Łódź Ghetto - 45 Aid Society

Members of the Boys were imprisoned in the Łódź Ghetto in Poland.

The Łódź Ghetto was one of a network of ghettos set up by Nazi Germany in which Jews were forced to live in occupied Poland. As with other ghettos in Czechoslovakia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, the Łódź Ghetto was established to contain the region’s Jews and isolate them from the rest of the population until the Nazi leadership could decide on an answer to the so-called “Jewish Question.”

The Boys and their families spent years living in dire conditions.

The Boys were teenage and child-Holocaust survivors, who were brought to the UK after the war for rest and rehabilitation.

Photograph of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto, Łódź, Poland. — ^{Łódź Ghetto, Poland.}

The Łódź Ghetto was offically known as the Litzmannstadt Ghetto. Litzmannstadt is the German name for the Polish city of Łódź. To find out more about Łódź and the Boys who grew up there click here.

In 1939, Łódź was Poland’s second largest city and a major industrial centre. After the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, the city and surrounding area were incorporated into the Third Reich. The city was then known by its German name of Litzmannstadt.

The ghettos were the only place, besides labour camps, where Jews were allowed to exist by the Nazi occupation authorities.

Overview

In the spring of 1940 some 164,000 Jews were imprisoned in the Łódź Ghetto. Nearly 25% of the Jews living in the city had fled the city by the time the ghetto was set up.

The ghetto lasted for four years and was under the leadership of the controversial Chaim Rumkowski. The commandant was the equally controversial Hans Biebow.

Photograph of Moniek Frenkel — Jack Bajer

^{Some of thew Boys held in the Łódź Ghetto. The photographs were all taken after the liberation.}

Łódź was the second largest ghetto in German occupied Poland. It was originally intended that the ghetto would be a temporary transit camp and that the Jews would be deported to the east, rendering the newly incorporated territories free of Jews. When this proved impossible, the ghetto was transformed into a major industrial centre, manufacturing war supplies for Germany and especially for the Wehrmacht.

Layout

The ghetto centred on the northern Bałuty quarter of the city, an impoverished area.

The ghetto was sealed from the rest of the world by a wooden fence surrounded by additional barbed-wire fences.

German Order Police battalions were assigned to patrol the perimeter of the ghetto, a Jewish Police force was created to ensure that no prisoners tried to escape. On 10 May 1940 orders went into effect prohibiting any commercial exchange between Jews and non-Jews in Łódź. By the new German decree, those caught outside the

Photograph of a Five mark note used in the Ghetto — ^{Five mark note used in the Ghetto}

ghetto could be shot on sight.

The ghetto population were further isolated by the introduction of a separate currency in the ghetto.

The Jews were entirely dependent on the German authorities for food, medicine and other vital supplies.

^{Łódź Ghetto policemen opening the gate into the ghetto to let the tram in.}

Daily Life

Food was in such short supply that many people died of starvation. Overcrowding meant that disease was rife.

Rumkowski adopted an autocratic style of leadership in order to transform the ghetto into an industrial base manufacturing war supplies.

Overcrowding in the ghetto was exacerbated by the influx of some 40,000 Polish Jews forced out from the surrounding Warthegau areas, as well as transports of foreign Jews resettled in Łódź from Vienna, Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg and other cities in Nazi Germany, as well as from Luxembourg, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. These cohorts included members of the Boys.

I am Because I Did Not Think
Those who kept diaries in the ghetto

Did not survive

Those who tried to understand

What was going on

Did not survive

Those who tried to comprehend

What was happening to them

Were the first to disappear

I am because I did not think

Because I knew how not to be

And to abandon myself

My past

My future

And my here and Now

I am because I knew how Not to think

Michael Etkind, A Gust of Wind (2015).

Etkind was 15 years old when he was imprisoned in the Łódź Ghetto.

Deportations

On 20 December 1941, Rumkowski was ordered by the Germans to announce that 20,000 Jews from the ghetto would be deported to undisclosed camps, based on selection by the Judenrat. This was a direct result of the overcrowding caused by the deportation of foreign Jews to the ghetto.

Deportations from Łódź began in January 1942 when Jews in the ghetto were taken to the Chełmno extermination camp. Over half of the Jews in the ghetto were murdered in the camp. Deportations continued intermittently until the ghetto was liquidated.

By September 1942, Rumkowski and the Jews of Łódź had realised the fate of the evacuees, because all baggage, clothing, and identification papers of their fellow inmates, were being returned to the ghetto for “processing”.

A debate raged in the ghetto over who should be given up for ‘deportation’. Rumkowski believed productivity was necessary for survival, he thought that the Jews in the ghetto should hand over their 13,000 children and 11,000 elderly. Some families committed collective suicide to avoid the inevitable.

Jewish Resistance

There was no armed resistance in the Łódź Ghetto as there was in Warsaw and other ghettos.

There were a number of reasons for this.

First and foremost, the ghetto was hermetically sealed off from the rest of the city, making food smuggling, outside contacts, and weapons acquisition nearly impossible. Łódź had been incorporated into the Third Reich and the city was populated by Germans and ethnic Germans. The Polish population was persecuted and ethnically cleansed, which meant that there was no Polish resistance movement for those in the ghetto to work with.

Secondly, the ghetto was administered by Chaim Rumkowski, head of the Jewish Council (Judenrat), who notoriously sought to save the community through total compliance and forced labour production, even cooperating with German deportation orders. Rumkowski’s overbearing autocracy including his periodic crackdowns made the development of a resistance movement far more difficult than in other ghettos.

There were however other distinct forms of resistance.

There was a rich cultural and secret religious life. There were also clandestine schools and nurseries for younger children whose mothers were forced to work. The Jewish population also maintained several illegal radios with which they kept abreast of events in the outside world.

Since production was essential to the German war effort, the slowing down of work was also a form of resistance. Political organisations also continued to exist and engaged in strikes when rations were cut.

The most important act of resistance was the creation of a secret archive that recoded the history of the ghetto. Administrative orders, personal testimonies, statistics and essays were all carefully collected. The photographers of the statistical department of the Judenrat, besides their official work, illegally took photos of everyday scenes and atrocities. The secret archivists also produced the Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, regularly documenting for over three years the events and life of the ghetto. Before the ghetto’s liquidation in August 1944, parts of the archive were smuggled out of the ghetto and hidden to ensure they survived.

Photograph of Stephen Wolkowitz just after the liberation. — ^{Stephen Wolkowitz just after the liberation.}

“In 1942, Rumkowski was ordered to remove those unfit for work and the elderly, which he did. He was also ordered by the Germans to take all children nine years of age and under from their parents. There were about 20,000 such children in the ghetto. Rumkowski made a speech to the ghetto inhabitants, now known as the ‘Give me your Children’ speech, ‘justfying’ his actions.

When the day came for the children to be taken away, my parents told me to run and hide in the attic. I hid in a corner of the attic behind a wall of boxes. The Jewish police searched the entire flat, including the attic, but did not find me. This only happened once, but it was terrifying. I was eight years old.”

Stephen Wolkowicz, Missing Childhood (2014)

Dissolution

Photograph of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. — ^{Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.}

Łódź was last ghetto in occupied Poland to be liquidated. As the front approached, German officials decided to deport the remaining Jews to Auschwitz II-Birkenau extermination and concentration camp, including Rumkowski.

On 28 August 1944, Rumkowski’s family were gassed along with thousands of others. About 10,000 Jewish residents of Łódź survived the Holocaust among them many members of the Boys.