In the Lodz ghetto, the Nazi Germans massacred a young Jewish girl in September 1942 during the imposition of a "curfew".
The city of Lodz, located about 120 kilometers southwest of Warsaw, Poland, formed the second largest Jewish settlement in pre-war Poland after Warsaw; the Germans occupied Lodz one week after the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. In early February 1940, the Germans established a ghetto in the northeastern part of Łódź. Some 160,000 Jews, more than a third of the population, were forced into the small area. The Germans isolated the ghetto from the rest of Lodz with barbed wire fences. Special police units guarded the area around the ghetto, and the Jewish ghetto police conducted internal surveillance.
There was no running water or sewage system in the Lodz ghetto, and living conditions were poor due to hard labor, overcrowding, and starvation. The overwhelming majority of the ghetto's Jews worked in German factories, but received little food from their employers. In 1941-1942, another 40,000 Jews from other parts of the country were forcibly transferred to the Lodz ghetto and confined in isolated building blocks.
In January 1942, the German military authorities began deporting Jews from Lodz to the Heumno concentration camp, and by the end of September 1942 had deported some 70,000 Jews and 4,300 Roma. In the Heumno concentration camp, a detachment of the Special SS killed Jewish deportees with mobile poison gas trucks. Jews gathered at the ghetto assembly point before deportation. The Germans initially demanded that the Jewish Council compile a list of the deportees. Most of the deported Jews were poor, elderly, children, and women. Since the list alone could not meet the required quotas, the Germans requested a police sting operation. German military personnel shot and killed hundreds of Jews, including children, the elderly, and the sick, during the deportation operation.
There were no large-scale deportations from Lodz from September 1942 until May 1944, when it was liberated. The ghetto became a forced labor camp; in the spring of 1944, the Nazi Germans decided to purge the Lodz Ghetto. In June and July 1944, the Germans resumed deportations from the Lodz ghetto, and some 70,000 Jews were deported to Chelmno concentration camp. The Germans deported the surviving ghetto Jews to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination center in August 1944. Approximately 145,000 people in the Lodz Ghetto were massacred in the extermination camp.
