Free Republic

Not all truth leads to reconciliation in Poland As one city reclaims its past, reminders of Poland's role in the second world war remain, says David Hearst David Hearst in Lodz Tuesday November 7, 2006 Guardian Unlimited Even today, the Nazis' compulsion to document their crimes is breathtaking. Imagine the scene - it is September 1 1944, the Soviet army is 60 miles away and approaching fast. The game in this part of the Third Reich is almost up, but you have still got 76,000 Jews - then the largest concentration in eastern Europe - labouring in the Lodz ghetto...

Working against time By Yechiam Weitz The remarkable endurance of the Lodz Ghetto was largely due to the head of the Judenrat and his policies. A new book presents a balanced picture of Chaim Mordechai Rumkowski "Lodz - Akhron Hageta'ot Bepolin" ("Lodz - The Last Ghetto in Poland") by Michal Unger, Yad Vashem, 600 pages The Lodz Ghetto was the most important of all the ghettos in Poland during the Holocaust, but it also stood apart for other reasons. First of all, it was the second largest ghetto in Poland, after the Warsaw Ghetto, with 160,000 Jewish residents from the...

The notebooks are now yellow with age and illegible in some sections. Filled with heart-wrenching short stories and poems that depict a horror beyond human imagination, they serve as the last will and testament of a young Jewish boy incarcerated in the Lodz Ghetto during World War II. The stories were written in Polish by an ill and malnourished Avraham Cytryn over a four-year period (1940-1944) - from the time he was 13 until he was 17, when he was transported to Auschwitz and gassedto death. After the war, the notebooks were found scattered on the floor of the family's...

Lodz Jewish Ghetto commemorations 28.08.2005 Events commemorating the 61st anniversary of the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto in Lodz began in that central Polish city today. A mass in the intention of those who perished there was celebrated by French cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger and the Lodz metropolitan archbishop Wladyslaw Ziolek. The Nazis created the Litzmannstadt Getto in February 1940 in the city’s most neglected district. It covered the area of 4 square kilometres. More than 160,000 Jews were closed there. Many Jewish intellectuals from Poland, Germany, Austria and Luxembourg were placed there. According to various sources only 5,000 to 12,000...

Shocking anti-abortion exhibition 14 giant anti-abortion billboards have been put up in the city centre of Lodz in central Poland. All of them abound in drastic scenes, and they are displayed right next to war images. The organizers think it’s a good way to appeal to people’s conscience. The main street in the city of £odz visited by thousands of people every day, now hosts now an antiabortion exhibition abounding in pictures portraying death next to photos of aborted foetuses. And so, a photo of massacred bodies in the former Yugoslavia is placed next to a picture of an 8-week...

Katsav skips Lodz ceremony By ETGAR LEFKOVITS In a diplomatic snub, President Moshe Katsav decided to skip the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the liquidation of the Lodz Ghetto held on Sunday in the central Polish city, without informing city officials he was not coming. The city-sponsored commemorations, which drew 5,000 Holocaust survivors and visitors from around the world, included the inauguration of a monument in memory of the Jews of Lodz at the site of a former freight train station from which the Germans sent nearly 150,000 Jews to their deaths. Katsav had been invited to attend the...

LODZ, Poland - Sam Weinreich remembers the last time he came to Radegast train station in Poland's second-largest city - the day in 1944 he was forced into a cattle car and sent to Nazi Germany's Auschwitz death camp. "They promised us bread, so we came here ... when you're hungry, you'll eat grass. People in the ghetto became like animals," said Weinreich, one of some 400 survivors who on Sunday commemorated the liquidation of the Lodz ghetto 60 years ago. Before World War Two, Lodz's 223,000 Jews, accounting for a third of the city's population, formed the second-largest Jewish...

Commemoration of Lodz Ghetto Sunday By JPOST.COM STAFF AND ASSOCIATED PRESS Science and Technology Minister Ilan Shalgi will attend a ceremony commemorating the destruction of the Lodz ghetto Sunday. Polish Prime Minister Marek Belka and Lodz Mayor Jerzy Kropiwnicki will also attend the ceremony, which will be followed by a march from the Lodz cemetery to the train station from which Jews were sent to concentration camps during World War II. The Lodz Ghetto was established on February 8, 1940 to house the city's 230,000 Jews. On June 10, 1944 SS leader Heinrich Himmler ordered the liquidation of the ghetto....

Survivors recall Lodz ghetto horror The Polish city of Lodz is to hold a major Holocaust memorial ceremony on Sunday dedicated to the thousands of Jews and Roma persecuted by the Nazis in the ghetto there during World War II. BBC News Online's Sarah Shenker spoke to some of the survivors. Lodz ghetto inmates were tormented by hunger, exhaustion and fear every day. As the Nazi extermination programme accelerated, ghetto inmates were deported to death camps en masse and slaughtered, the last train leaving on 29 August 1944. Mass starvation gripped the ghetto's inmates (pic: Simon Wiesenthal Center) Renee Salt...

Holocaust survivors remember Poland's last ghetto By DPA WARSAW/LODZ - The history of the Polish city of Lodz would be incomplete without names like Rubinstein, Poznanski or Singer. Such 19th-century Jewish industrialists were among those who turned the small central Polish town into a booming city with a flourishing textile industry. No European city other than Warsaw had as many Jewish inhabitants as Lodz, Poland's second largest city. Before World War II the 223,000 Jews of Lodz - who often called themselves Lodzermensh - formed one-third of the city's population, living alongside Poles and Germans. Today, the Jewish cemetery in...

Lodz Ghetto, 60 years later By ETGAR LEFKOVITS Nearly 150,000 Jews were transported to Nazi death camps during World War II from the Radegast train station in Lodz, where a Holocaust memorial is under construction. The central Polish city of Lodz will at the end of the month mark 60 years since the liquidation of the Lodz Ghetto. The series of commemorations will climax with the inauguration of a major monument in memory of the Jews of Lodz at the site of a former freight train station from which the Germans sent nearly 150,000 Jews to death in the concentration...