pre-war Jewish population.
