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Authors: Wendy Holden
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stadium walls – as could the sound of gunfire as any who protested were executed on the spot.
While the family were waiting their turn to be transported, German officials called for strong young men to volunteer to travel with the children and the elderly for ‘important work’. To their horror, Rachel’s eighteen-year-old brother Moniek jumped up and offered his services. He insisted that the children might not be so afraid if he accompanied them. ‘We said, “Don’t go back! Stay here!” and he said, “No, I have to go and help.” They took him awaywith the children.’ Their last sight of handsome young Moniek was of him being driven away on a bus full of children, singing nursery rhymes in an attempt to calm them down.
The distraught family could have had no idea at the time, but those selected that day were transported to Chełmno, renamed Kulmhof by the Germans, a specialist SS killing centre less than a hundred kilometres northwest of Łódź. Approximately 150,000 people were to be exterminated at Chełmno during the course of the war – either shot as they were lined up beside burial pits or locked inside a specially adapted lorry that was then filled with exhaust fumes from the vehicle’s engine as it was driven to a clearing in the middle of Rzuchów Forest. Some 70,000 of the victims came from Łódź. It was many years after the war before the family eventually discovered what had happened to their cherished Moniek.
‘They sent them to a forest and they shot them all,’ Sala said. ‘My brother was one of the ones to clear the mess and after it was cleared they killed those young men too. They told him to remove his clothes and the authorities found his clothes after it was done. He was the first to be killed in our family.’
Unaware of Moniek’s fate but still turned inside out by his loss, the Abramczyk family were in a sorrowful daze as they were transported – minus one – to Łódź.
Conditions in the new ghetto, situated in a slum area of the old town, were shocking for Rachel even by comparison with Warsaw, where an estimated 70,000 Jews had died of starvation between 1941 and 1942. She said she’d never fully understood what hunger meant until she arrived in Łódź. Large signs at the heavily guarded gates warned, ‘Jewish residential area. Entry forbidden.’ The soldiers posted every five hundred metres had instructions to shoot on sight anyone who tried to escape.
Inside the barbed wire barricades some 230,000 people were squeezed together in abysmal conditions in tenement buildings on mud or cobbled streets. Windowless apartments housed entirecommunities. The air was rancid with the smell of sewage and rotting people – alive and dead. The ghetto’s scarecrow inhabitants seemed too catatonic to tend to their appearance any longer. Loose skin hung from them like cloth and many looked so insubstantial silhouetted against the light that it seemed as if the breeze might blow them away. Sala said, ‘The ones that had been there the longest looked awful. They were undernourished and swollen with hunger. They could hardly walk and they had yellow faces hanging down. It was pitiful.’
Three steep wooden bridges spanned the ghetto’s main streets, which were forbidden to non-Aryans, and trams passed beneath them, but their passengers weren’t allowed off and could only watch helplessly as conditions in the ghetto worsened. Having come from homes filled with colour and vibrancy, all the Abramczyk family could see around them now were shadow people and monochrome hues, as if the very pigments of life had been bleached out by hunger and cold.
Łódź ghetto walkway for Jews to avoid Aryan streets
As with almost every ghetto they created, the Nazis insisted that the Jews pay for their own upkeep, so their chief purpose became industry in return for a chance to live. There were more than a hundred factories behind the fences that ringed the perimeter and everyone between the
While the family were waiting their turn to be transported, German officials called for strong young men to volunteer to travel with the children and the elderly for ‘important work’. To their horror, Rachel’s eighteen-year-old brother Moniek jumped up and offered his services. He insisted that the children might not be so afraid if he accompanied them. ‘We said, “Don’t go back! Stay here!” and he said, “No, I have to go and help.” They took him awaywith the children.’ Their last sight of handsome young Moniek was of him being driven away on a bus full of children, singing nursery rhymes in an attempt to calm them down.
The distraught family could have had no idea at the time, but those selected that day were transported to Chełmno, renamed Kulmhof by the Germans, a specialist SS killing centre less than a hundred kilometres northwest of Łódź. Approximately 150,000 people were to be exterminated at Chełmno during the course of the war – either shot as they were lined up beside burial pits or locked inside a specially adapted lorry that was then filled with exhaust fumes from the vehicle’s engine as it was driven to a clearing in the middle of Rzuchów Forest. Some 70,000 of the victims came from Łódź. It was many years after the war before the family eventually discovered what had happened to their cherished Moniek.
‘They sent them to a forest and they shot them all,’ Sala said. ‘My brother was one of the ones to clear the mess and after it was cleared they killed those young men too. They told him to remove his clothes and the authorities found his clothes after it was done. He was the first to be killed in our family.’
Unaware of Moniek’s fate but still turned inside out by his loss, the Abramczyk family were in a sorrowful daze as they were transported – minus one – to Łódź.
Conditions in the new ghetto, situated in a slum area of the old town, were shocking for Rachel even by comparison with Warsaw, where an estimated 70,000 Jews had died of starvation between 1941 and 1942. She said she’d never fully understood what hunger meant until she arrived in Łódź. Large signs at the heavily guarded gates warned, ‘Jewish residential area. Entry forbidden.’ The soldiers posted every five hundred metres had instructions to shoot on sight anyone who tried to escape.
Inside the barbed wire barricades some 230,000 people were squeezed together in abysmal conditions in tenement buildings on mud or cobbled streets. Windowless apartments housed entirecommunities. The air was rancid with the smell of sewage and rotting people – alive and dead. The ghetto’s scarecrow inhabitants seemed too catatonic to tend to their appearance any longer. Loose skin hung from them like cloth and many looked so insubstantial silhouetted against the light that it seemed as if the breeze might blow them away. Sala said, ‘The ones that had been there the longest looked awful. They were undernourished and swollen with hunger. They could hardly walk and they had yellow faces hanging down. It was pitiful.’
Three steep wooden bridges spanned the ghetto’s main streets, which were forbidden to non-Aryans, and trams passed beneath them, but their passengers weren’t allowed off and could only watch helplessly as conditions in the ghetto worsened. Having come from homes filled with colour and vibrancy, all the Abramczyk family could see around them now were shadow people and monochrome hues, as if the very pigments of life had been bleached out by hunger and cold.
Łódź ghetto walkway for Jews to avoid Aryan streets
As with almost every ghetto they created, the Nazis insisted that the Jews pay for their own upkeep, so their chief purpose became industry in return for a chance to live. There were more than a hundred factories behind the fences that ringed the perimeter and everyone between the
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