Liquidation of the Łódź ghetto

The Łódź ghetto — Litzmannstadt under occupation — was the first large sealed ghetto and the last to survive. It owed its longevity to a wager: its chairman, Chaim Rumkowski, had made the district into a vast manufacturing operation working for the German army, convinced that economic utility would protect its inhabitants. Children and the elderly had already been deported to Chełmno.

In the summer, as the front drew near, the liquidation order arrived. The remaining inhabitants, exhausted by years of famine and forced labor, were summoned by neighborhood and transported to Auschwitz; Rumkowski departed with one of the last convoys. A handful of men were left behind to sort through what remained. The ghetto had maintained its registers, its statistics, and its chronicle day after day: these archives, hidden and later recovered, constitute the most complete internal documentation we have of any ghetto.