Posted on 08/23/2004 8:29:49 AM PDT by lizol
Holocaust survivors remember Poland's last ghetto
By DPA
WARSAW/LODZ - The history of the Polish city of Lodz would be incomplete without names like Rubinstein, Poznanski or Singer. Such 19th-century Jewish industrialists were among those who turned the small central Polish town into a booming city with a flourishing textile industry.
No European city other than Warsaw had as many Jewish inhabitants as Lodz, Poland's second largest city. Before World War II the 223,000 Jews of Lodz - who often called themselves Lodzermensh - formed one-third of the city's population, living alongside Poles and Germans.
Today, the Jewish cemetery in Lodz, the largest worldwide, bears witness to the wealth of the so-called "cotton barons." Yet many of the impressive tombs are neglected and overgrown with grass and weeds.
No other ghetto in occupied Poland existed as long as the one in Lodz, but old Jewish Lodz is long gone. The Jewish prewar community with its numerous synagogues, two newspapers, schools, hospitals and rich cultural life is lost.
On August 29, the 60th anniversary of the ghetto's liquidation, many of the survivors, along with official delegates, will gather in Lodz to commemorate their fate and remember the dead.
Sixty years ago the German occupants put a violent end to the history of Polish-Jewish success in Lodz when they liquidated the ghetto. Nowadays, there are only about 400 Jews, mainly elderly, living in the city.
When German troops occupied Poland in September 1939, Lodz was incorporated into the German Reich as part of the newly established district of Warthegau and was renamed Litzmannstadt after a German general.
Few areas of German-occupied Poland suffered as much as Warthegau. The Polish elite was systematically murdered or deported. For the Jews of Lodz, the beginning of German occupation was marked by violence, terror and pillage. Ethnic Germans took part in the violence against their Jewish neighbors.
The Jewish population was systematically excluded from economic life. All Jewish bank accounts were closed. No Jew was allowed to hold more than 2,000 zloty in cash. Industrialists had to turn over their companies to so-called "commissioners."
In November 1939, the Germans destroyed all synagogues and the first deportations began. Hundred of Jews tried to escape, fleeing into Eastern Poland and the Soviet Union. A short time later, in December 1939, construction on the ghetto began.
On April 30, 1940, about 164,000 Jews living in Lodz were forced to move to a quarter surrounded by barbed wire and fences. They were housed in derelict or wooden buildings in an area of only four square kilometers.
Although living conditions were already cramped, a further 20,000 Jews from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Luxembourg, and 18,500 from around Poland were moved into the ghetto in 1941 and 1942.
"I didn't know why I was sent to the ghetto. I didn't know what was going on," recalls survivor Maria Simonowicz. "Even if some minor piece of information reached us about the extermination, we did not think or talk about it."
A "council of elders," imposed by the German authorities and headed by Mordechai Rumkowski, dealt with the ghetto's administration. The death rate was high. Typhus, tuberculosis, hunger and cold killed about 43,500 of the ghetto's inhabitants.
"We lived simply - day by day, from food ration to food ration," Simonowicz remembers.
"Food was the main problem," Paula Garfinkel, another ghetto survivor, says. "At the women's clothing factory where I worked, I at least got some soup for lunch."
Once, in a desperate attempt to find food for her sick younger brother, she dug potatoes from a field outside the factory, "knowing that if I was caught, I'd be shot."
The first deportations to forced labor camps began in late 1940. In January 1942, deportations to the Chelmno death camp began. By September of that year, about 75,000 Jews and 5,000 Sinti and Romas were killed at the camp, most meeting their death immediately on arrival.
In September 1942, the deportations stopped. By that time, most of the frail and the weak, the old and the children were dead, leaving only those who were able to work. The ghetto itself became a huge forced labor camp.
In the spring of 1944, as a German defeat became more and more obvious, the Nazis decided to liquidate the last remaining ghetto in occupied Poland. Deportations to Chelmno and Auschwitz resumed in June.
Information on the end of the ghetto is vague, but the last transport probably left the Radegast station on August 29. Only 877 Jews remained in the ghetto.
According to the plan, this small group was to be murdered when the German troops left Lodz, but they managed to go into hiding before being liberated by the Soviet Army in January 1945.
Holocaust researchers assume that between 5,000 and 8,000 Jewish inhabitants of Lodz survived the camps.
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