Today marks 60 years since the liquidation of the Lodz ghetto in Poland, with the sending of the last transport of Jews to the death camps. The Lodz ghetto - with the Warsaw ghetto one of the two largest in Nazi-occupied Poland - was established in February 1940. According to one estimate, the death rate in those two ghettos, just from overcrowding, starvation and disease was one percent of the population per month.
[I]nmates were tormented by hunger, exhaustion and fear every day.I commemorate this sombre anniversary here today.As the Nazi extermination programme accelerated, ghetto inmates were deported to death camps en masse and slaughtered, the last train leaving on 29 August 1944.
The central Polish city of Lodz will mark sixty years since the liquidation [of] the Lodz Ghetto at the end of the month, with a series of commemorations and memorial ceremonies, climaxing with the inauguration of a major monument in memory of the Jews of Lodz at the site of a former freight train station from which the Germans sent nearly 150,000 Jews to death in the concentration camps.The head of the Jewish council in the Lodz ghetto was Chaim Rumkowski. Believing in salvation through obedience and work - through being useful to the Germans - his policy eventually was to sacrifice some Jews in the hope of saving others.
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Before the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, Lodz was home to 233,000 Jews, who made up one in... three city residents in what was Poland's second-largest Jewish community, after Warsaw.
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In all, more than 200,000 Jews from Poland, Germany, Austria, Luxembourg, and what was then Czechoslovakia were imprisoned in the ghetto, with only 5,000–12,000 of them surviving the Holocaust.Starting in 1941, the Germans used the small Radegast train station, which also functioned as a freight depot, to transport 38,000 Jews from all over Western Europe, as well as some 5,000 Gypsies, into the ghetto.
A year later, with the Final Solution in full swing, the Nazis used the station to deport an estimated 145,000 Jews from the ghetto to death camps in Chelmno and Auschwitz-Birkenau, where nearly all of them were gassed.
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On August 29, 1944, after a three-week period which saw more than 70,000 of the last remaining Jews of the ghetto sent to the extermination camps, the last remaining Nazi ghetto in Poland ceased to exist, with only hundreds avoiding transport to the death camps.
Rumkowski was a controversial figure. Pressured by the Germans to provide more children and old people for the transports, he made a notorious speech in the ghetto asking fathers and mothers to give him their children.There's an article here about the search for remnants of, and from, the Jews murdered at Chelmno:
In a rural forest area in central Poland, they are still sorting through the verdant fields, looking for human remains.The article goes on to describe the fate of the people who arrived at this place, ending in the gas vans.More than 60 years after hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered in the Nazi death camp that stood at the site, just off the main road in this otherwise tranquil village, pieces of human belongings of lives long since extinguished are being uncovered almost daily.
Bracelets, pieces of watches, and a badge of the Bnei Akiva youth movement were among the items uncovered by the two Polish conservation workers at the site just this month amidst the mounds of dirt where clothing and human belongings that were deemed worthless were discarded by the Nazis.