Buildings in the former Lodz Ghetto still stand

LODZ, Poland — It’s a forgettable, rundown district of four square kilometres in the centre of this city, and if not for its historical notoriety, a visitor would not even bother with it.

A street in the former Lodz Ghetto [Sheldon Kirshner photo]

Filled with a profusion of crumbling prewar tenements, the former Nazi ghetto area is synonymous with the Holocaust that unfolded in Poland.

Since a revolt did not break out here, as in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, most of its original buildings still stand, said Jaroslaw Nowak, the mayor’s adviser on Jewish affairs.

Although the neighbourhood seems  neglected, the municipality has seen to it that the former ghetto is properly marked with 42 commemorative plaques in memory of the victims.

I had a special interest in visiting it. My parents, David and Genya, were imprisoned in the ghetto, the longest surviving one in Nazi-occupied Poland. Sixty-five years ago this month, it was ruthlessly liquidated by the Nazis, dooming tens of thousands of its hapless inmates.

Within a week of invading Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, the German army marched into Lodz, more than one-third of whose population of 670,000 was Jewish. Lodz and its hinterland were annexed by Germany, and the city was renamed Litzmannstadt in honour of Karl Litzmann, a German general who had conquered it in World War I.

The German authorities proceeded to marginalize and terrorize Jews, plunder their shops and homes and burn their synagogues, including the Great Synagogue, the first Reform shul in Lodz.

These indignities were merely a foretaste of things to come. In February 1940, the Germans took the first steps to enclose Jews in a ghetto in the Baluty district, with its 2,300 buildings. Two months later, the ghetto was sealed off.

Fearing the worst, 60,000 Jews in  Lodz fled to the Soviet Union prior to these events, leaving 160,000 Jews in the ghetto. Apart from its Jewish inhabitants, the ghetto was also populated by 5,000 Roma from Austria and Hungary, and a smaller group of Catholic youth, the children of Polish dissidents.

Essentially, the ghetto was a huge work camp, producing goods for Germany at more than 100 workshops, or, as they were known in German, Ressorts. The autocratic head of the Jewish Council, or Judenrat, Chaim Rumkowski, was convinced that productivity would ensure the ghetto’s survival.

From the outset, conditions were abysmal. Since the daily food ration was  eventually reduced from1,800 calories to 600 calories, hunger was rampant, as were infectious diseases. Thousands of Jews died. They were buried in the Bracka Street cemetery, Europe’s largest Jewish cemetery.

 As if the ghetto was not already congested, the Nazis crammed still more Jews into it. Forty thousand Jews from the surrounding areas, as well as from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Luxembourg, were “resettled” in Lodz.

The first deportations occurred in December 1941 from the Radegast Street railway station. Further deportations followed. The Radegast station, from which 73,000 Jews were deported, has been transformed into a monument consisting of the original building and two cattle cars sitting on a siding.

The deportees were sent to the Chelmno concentration camp. In September 1942, the Nazis ordered Rumkowski to hand over an additional 15,000 Jews. Rumkowski decided that they would be children under the age of 10 and adults over 65. Deportations ceased temporarily after 1942, leaving about 70,000 Jews in the ghetto.

In the summer of 1944, after an internal debate, the Nazis made the fateful decision to liquidate the ghetto. German officials who had argued that the ghetto was a source of cheap labour and should be preserved were outvoted by Nazi ideologues intent on exterminating Polish Jewry.

Seven thousand ghetto inhabitants were deported to Chelmno in June and July. In August, the remainder of the Jews, including Rumkowski and his family, were transported to Auschwitz. The last transport pulled out of Lodz on Aug. 29. My parents were among the deportees consigned to Auschwitz.

The Nazis spared 800 Jews whose job would be  to “clean” up the ghetto . They would then be shot. Before they were to be killed, the Nazis forced them to dig shallow rectangular pits into which their corpses would be dumped. The Nazi plan was thwarted as the Red Army bore down on Lodz, sending the Germans into retreat.

Of the estimated 200,000 Jews who passed through the ghetto, 10,000, or about five per cent, were still alive when the war ended.

A visitor who walks through the former ghetto today will find that more than 80 per cent of its buildings still exist.

The barracks that served as Rumkowski’s headquarters at Balucki Market Square are there, as is the Gestapo building at 1 Limanowskiego St.

The ghetto’s fire department, for which my father toiled and owed his survival, was located in a densely packed row of apartment buildings at 13 Lutomierska St. The four-storey building at 37 Pomorska St., in which my mother lived, has been converted into a bank. It is close to today’s Jewish community centre.

The parish building of St. Mary’s Assumption Church, known as the Red House, housed the German criminal police. The building at 3 Krawiecka St. was where Rumkowski delivered several of his speeches. The soup kitchen was at 32 Mlynarska St. The site of the Great Synagogue, destroyed by Nazi arsonists on Nov. 14, 1939, is now used as a parking lot.

The remains of 45,000 Jews who died in the ghetto were interred in the 40-hectare Jewish cemetery, which was opened in the late 19th century and supposedly contains 180,000 headstones.

Rumkowski’s ex-wife is buried here, as are the parents of the pianist Arthur Rubinstein, the poet Julian Tuwim and the illustrator Artur Szyk. Izrael Poznanski, the legendary textile magnate who died in 1900, rests here, too, in a grand mausoleum.

The grounds and the gravestones are cared for by the Monumentum Judaicum Lodzense Foundation, which was set up in 1997 by the city of Lodz, the Organization of Former Residents of Lodz in Israel and the Jewish Restitution Organization.

Nonetheless, the cemetery is largely overgrown. Many of its headstones lean sideways and moulder away in what appears to be a state of neglect.