The Deportation of Jews from the Lodz Ghetto to KL Auschwitz ... by Andrzej Strzelecki

In 19, almost 40,000 Jews were deported to the Lodz 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. The whole ghetto was designed, actually, to starve the people out. More than 20 percent of the ghetto's population died as a direct result of the harsh living conditions.

The overwhelming majority of ghetto residents worked in German factories and received only meager food rations. Hard labor, overcrowding, and starvation were the dominant features of life. Most of the quarter had neither running water nor a sewer system. Living conditions in the ghetto were horrendous. He gambled that making Jewish labor essential to German factories would spare Jews from eventual deportation and preserve the Lodz ghetto until the end of the war.

Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, chairman of the Jewish council in the Lodz ghetto, hoped to prevent the destruction of the ghetto by making it as productive as possible. The major factories produced textiles, especially uniforms, for the German military. By July 1942, there were 74 workshops within the ghetto. As early as May 1940, the Germans established factories in the ghetto and used Jewish residents for forced labor. The Lodz ghetto thus became a major production center under the German occupation. Lodz was the center of the textile industry in prewar Poland. Streetcars for the non-Jewish population of Lodz traversed the ghetto but were not permitted to stop within it. Bridges constructed over the two thoroughfares connected the three segments of the ghetto. The intersection itself lay outside the ghetto. The ghetto area was divided into three parts by the intersection of two major roads. Internal order in the ghetto was largely the responsibility of Jewish ghetto police. German Order Policemen guarded the ghetto perimeter. The Germans isolated the ghetto from the rest of Lodz with barbed-wire fencing. About 160,000 Lodz Jews were forced into a small area. In early February 1940, the Germans established a ghetto in the northeastern section of Lodz. The Germans renamed the city Litzmannstadt, after a German World War I general, Karl Litzmann. Lodz was annexed to Germany as part of the Warthegau. This was one week after Germany invaded Poland on September 1. German troops occupied Lodz on September 8, 1939. The Jews of Lodz formed the second largest Jewish community in prewar Poland, after Warsaw. The city of Łódź (Lodz) is located about 85 miles southwest of Warsaw, Poland.

The Deportation of Jews from the Lodz Ghetto to KL Auschwitz ... by Andrzej Strzelecki