I bring groups to Lodz because the world has, to a large degree, forgotten it, and I do not believe we have the right to forget. Before the war, Lodz held one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe, more than two hundred thousand people, in a city that Jewish entrepreneurs and workers had helped build into an industrial powerhouse. The Lodz Ghetto, sealed in 1940, was the second largest of the ghettos and the longest to operate. And yet far fewer groups come here than to Warsaw or Krakow. Part of my work, when I bring a community to Lodz, is simply to insist that this place be remembered.
I want to be careful in how I write about the ghetto, because the subject demands it. The Lodz Ghetto was a place of suffering, starvation, forced labor, and ultimately deportation to murder. There is no tourism here. We come to bear witness to what was done to the people of Lodz and to the people brought to Lodz from across Europe, and to refuse the forgetting that has gathered around this city. What follows is offered in that spirit, with the gravity the dead are owed.
What the Lodz Ghetto Was
A City Within a City, Sealed Off
When German forces occupied Lodz in 1939, they renamed the city and began the persecution of its large Jewish population immediately. In early 1940, they established a ghetto in the impoverished northern district of the city, and by the spring of that year it was sealed. The entire Jewish population of Lodz, along with Jews and Roma later deported there from other places, was confined within its boundaries, cut off from the rest of the city by fences and guards.
The conditions inside were designed to crush. Overcrowding was extreme. Food was deliberately insufficient, and starvation was constant. Disease spread through the packed streets. People died in large numbers from hunger and illness, before any deportation ever began. To survive a single day in the Lodz Ghetto was to endure cold, hunger, fear, and the steady loss of those around you.
Forced Labor and the Illusion of Survival
The Lodz Ghetto was organized around forced labor. Its workshops produced goods, including textiles and uniforms, for the occupiers. The head of the Jewish Council in the ghetto pursued a strategy of survival through work, believing that if the ghetto made itself economically valuable, its people might be spared. This is among the most painful and debated histories of the ghetto, and I treat it with care when I speak about it with groups. The people who lived through it faced impossible choices under conditions of total powerlessness. It is not for us, standing in safety decades later, to render easy judgments. The labor did not, in the end, save the community. The decision to deport remained with the murderers, not with the imprisoned.
What the strategy did do was make the Lodz Ghetto the last major ghetto to remain in operation, which is part of why a fuller record of daily life survived here than in many other places. People kept diaries. An official chronicle was maintained. Photographs were taken. These records are part of what your group can encounter, and they return individual faces and voices to a history that the murderers tried to render anonymous.
The Deportations and Radegast Station
I now have to write about how the people of the Lodz Ghetto were taken to be murdered, because remembrance requires that the truth be told.
Beginning in 1942, deportations from the Lodz Ghetto carried tens of thousands of people to the Chelmno extermination camp, where they were murdered in gas vans. Among those deported in the early phase were the ghetto’s children and elderly, taken in operations of unspeakable cruelty. Later, as the ghetto was finally liquidated in 1944, the remaining population was deported, most of them to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the great majority were murdered on arrival.
The deportations departed from a place that now stands as one of the most important memorials in Lodz: Radegast Station. This railway station on the edge of the former ghetto was the point from which the trains left. People were assembled here, loaded into railcars, and taken away. For the overwhelming majority, this station was the last place they stood in Lodz, the last place in the city where they were still alive.
Standing at Radegast
Radegast Station is preserved today as a memorial. There is the station building, there are railcars of the kind used in the deportations, and there are monuments inscribed with the names of the destinations to which the people of Lodz were sent: Chelmno, Auschwitz, and others. To stand on this platform is to stand where families were torn apart and sent to their deaths. I bring groups here and I say very little. The place carries its own testimony. Many in the group say Kaddish on the platform. It is, I believe, exactly where it should be said.
A long memorial tunnel at the site bears the transport records, the dates and numbers of the deportations, rendering visible the relentless machinery of the murder. Walking through it, your group passes the documentation of how a community of more than two hundred thousand was destroyed, transport by transport.
The Other Sites of Memory
The Jewish Cemetery and the Field of the Murdered
Lodz holds one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Europe, with hundreds of thousands of graves reaching back generations. Within it is an area known as the Ghetto Field, where those who died inside the ghetto from starvation and disease were buried, often in graves that the dying themselves had been forced to dig in advance. To walk this ground is to encounter the dead of the ghetto directly, those who never reached a deportation train because the conditions killed them first. The cemetery is a place of profound remembrance, and I give every group time here.
The Streets of the Former Ghetto
Much of the area that was the Lodz Ghetto can still be walked. The buildings, many of them, still stand. With a knowledgeable guide carrying maps and photographs, your group can move through the former ghetto and understand where its boundaries ran, where its institutions stood, where the bridges crossed over streets that the imprisoned were forbidden to set foot on. This kind of guided witness, reconstructing what was here, is essential, because the ordinary appearance of the streets today can otherwise hide what they once contained. For the broader context of Lodz within Jewish Poland, our guide to Jewish heritage in Poland places the city in its full history as an industrial center built in large part by Jewish hands.
Preparing Your Community
A visit to the Lodz Ghetto sites should be approached with the same care as any encounter with the history of mass murder. Prepare your group honestly before departure for what they will witness at Radegast Station and the cemetery. Explain that responses vary, that silence and tears and numbness are all natural, and that no one grieves wrong. Build reflection time into the day afterward, and do not crowd the schedule.
As with all the sites of remembrance, sequence matters. Your community should understand the world that was destroyed before they stand where it was destroyed. Knowing that Lodz was a thriving industrial city with one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe, full of workers and entrepreneurs and families, changes what it means to stand at Radegast. The grief needs the context. For groups carrying the weight of multiple sites of remembrance, our reflection on bearing witness at Majdanek near Lublin speaks to the pacing and the care that this work requires across a full journey.
Why We Refuse to Forget Lodz
I said at the start that the world has largely forgotten the Lodz Ghetto, and that we have no right to. Let me say why it matters so much to me.
More than two hundred thousand people lived in this community. Children were born here, grew up here, went to school here. Workers built one of Europe’s great industrial cities. And then they were sealed into a ghetto, starved, worked, and deported to be murdered, and afterward the city itself moved on and the memory thinned. To come to Lodz, to stand at Radegast, to walk the cemetery and the streets, to say the names and the prayers, is to push back against that thinning. It is to insist that these people existed, that they mattered, that they are remembered. That insistence is, I believe, a sacred obligation, and I am grateful every time a community asks me to help them honor it.
FAQ: The Lodz Ghetto
What was the Lodz Ghetto?
The Lodz Ghetto was established by German occupiers in early 1940 in the northern district of Lodz and sealed that spring. It confined the city’s entire Jewish population, more than two hundred thousand people, along with Jews and Roma later deported there. It was the second largest of the ghettos and the longest to operate. Conditions of extreme overcrowding, deliberate starvation, disease, and forced labor caused enormous loss of life even before the deportations began.
Where were the people of the Lodz Ghetto deported?
Beginning in 1942, tens of thousands were deported to the Chelmno extermination camp, where they were murdered in gas vans. The early deportations included the ghetto’s children and elderly. When the ghetto was finally liquidated in 1944, most of the remaining population was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the great majority were murdered on arrival. The deportations departed from Radegast Station.
What is Radegast Station?
Radegast Station is the railway station on the edge of the former ghetto from which the deportation trains departed. It is preserved today as a memorial, with the station building, deportation railcars, monuments naming the destinations, and a memorial tunnel bearing the transport records. For the overwhelming majority of those deported, this station was the last place they stood alive in Lodz. It is a central site of remembrance and a place where many groups say Kaddish.
What else can my group see related to the Lodz Ghetto?
Lodz holds one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Europe, including the Ghetto Field, where those who died inside the ghetto from starvation and disease were buried. Much of the area of the former ghetto can also be walked, with many buildings still standing. A knowledgeable guide with maps and photographs can help your group understand the ghetto’s boundaries and institutions, reconstructing what the ordinary-looking streets once contained.
How should I prepare my group for the Lodz Ghetto sites?
Prepare your community honestly before departure for what they will witness, particularly at Radegast Station and the cemetery. Explain that responses vary widely and that silence, tears, and numbness are all natural. Provide historical context first, helping your group understand that Lodz was a thriving city with one of Europe’s largest Jewish communities, so the grief has a home in the knowledge of what was destroyed. Build reflection time into the day and avoid an overcrowded schedule. Heritage Tours builds this care and pacing into every Poland itinerary.
If your community feels called to bear witness in Lodz and to refuse its forgetting, I would consider it a privilege to help you plan that journey with the gravity it requires. You can read more about how we structure these journeys at our Poland destination page and our group heritage tours page. When you are ready, contact us and we will begin, with full attention to what this asks of all of us.