The Łódź Ghetto: The Second Largest Ghetto of the Holocaust

In the autumn of 1939, German forces occupied the Polish industrial city of Łódź — the second largest city in Poland and home to one of Europe's largest Jewish communities. Within months, the Nazis had sealed approximately 164,000 Jews into a small, decrepit section of the city. At its peak, the ghetto held more than 200,000 people. It would become the second largest ghetto in occupied Europe, and the last major one liquidated — ground down across four and a half years by starvation, disease, deportations, and deliberate brutality.

The story of the Łódź Ghetto is inseparable from the figure of Chaim Mordechai Rumkowski, the elder the Nazis appointed to govern it — and from the impossible choices that defined life inside its walls. It is a story that still provokes debate, still resists easy moral categories, and still illuminates the mechanisms by which totalitarian systems corrupt and destroy human communities.

Sealing the Ghetto

The Germans renamed Łódź as Litzmannstadt in April 1940 and designated the northern district of Bałuty and the Old Town as the Jewish residential area. On May 1, 1940, the ghetto was sealed. The area was chosen deliberately: it was the poorest and most dilapidated section of the city, without adequate sanitation, heating, or infrastructure. Streets that had been home to modest Jewish working-class families now had to absorb a population density that made normal life nearly impossible.

Residents were forced to surrender their valuables and were allowed to bring only what they could carry. The apartments they were assigned were frequently overcrowded — multiple families to a single room. Running water was scarce. Coal for heating was rationed to almost nothing in winter. The Nazis controlled every entry point and shot those who attempted to cross the perimeter without authorization.

Between late 1941 and early 1942, the Germans deported an additional 20,000 Jews from Germany, Austria, Luxembourg, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia into the already overwhelmed ghetto — along with approximately 5,000 Roma and Sinti, who were imprisoned in a separate, even more brutal enclosure. The newcomers arrived with suitcases and the expectation of resettlement. What they found was a sealed ghetto on the edge of starvation.

Rumkowski and the Politics of Survival

The man the Germans appointed to administer the ghetto was Chaim Rumkowski, a 62-year-old failed businessman and administrator of a Jewish orphanage. The Nazis called him the Älteste der Juden — the Elder of the Jews — and gave him responsibility for organizing the ghetto's internal governance, food distribution, and labor. Rumkowski accepted the role with a degree of personal investment that went far beyond mere compliance.

He established a ghetto currency bearing his own image. He gave speeches in which he referred to the ghetto's children as "my children" and the ghetto's workers as "my workers." He created an internal police force, a court system, and a network of factories — workshops that produced uniforms, boots, textiles, and ammunition components for the German war economy. His theory was that a productive ghetto was a protected ghetto: if the Jews of Łódź made themselves economically indispensable to Germany, they might survive.

Rumkowski's strategy was not irrational: for a time, it may have prolonged lives. The Łódź Ghetto survived longer than most others, including Warsaw. But it came at an enormous cost — including a cost that has made Rumkowski one of the most morally contested figures in Holocaust history. When the Nazis demanded deportations of "unproductive" residents — the elderly, the sick, and most devastatingly the children — Rumkowski complied. His infamous speech of September 4, 1942, in which he begged parents to surrender their children to deportation so that the working population might be spared, remains one of the most anguished and disturbing documents of the Holocaust.

"A grievous blow has struck the ghetto. They are asking us to give up the best we possess — the children and the elderly. I was unworthy of having a child of my own, so I gave the best years of my life to children. I've lived and breathed with children. 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! Hand them over to me! Fathers and mothers: Give me your children!"

Approximately 15,000 children and 5,000 elderly were deported during the Gehsperre — the curfew action — of September 1942. Nearly all were taken to the Chełmno extermination site and gassed.

Life Inside the Ghetto

Daily existence in the Łódź Ghetto was shaped above all by hunger. Food rations were calculated to sustain labor, not health. Adults received approximately 1,200 calories per day at best — far below subsistence levels — and allocations were frequently cut further. Starvation diseases were endemic: tuberculosis, typhus, and dysentery spread through overcrowded apartments. Between 1940 and 1944, more than 43,000 people died inside the ghetto from hunger and disease alone, before a single deportation train departed.

And yet alongside this devastation, an extraordinary cultural life persisted. The ghetto had schools, a hospital, a postal system, orchestras, and theatre performances. Intellectuals, writers, and artists continued to work. A group of archivists — the Oneg Shabbat initiative had its parallel in Łódź — compiled documentation of daily ghetto life, preserving statistics, testimonies, and diaries that would eventually become crucial historical records. Children attended classes in secret when official schools were shut down. Rabbis held services. People fell in love, had children, and tried to maintain the fabric of ordinary life under conditions designed to destroy it.

The Deportations to Chełmno and Auschwitz

Beginning in January 1942, the Nazis began deporting residents of the Łódź Ghetto to the Chełmno extermination camp, approximately 50 kilometers away. Chełmno was the first extermination site to use gas vans — mobile chambers in which victims were killed by carbon monoxide — rather than fixed gas chambers. Between January and May 1942, approximately 55,000 Jews from Łódź were transported to Chełmno and murdered.

Deportations paused as the ghetto's labor value remained high, but resumed in waves. By the summer of 1944, as the Soviet Army advanced westward, the Germans moved to liquidate what remained of the ghetto entirely. The final deportations took place in August 1944. Approximately 74,000 people were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau in the last weeks before liberation. At Auschwitz, SS physicians conducted selections on the platform: those deemed fit for labor were sent to work camps; the rest — the majority — were sent immediately to the gas chambers.

Rumkowski himself was deported in August 1944, on one of the last transports. Accounts differ as to what happened to him at Auschwitz — some survivors recalled that other deportees from Łódź, aware of his role in the selections and deportations, beat him to death on the transport or shortly after arrival; other accounts suggest he was gassed. His fate, like that of so many in the ghetto, was death.

Liberation and What Remained

Soviet forces entered Łódź on January 19, 1945. They found approximately 877 Jews still alive inside the ghetto — hidden, or left behind as laborers to sort and pack the property of those who had been deported. Of the more than 200,000 people who had passed through the Łódź Ghetto, fewer than 10,000 survived the war.

The ghetto's records — meticulously maintained by Rumkowski's administration and by independent archivists — survived in substantial form. The Łódź Ghetto Chronicle, compiled daily by a team of writers and historians inside the ghetto, provides an extraordinary window into life under those conditions: detailed, contemporaneous, and deeply human. It runs to thousands of pages.

Memory and Meaning

The Łódź Ghetto raises questions that historians and ethicists continue to grapple with. Was Rumkowski a collaborator or a pragmatist? Did the strategy of productivity prolong lives, or did it merely delay and facilitate the same outcome while purchasing complicity from the victim community? These questions have no clean answers. Hannah Arendt's controversial analysis of Jewish council leaders — and the pushback it generated — was shaped in part by cases like Łódź.

What is not in dispute is the scale of the loss. The Jewish community of Łódź, one of the most vibrant and culturally productive in Europe, was almost entirely destroyed. The Bałuty neighborhood where the ghetto stood was later demolished. Radegast Station — the railway terminus from which the deportation trains departed — has been preserved as a memorial site. Visitors can walk the platform, see the cattle cars, read the names carved into the walls of the memorial hall.

The Łódź Ghetto endured longer than almost any other. That endurance was not deliverance. It was a prolonged encounter with a system of organized murder, and the vast majority of those who passed through it did not survive. To remember them is not only to mourn the dead but to understand, with as much clarity as history allows, exactly what was done to them — and who did it.