Soviets Liberate Lodz: Only 900 of 200,000 Jews Survive

When Soviet troops entered Lodz on January 19, 1945, they found fewer than 900 Jews alive in a city that had contained one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe. The Lodz Ghetto, sealed by the Germans in April 1940, had held more than 200,000 people at its peak. By the time of liberation, nearly all of them were dead, killed by starvation, disease, or deportation to the Chelmno and Auschwitz extermination camps. The ghetto was unique among Nazi-imposed ghettos for both its longevity and the strategy of its controversial Jewish leader, Chaim Rumkowski. Appointed by the Germans as head of the Judenrat, the Jewish council that administered the ghetto's internal affairs, Rumkowski pursued a policy of "salvation through labor," arguing that making the ghetto indispensable to the German war effort would keep its inhabitants alive. He organized the ghetto into a vast industrial operation, with factories producing textiles, leather goods, metal products, and other supplies for the Wehrmacht. The strategy bought time but could not prevent the deportations. In early 1942, the Germans began transporting ghetto residents to the Chelmno death camp, where they were murdered in gas vans. Rumkowski cooperated with the selection process, delivering the elderly, the sick, and children under ten in a desperate attempt to save the working-age population. His speech of September 4, 1942, asking parents to surrender their children, remains one of the most harrowing documents of the Holocaust: "Give me your children... I must cut off limbs in order to save the body." The ghetto survived longer than almost any other in Nazi-occupied Europe, functioning until August 1944, when the Germans liquidated the remaining 67,000 inhabitants. Most were transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the majority were gassed on arrival. Rumkowski himself was sent to Auschwitz on one of the last transports and is believed to have been killed there, though accounts of his death vary. The fewer than 900 survivors found by Soviet forces had been kept alive to clean up the ghetto. Some had hidden in bunkers and attics during the final liquidation. The industrial complex that Rumkowski had built to save lives had merely prolonged the dying. Lodz stands as evidence of the fundamental futility of negotiating with a regime whose objective was total annihilation.