Holocaust survivors remember Lodz ghetto

By Reuters

August 29, 2004

LODZ, Poland - Sam Weinreich remembers the last time he came to Radegast train station in Poland's second-largest city - the day in 1944 he was forced into a cattle car and sent to Nazi Germany's Auschwitz death camp.

"They promised us bread, so we came here ... when you're hungry, you'll eat grass. People in the ghetto became like animals," said Weinreich, one of some 400 survivors who on Sunday commemorated the liquidation of the Lodz ghetto 60 years ago.

Before World WarTwo, Lodz's 223,000 Jews, accounting for a third of the city's population, formed the second-largest Jewish community in Europe. The city was home to noted cultural figures, including pianist Arthur Rubinstein.

Over 200,000 people from Lodz and other cities were imprisoned in the ghetto. Only 5,000-7,000 survived the war. The rest - like Weinreich's parents and nine brothers and sisters - died there or in the death camps.

Weinreich, now 85, lives in Memphis, Tennessee with his wife Frieda - also a former Lodz resident.

In the 19th century Lodz was known as "The Promised Land", drawing Jews from around the Russian Empire and Western Europe to work in its thriving textile industry.

"Today Lodz renders honor to its Jewish residents, who during the Holocaust were murdered simply because of who they were," Polish Prime Minister Marek Belka, a Lodz native, told a ceremony at the Radegast train station, renovated as a memorial.

Belka called his participation in the ceremony "the crowning of my upbringing," referring to his grandparents' stories of pre-war Lodz, and to hiking trips as a boy scout during which he discovered abandoned historical sites.

"Today we can build a bridge of memory and dialogue, after decades of tragic forgetting. We owe memory, and honor, to the Jews of Lodz, who for a century and a half built Poland's Promised Land," Belka said.

Thousands of city residents gathered to hear speakers including Ilan Shalgi, Israel's Science and Technology Minister, and U.S. ambassador Victor Ashe, at the main event in a weekend that includes prayer services and memorial concerts.

Poland's pre-war Jewish community of 3.5 million was reduced to 300,000 by the time the war ended. Many survivors fled post-war pogroms, and others were expelled in 1968 during a bout of anti-Semitism encouraged by the communist government. Today, Poland's Jewish community has some 5,000 to 6,000 active members.

Relations have improved in recent years thanks to gestures of conciliation from mainstream politicians of both right and left, but anti-Semitic statements from fringe political and Roman Catholic leaders still occasionally open old wounds.

Victims of Lodz ghetto remembered 60 years after final transports to Nazi death camps

By MONIKA SCISLOWSKA

Associated Press

August 29, 2004

LODZ, Poland (AP) - Holocaust survivors and their families gathered Sunday at one of Europe's largest Jewish cemeteries to remember more than 200,000 Jews of Lodz who were killed by the Nazis, marking the 60th anniversary of the last transports from the city's ghetto to Hitler's death camps.

On the edge of the vast 19th century wooded cemetery of gray and black tombstones, some 1,500 people stood in silent tribute as a Jewish cantor and a choir chanted Hebrew prayers for the dead in honor of those taken in cattle cars from the ghetto to Auschwitz and other camps.

Ahead of the prayers, survivor Eljezer Zyskind remembered the horror as the ghetto's residents were rounded up and taken to death camps.

"I can still hear the cries of little children torn from their mothers crying 'mama, mama!''' Zyskind said, his voice quavering with emotion.

Lodz, some 120 kilometers (75 miles) southwest of Warsaw, was a thriving center of commerce before World War II, with the city's 230,000 Jews representing about a third of its population.

After occupying the city in the wake of the successful invasion of Poland, the Nazis sealed the ghetto with barbed wire on April 30, 1940, concentrating Jews in a tightly packed space sequestered from society, much the way they did in Warsaw and other conquered cities.

About 45,000 Jews from other parts of German-occupied Europe, including Luxembourg, Austria and Germany, were also forced into the Lodz ghetto, as were about 5,000 Gypsies.

Used as forced labor, many died from the horrific conditions and the Nazis eventually decided to kill those remaining in August 1944.

"I lost my parents, my brothers, my sisters, my grandfather, my uncles and my aunts and my nieces,'' said 83-year-old Ivor Leiser, who traveled from his home in Melbourne, Australia, to mourn loved ones who perished in the ghetto's liquidation.

"I am the only one that was left,'' said Leiser, who escaped death by fleeing Poland, and served in the Australian air force during the war. ``I survived to remember; this day means a lot to me.''

Following the prayers, survivors, Israeli Science and Technology Minister Ilan Shalgi and city leaders placed flowers at a monument to the victims near the cemetery gate.

They then moved about a mile (about two kilometers) away to the Radegast railway station, where some 150,000 Jews began their final journey to the Nazi death camps. Three wooden cattle cars marked with the name of Hitler's railway, ``Deutsche Reichsbahn,'' their tiny windows webbed with barbed wire and their red paint flaking, sit in the station today as grim reminders of their fate.

"Our Jewish neighbors - doctors, teachers, scientists, poets, musicians - were murdered in a bestial way,'' Polish Prime Minister Marek Belka told the crowd.

"Today Poland is firmly against terrorism and firmly denounces anti-Semitism. We will preserve the memory of crimes carried out on Lodz's soil.''