A decree on the final liquidation of Łódź Ghetto was issued by Heinrich Himmler in the spring of 1944. At the time, 76,000 people resided there. Preparations for murdering the remaining residents of the ghetto had been made earlier.
Copyrights
fot. z kolekcji Stowarzyszenie Żydowski Instytut Historyczny
In the spring of 1944, the Germans began preparations to re-open the extermination center in Chełmno and the first transport of Jews from Łódź was sent there on 23 June 1944. By 14 July 1944, ten transports of over 7,000 Jews were sent to Chełmno and exterminated. Putting a halt to the deportations did not mean abandoning plans to liquidate the ghetto. Already on 5 August the Jewish Police received an order to gather people for transports. At that time, however, trains set off from the Radegast station to Auschwitz. No armed rebellion took place in the Łódź Ghetto, and yet people did resist Nazi order by seeking hideouts and ignoring the calls for assemblies for deportations.
By 29 August, 67,000 Jews from the Łódź Ghetto were sent to Auschwitz. Chaim Mordechai Rumkowski with his family left with one of the last transports.
The ghetto was no more, but over one thousand people remained there—while some were sent to labor camps in the Third Reich, a group of approximately 700 people were ordered to stay and tidy up the ghetto area. Many of them managed to hide and survive until the liberation of Łódź by the Red army on 19 January 1945.
Over 200,000 were imprisoned in the Łódź Ghetto in the period of four years of its existence. Over 45,000 died there of hunger and exhaustion. According to the estimates, about 7,000 residents of the Łódź Ghetto survived.