The Jews of Łódź

The Jewish community of Łódź was the second largest in Poland and one of the most distinctively industrial Jewish communities in Europe. The 1931 census recorded 202,497 Jews in the city, around a third of its total population. By the autumn of 1944, when the Łódź ghetto was liquidated, around 220,000 Jews had passed through it; almost all of them had been murdered by the time the Soviet army reached the city in January 1945. Around 7,000 Łódź Jews are estimated to have survived. The community has not been reconstituted on its pre-war scale.

The textile city

Łódź in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the textile capital of the Russian Empire and, after 1918, of independent Poland. The city had grown explosively from a town of 13,000 in 1860 to over 600,000 by 1939, on the back of the textile industry. Jews were one of three communities that built the city alongside Poles and Germans; Jewish capital, Jewish labour and Jewish entrepreneurship were central to it. Israel Poznański’s textile complex on Ogrodowa Street, the largest factory in the city, employed thousands of workers in the late nineteenth century; the Poznański palace adjacent to the factory is now the Museum of the City of Łódź.

The community was religiously and politically diverse. The Hasidic communities of Aleksander, Ger and Pilica had substantial followings in the city. The Bund, the Jewish socialist party, had its largest membership in Poland in Łódź. The Zionist movements, in their various streams from the Labour Zionists to the Revisionists, were active. The Yiddish theatre, the Yiddish daily press (the Lodzher Tageblatt, the Najer Folksblat) and the Yiddish school system were central to the community’s daily life.

Łódź produced a Jewish cultural contribution that travelled. The poet Julian Tuwim, born in the city in 1894, became one of the most celebrated Polish-language poets of the twentieth century. The painter Artur Szyk, born in Łódź in 1894, became one of the great political illustrators of the Second World War. The pianist Arthur Rubinstein, also born in Łódź in 1887, had one of the longest performing careers of any twentieth-century concert artist. The novelist Israel Joshua Singer (the older brother of Isaac Bashevis Singer) wrote his great Łódź novel The Brothers Ashkenazi in 1936 about the textile families of the city.

1939 to 1944: the ghetto

The German army occupied Łódź on 8 September 1939. The city was annexed directly to the Reich and renamed Litzmannstadt. The Łódź ghetto was sealed on 30 April 1940, the first major Jewish ghetto established by the Germans in occupied Poland. It covered an area of about four square kilometres in the Bałuty and Stare Miasto districts, and at its peak held around 164,000 Łódź Jews plus around 40,000 deportees brought in from western Europe and from smaller Polish ghettos.

The ghetto was administered by the Judenrat under Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, an industrialist and orphanage director who had been appointed by the Germans in October 1939. Rumkowski’s strategy was survival through productivity: the ghetto would become an indispensable production centre for the German war economy, and its workers would therefore be kept alive. The strategy was carried through with extraordinary discipline. By 1942 the ghetto was producing uniforms, footwear, electrical components and other supplies for the Wehrmacht in 117 factories employing nearly 80,000 workers. The ghetto issued its own currency, the Rumki; it had its own postage, its own court system, its own police force.

The strategy did not save the inhabitants. Mass deportations to the Chełmno extermination camp began in January 1942 and continued through that year, taking 70,000 Łódź Jews to be murdered in mobile gas vans. A second wave of deportations in September 1942, the Gehsperre, took the remaining elderly and the children under ten. Rumkowski’s speech of 4 September 1942 in which he called on the parents of the ghetto to give up their children (“Brothers and sisters, give them to me. Fathers and mothers, give me your children”) is one of the most-quoted documents of the Holocaust.

The ghetto was the longest-surviving major Jewish ghetto in occupied Poland because of its productive value. It lasted until August 1944, when the Soviet advance forced its liquidation. The remaining 67,000 inhabitants were deported to Auschwitz between 9 and 30 August 1944. Almost all were murdered on arrival. Rumkowski himself was on the last transport.

The chronicle

The Łódź ghetto is one of the best documented in occupied Europe because of an internal chronicle kept by the ghetto’s own archive department. The chronicle was begun in January 1941 by a small team of educated ghetto inhabitants and ran until July 1944. It runs to several thousand pages and records, day by day, the deportations, the food rations, the deaths, the births, the weather, the rumours, the political developments, the cultural life, the suicides. A large part of the chronicle survived the war buried in the ghetto. Its publication, beginning in the 1980s and completed in 1999, is the principal day-by-day documentary record of any Jewish community under German occupation.

Afterwards

The community of Łódź did not return. A small number of survivors came back to the city in 1945 and 1946, but most who had survived had already been displaced eastwards into the Soviet Union and then westwards through the displaced persons camps to Israel, the United States, Britain or other refuges. The post-war Polish state under communist rule provided no encouragement for Jewish institutional rebuilding. The 1968 antisemitic campaign of the Gomułka government drove out most remaining Polish Jews; few stayed in Łódź. The Łódź Jewish community in 2026 numbers a few hundred.

The remains of the ghetto are visible in the city. The Radegast station from which the deportation transports left is now a memorial. The Jewish cemetery on Bracka Street, with around 200,000 graves, is the largest Jewish cemetery in Europe and survives substantially intact. The Poznański palace and the Manufaktura complex (the converted Poznański textile factory) are now major attractions in the city. The internal chronicle of the ghetto is held in the Yad Vashem archive in Jerusalem.

See also

Sources

  • Lucjan Dobroszycki (ed), The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto 1941-1944, Yale University Press, 1984 (a one-volume English selection)
  • Sascha Feuchert, Erwin Leibfried and Jörg Riecke (eds), Die Chronik des Gettos Lodz/Litzmannstadt, five volumes, Wallstein Verlag, 2007
  • Isaiah Trunk, Łódź Ghetto: A History, Indiana University Press, 2006
  • Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (eds), Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Indiana University Press, 1994 (chapters on the Łódź deportations)
  • Andrea Löw, Juden im Getto Litzmannstadt: Lebensbedingungen, Selbstwahrnehmung, Verhalten, Wallstein Verlag, 2006
  • Yehuda Bauer, The Death of the Shtetl, Yale University Press, 2009
  • Philip Friedman, Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust, Jewish Publication Society, 1980
  • Yad Vashem, Łódź ghetto archive holdings, https://www.yadvashem.org
  • Muzeum Tradycji Niepodległościowych, Łódź, Radegast Station memorial, https://muzeumtradycji.pl