On February 8, 1940, the Nazi administration issued an order to create a separate Jewish area in Łódź. Thus, began the history of the second largest population (second only to the Warsaw Ghetto) and the first closed ghetto in occupied Europe. In different periods, the number of people who lived here ranged from 160 to more than 200 thousand people. At the time of the completion of the forced Jews eviction (end of April 1940), the ghetto, as well as the city, had a new name – Litzmannstadt (a month earlier, the Nazis renamed Łódź into Litzmannstadt in memory of General Karl Litzmann – the German World War I commander).

In addition, since the fall of 1941, the ghetto has been serving as one of the Jews and Roma deportation places in Germany. New arrivals fell into a terrible atmosphere of hunger, disease and crowding. Imagine that the population density reached 40 thousand people per km2. For comparison, as of 2013, in Kyiv the same indicator amounted to 3.4 thousand people.

It is worth noting that a kind of Roma “camp in the camp” (it existed in November – December 1941) with more than 1200 prisoners was created in the ghetto.

The Litzmannstadt Ghetto lasted a record time - 4.5 years (until August 29, 1944). The policy of Chaim Rumkowski, head of the local Judenrat (Jewish Council), played an important role in this. In various ways, including through repression, he realized the thesis that “only labor can save a life”. On his initiative, more than 100 enterprises, which carried out various orders of the Nazi authorities and at the same time testified to the “usefulness of its employees”, were organized in the ghetto. The fact of employment gained particular importance for the ghetto’s residents at the end of 1941.

It was then that in the village of Chełmno, which is 60 kilometers from Łódź, the Kulmhof death camp began to operate. Only during January-May 1942, about 55 thousand inhabitants of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto were killed in its gas chambers. In total, more than 70 thousand Jews were deported to the camp during 1942. Later, Jews from the ghetto from Radegast station near Łódź were also deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. In total, at the time of the expulsion of the Nazis from the city (January 1945), about 900 former residents of the ghetto were still alive. About 10 000 people were hiding in the forests nearby to Łódź.

The Museum “Jewish Memory and Holocaust in Ukraine” permanent exhibition contains items that were owned and used by Jewish residents of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto, as well as unique footage from the 1942-1943 chronicle, which captured the tragic fate of hundreds of thousands of the Nazi genocide victims.

Also, in the Museum’s library you can find the publication “My secret camera. Life in the Łódź Ghetto”. This is an album of photos from the Litzmannstadt Ghetto, made secretly by Mendel Grossman (1943-1945), photographer and prisoner of the ghetto in Łódź. The photographs, accompanied by a brief description of the depicted, reveal the inhuman living conditions of the Jewish population in the ghetto.

Link to the book here