The Lódz Ghetto

In February 1940, the Nazis established Europe's largest Jewish ghetto in Lódz. In order to confine the city's 230,000 Jews to the 4.3 sq. km area, the Nazis drove out non-Jewish residents with warnings of infectious diseases, then ordered all of the city's Jews into the cramped district, and after surrounding the area with a wall, announced that the ghetto was "closed."

After the Nazis proclaimed that residents of the ghetto must work in exchange for their meager rations of food, the overcrowded ghetto became a massive textile factory: young girls even hand-stitched the emblems on Nazi officers' uniforms. Conditions worsened when 20,000 more Jews and 5000 Gypsies joined the original internees. In 1942, deportations of the infirm and children began. Until 1944, though, Lódz managed to escape the total liquidation that had been the fate of other ghettos.

With the approach of the Red Army in August 1944, Heinrich Himmler deported the ghetto's 70,000 remaining residents to Auschwitz and Majdanek, sparing only 800 Jews who stayed back as a cleaning crew. As the Russians were about to capture Lódz, the Nazis resolved to execute these also. Fortunately, the Russians' swift advance interrupted their plans, saving all 800 Jews. Of those deported, 20,000 survived—the highest number of survivors of any European ghetto.