“The ghetto has been struck a hard blow. They demand what is most dear to it— children and old people”
When the Lodz Ghetto was sealed off in May 1940, its nearly 200,000 inhabitants had to struggle daily to survive under worsening conditions. The huge ghetto in Lodz was unique in several respects. Second in size only to Warsaw’s, it crowded nearly a third of the city’s inhabitants into a tiny habitable area of less than a square mile. Disease and malnutrition were rampant, leading to the deaths of approximately 43,000 victims within the ghetto itself.
While such conditions were unfortunately common in the more than 1,000 Nazi ghettos in eastern and southern Europe, many of them relied on a sophisticated smuggling network to augment the meager food rations. Not so in Lodz. There, the ghetto was hermetically sealed off from the world by the SS security apparatus. Food, medical supplies, and even news from the outside world were nearly impossible to obtain. The only legal tender in the ghetto was a special currency created by the Nazis that was worthless in the world outside, further frustrating smuggling efforts.
The Lodz Ghetto’s most distinguishing feature, however, was its sheer longevity. One of the first ghettos to be established in Nazi-occupied Poland, it far outlasted all the others. The final deportation of its last 70,000 Jews to the Auschwitz gas chambers took place in August 1944, long after every other ghetto in Poland had been liquidated.
The Lodz Ghetto lasted so long for a variety of reasons, but first and foremost because it served as a valuable source of slave labor for the Nazi war machine. Its tens of thousands of inmates worked about 14 hours a day under malnourishment and horrifying labor conditions. The ghetto’s 117 workshops supplied uniforms and other related textile materials to the Wehrmacht and German private firms. These workers were considered essential to the Nazi war effort and were therefore spared the initial deportations in 1942. Only with the Red Army’s advance in the summer of 1944 did Lodz’s Jews meet the fate of their brethren.
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