Page 115 - Centrum Dialogu im. Marka Edelmana w Łodzi. "Fragmenty pamięci".

Wielka Szpera 5-12 września 1942 The Great Szpera, 5-12 September 1942

Litzmannstadt Ghetto
after the Great Szpera

After the Great Szpera, in October 1942, there were still more than 89,000 inhabitants in the Łódź
ghetto. Everyone, including few-year-old children, worked because only those who worked received
food ration cards and had a chance of survival. The few toddlers saved from deportation were hidden;
efforts were made to make them invisible.

The Litzmannstadt ghetto survived until the summer of 1944. It was the longest-lasting ghetto in the
occupied Polish territories, the Germans have liquidated all others in 1942 and 1943. The liquidation of
the Łódź ghetto began on 23 June 1944. By 14 July, the Germans had deported more than 7,000 people
to Chełmno and murdered them. After a short break, the transports moved south. From 9 to 29 August
1944, around 70,000 Jews were deported by the Germans to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Chaim Mordechaj
Rumkowski, the Chief of the Jewish Elders, was also deported in one of the last transports.

Hans Biebow, head of the German ghetto administration, left several hundred people, mainly ghetto
officials, engineers and craftsmen with their families, who were deported to labour camps near Berlin
and Dresden in October 1944. Around 800 people were left to clean up the ghetto area. They survived
until the Red Army entered Łódź in January 1945.
It is estimated that about 145,000 people who were in the Łódź ghetto were murdered in the extermi-
nation camps. Between 5,000 and 15,000 people survived the war; the exact numbers are not known.
Most of the survivors moved around the world.

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