Lodz Getto, sixty years ago

Jerusalem Post, online edition

Jewish-jpost-com

August 13, 2004

The central Polish city of Lodz will mark sixty years since the liquidation the Lodz Ghetto at the end of the month, with a series of commemorations and memorial ceremonies, climaxing with the inauguration of a major monument in memory of the Jews of Lodz at the site of a former freight train station from which the Germans sent nearly 150,000 Jews to death in the concentration camps.

The final city-sponsored commemoration, which will take place on August 29 - 60 years to the day after the last deportation to the Nazi death camps left the Radegast train station - will be attended by a host of world leaders, including the presidents of Israel, Poland, Germany, Austria, and the Czech Republic, as well as hundreds of Holocaust survivors, some of whom were residents in the Lodz Ghetto.

"This was the last moment to convince these people that the memory of what happened here will not be forgotten, even if they are no longer with us," said the mayor of Lodz, Jerzy Kropiwnicki, in an interview with The Jerusalem Post in his office.

The unabashedly right-wing and fervently Roman Catholic Kropiwnicki, who surprised many by being the chief initiator of the city's Holocaust monument, added that he felt it was his "moral challenge" to make the Polish people conscious of what happened in the city.

"I cannot explain why for 60 years the citizens of my city seemed not to be aware of the extent of the tragedy that happened here... and why the Communist regime didn't want to make any commemorations for the Jewish victims, but I felt it was my moral obligation to do so," he said.

Before the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, Lodz was home to 233,000 Jews, who made up one in the three city residents in what was Poland's second-largest Jewish community, after Warsaw.

During the first months of the German occupation, about 75,000 Jews fled the city. On February 8, 1940, the German police ordered the establishment of the Lodz Ghetto, and on April 30 of that year the four-sq.km. ghetto was completely sealed off, isolating more than 160,000 Jews from the rest of the city, which the Nazis renamed Litzmannstadt. In all, more than 200,000 Jews from Poland, Germany, Austria, Luxembourg, and what was then Czechoslovakia were imprisoned in the ghetto, with only 5,000-12,000 of them surviving the Holocaust.

Starting in 1941, the Germans used the small Radegast train station, which also functioned as a freight depot, to transport 38,000 Jews from all over Western Europe, as well as some 5,000 Gypsies, into the ghetto.

A year later, with the Final Solution in full swing, the Nazis used the station to deport an estimated 145,000 Jews from the ghetto to death camps in Chelmno and Auschwitz-Birkenau, where nearly all of them were gassed.

The nearly $1 million memorial monument being designed at the site of the train station in Lodz includes a renovated station platform, the original rail tracks with three cattle wagons on them, a Tunnel of the Deportees, and a immense Column of Remembrance, symbolizing a crematorium.

"We simply cut off a piece of the suburban landscape - an old train station- and are putting people in a situation which they can never imagine," said Czeslaw Bielecki, the Polish architect commissioned to design and build the monument, in an on-site interview.

One side of the station will be filled with eight-meter-high Jewish tombstones with the names of the death camps on them. From the other side of the station platform, one enters the Tunnel of the Deportees, a dark 140-meter tunnel built of bare concrete, with the only source of light coming from the showcases with the original deportation lists on display. At the end of the tunnel, one enters the Hall of Cities, a small room with an eternal torch with the names of all the cities in the world where the Jews of the Lodz Ghetto came from. On the monument's rim, a 25-meter-high Column of Remembrance, symbolically broken, hovers in the air, eerily reminiscent of the crematoria the Jews were transported to from the train station.

On August 29, 1944, after a three-week period which saw more than 70,000 of the last remaining Jews of the ghetto sent to the extermination camps, the last remaining Nazi ghetto in Poland ceased to exist, with only hundreds avoiding transport to the death camps.

In contrast to the Warsaw Ghetto, which was completely demolished after the 1943 uprising, there was no Jewish revolt at the Lodz Ghetto, both because it was completely cut off from the rest of the city, without even a sewer system in place, and because a massive forced labor camp was in place there, which led some people to erroneously believe they would be spared. Moreover, with Lodz annexed by the Third Reich and a 70,000-strong German minority loyal to the Nazis living nearby, the ghetto was virtually inaccessible to underground forces.

Today about 80 percent of the ghetto's original buildings remain intact, with poor Poles living in some of the same tenements used to house hundreds of thousands of Jews in inhumane conditions less than 65 years ago.

More than 2,500 original items related to the Lodz Ghetto discovered hidden inside the compound after the war - including deportation lists, ghetto registration books, ghetto ID cards, postcards confiscated by the Nazis, and even children's New Year cards - can be seen at the Lodz city archives, offering a glance back in history at a community annihilated.