Qualla: Lodz Ghetto

Lodz Ghetto: Introduction

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rakoon, CC0. On 4 September 1942, in a square in front of the fire station on Lutomierska Street, the chairman of the Lodz Ghetto's Jewish Council stood on a wooden platform and asked the parents in front of him to give him their children. "Brothers and sisters," Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski said in Yiddish, "a grievous blow has struck the ghetto. They are asking us to give up the best we possess — the children and the elderly. I never imagined I would be forced to deliver this sacrifice to the altar with my own hands. In my old age I must stretch out my hands and beg: Brothers and sisters, give them to me. Fathers and mothers, give me your children." Over the following eight days the Germans took roughly 15,000 children under ten and elderly people from the Lodz Ghetto and sent them to be gassed at the Chelmno extermination camp.

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Image: Rakoon | CC0

Lodz Ghetto: Litzmannstadt

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Piotr Rajczyk - Rayyar -, CC BY-SA 4.0. Lodz was the textile capital of pre-war Poland, a city of red-brick mills and a Jewish community of about 233,000 — roughly a third of the population. The Germans entered on 8 September 1939, renamed the city Litzmannstadt after a German general of the First World War, and on 8 F...

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Image: Piotr Rajczyk - Rayyar - | CC BY-SA 4.0

Lodz Ghetto: The Shop, the Strategy, the Argument

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rakoon, CC0. Rumkowski's calculation was that productivity would mean survival. By 1943 the ghetto held 117 factories — Ressorts in the German bureaucratic vocabulary — sewing Wehrmacht uniforms, making boots, weaving carpets, repairing parachutes. Roughly 80,000 people worked. The strategy b...

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Image: Rakoon | CC0

Lodz Ghetto: The Children

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gauss, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. The Sperre — the September 1942 deportation — is the moment around which everything in the ghetto's history bends. The Germans demanded 20,000 deportees, specifically the children under ten and the very old, the inhabitants who could not work. The Jewish Council was offered the c...

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Image: Gauss | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Lodz Ghetto: The Witnesses

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rakoon, CC0. Henryk Ross was a photographer for the ghetto's statistical department. His official assignment was identification photographs and propaganda images of productive labour. In his off-hours he photographed everything else: the deportations, the corpse carts, the starving children, ...

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Image: Rakoon | CC0