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The Łódź Ghetto

In early February 1940, the Germans established a ghetto in the northeastern section of Łódź. About 160,000 Łódź Jews were forced into a small area.

Lodz ghetto

The German army occupied Lodz, Poland, in September 1939. From early February 1940, Jews in Lodz were forced to move to a designated ghetto area, which was sealed on April 30, 1940. This German footage illustrates conditions during winter in the Lodz ghetto. Winter in the ghettos aggravated existing hardships, depleting already sparse supplies of food and fuel.

National Center for Jewish Film

The Germans isolated the ghetto from the rest of Łódź with barbed-wire fencing. German Order Policemen guarded the ghetto perimeter. Internal order in the ghetto was largely the responsibility of Jewish ghetto police. The ghetto area was divided into three parts by the intersection of two major roads. The intersection itself lay outside the ghetto. Bridges constructed over the two thoroughfares connected the three segments of the ghetto. Streetcars for the non-Jewish population of Łódź traversed the ghetto but were not permitted to stop within it.

A Jewish man and child at forced labor in a factory in the Lodz ghetto.

Łódź was the center of the textile industry in prewar Poland. The Łódź ghetto thus became a major production center under the German occupation. As early as May 1940, the Germans established factories in the ghetto and used Jewish residents for forced labor. By July 1942, there were 74 workshops within the ghetto. The major factories produced textiles, especially uniforms, for the German military. Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, chairman of the Jewish council in the Łódź ghetto, hoped to prevent the destruction of the ghetto by making it as productive as possible. He gambled that making Jewish labor essential to German factories would spare Jews from eventual deportation and preserve the Łódź ghetto until the end of the war.

Conditions in the Ghetto

Living conditions in the ghetto were horrendous. Most of the quarter had neither running water nor a sewer system. Hard labor, overcrowding, and starvation were the dominant features of life. The overwhelming majority of ghetto residents worked in German factories and received only meager food rations. More than 20 percent of the ghetto's population died as a direct result of the harsh living conditions.

The whole ghetto was designed, actually, to starve the people out.
—Leo Schneiderman

Leo Schneiderman describes conditions in the Lodz ghetto

The Germans invaded Poland in September 1939. Leo and his family were confined to a ghetto in Lodz. Leo was forced to work as a tailor in a uniform factory. The Lodz ghetto was liquidated in 1944, and Leo was deported to Auschwitz. He was then sent to the Gross-Rosen camp system for forced labor. As the Soviet army advanced, the prisoners were transferred to the Ebensee camp in Austria. The Ebensee camp was liberated in 1945.

US Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection

Deportations to the Łódź Ghetto

In 1941 and 1942, almost 40,000 Jews were deported to the Łódź ghetto: 20,000 from Germany, Austria, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and Luxembourg, and almost 20,000 from the smaller provincial towns in the Warthegau. About 5,000 Roma (Gypsies) from Austria, primarily from the Burgenland province, were deported to the ghetto. They were confined in a segregated block of buildings.

In total, approximately 210,000 people were forced to live in the Łódź ghetto.

Jews deported from Germany and Austria march towards the Lodz ghetto.

Deportations from the Łódź Ghetto

In January 1942, German authorities began to deport Jews from Łódź to the Chełmno killing center. By the end of September 1942, they had deported approximately 70,000 Jews and about 4,300 Roma to Chełmno.

At Chełmno, a special SS detachment killed the Jewish deportees in gas vans. These were large vans whose back storage area had been converted into an airtight gas chamber to murder people with poisonous carbon monoxide gas. Jews were concentrated at assembly points in the ghetto before deportation. The Germans at first required the Jewish council to prepare lists of deportees. As this method failed to fill required quotas, the Germans resorted to police roundups. German personnel shot and killed hundreds of Jews, including children, the elderly, and the sick, during the deportation operations.

Jews from the Lodz ghetto are forced to transfer to a narrow-gauge railroad at Kolo during deportation to the Chelmno killing center.

Between September 1942 and May 1944, there were no major deportations from Łódź. During this period, the ghetto resembled a forced-labor camp.

In the spring of 1944, the Nazis decided to destroy the Łódź ghetto. By then, Łódź was the last remaining ghetto in German-occupied Poland, with a population of approximately 75,000 Jews in May 1944. In June and July 1944 the Germans resumed deportations from Łódź, and about 7,000 Jews were sent to Chełmno. The ghetto residents were told that they were being transferred to work camps in Germany. The Germans deported almost all of the surviving ghetto residents to the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center in August 1944. A small group of 1,000–1,500 Jews remained behind in the Łódź ghetto. They were responsible for sorting the possessions of the deported and cleaning up.

Deportation of Jews from the Lodz ghetto. Poland, August 1944.

Blanka Rothschild describes returning to Lodz after the war to look for family members

Blanka was an only child in a close-knit family in Lodz, Poland. Her father died in 1937. After the German invasion of Poland, Blanka and her mother remained in Lodz with Blanka's grandmother, who was unable to travel. Along with other relatives, they were forced into the Lodz ghetto in 1940. There, Blanka worked in a bakery. She and her mother later worked in a hospital in the Lodz ghetto, where they remained until late 1944 when they were deported to the Ravensbrueck camp in Germany. From Ravensbrueck, Blanka and her mother were sent to a subcamp of Sachsenhausen. Blanka was forced to work in an airplane factory (Arado-Werke). Her mother was sent to another camp. Soviet forces liberated Blanka in spring 1945. Blanka, living in abandoned houses, made her way back to Lodz. She discovered that none of her relatives, including her mother, had survived. Blanka then moved westward to Berlin, eventually to a displaced persons camp. She immigrated to the United States in 1947.

US Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection

Last Edited: Aug 9, 2021

Author(s): United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

Critical Thinking Questions

Why did the Nazis resort to a system of ghettos?
Besides armed resistance, in what other ways did the Jews resist the Nazis while forced to live in the ghettos?
How does the history of the Łódź ghetto and its inhabitants illustrate the systematic nature of the “Final Solution?”
Examine the realities and choices faced by Jewish council members in the ghettos.
Learn about the lives of the Jews in the community of Łódź before 1939.