I. THEMES OF ŁÓDŹ
Piotr Piluk
Łódź Bałuty. Memory of the Shoah in an Urban Landscape
Photographs animate memory and aid in evoking images that are
helpful to it. Passing time causes memory to undergo changes. These
changes occur simultaneously, but also independently and virtually
unconnected, in the memory of Poles and Jews alike. Polish memory
appears to be less wounded, which may perhaps be a simplification, and
Jewish memory has for many years - for a variety of reasons - been functioning outside of Poland. The same is true with regard to the memory of
the ghetto in Łódź.
The Bałuty district of Łódź created its own specific character which
made the district recognizable and distinctive in the urban landscape.
Throughout its history, the Bałuty architecture developed somewhat haphazardly and with great impulsiveness, undergoing many different transformations. Within a few decades it had grown from a small settlement
into a big Jewish district inhabited mostly by not very affluent people.
During World War II the Nazis established a ghetto here. Even today the
Bałuty district bears the stigma of war. The world of the Bałuty Jews was
irrevocably annihilated by the Germans who took it on themselves to
clear up the town according to their vision.
Many sites connected with the Holocaust of Jews in Łódź have
changed over the past few dozen years or have entirely and irretrievably
disappeared. In recent times several of these places have been commemorated, although still, looking at a map of Jewish martyrdom in Łódź, one
would be justified in thinking that many important sites are missing. One
example is the architectural landscape of the district, in which for four
horrible years Jews lived and died in the ghastly conditions of the ghetto.
Contemporary photographs freeze images for eternity. Yet these are
not images of the ghetto, but stills that are created out of the need for
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remembering the ghetto. They show authentic objects from that time, but
after the passage of years. The intention behind them is that they constitute a reflection on the past of a place.
The former Żydowska (Jewish) Street was renamed after the last war;
it is now the Street of the Fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto. Embarking on
a visit to the former Jewish district and later ghetto, one wonders: Why
such a name? Are not the Jews of the Łódź ghetto, its victims, worthy of
a street in their own name? Is not the change of the name of the street
from "Jewish" to "Fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto", in Łódź where the
ghetto was the second largest in size in Polish territory, perhaps a simplification? Perhaps the case is quite the contrary: the new name is a reference to an important and recognizable symbol, such as the Warsaw
Ghetto Uprising undoubtedly is?
To answer these questions is to touch directly on the issue of the
memory of the Holocaust in Łódź. The genesis of these questions is not
without reason, too, for the specificity of the ghettoes in Warsaw and
Łódź is meaningfully different. Is any of this of importance, however, in
the face of the death of thousands of people in horrible conditions? How
important is the difference for us - Poles and Jews - today, when our
chief desire is to foster memory of those times?
grafika znajduje siǗ w wersji papierowej pisma
Gestapo seat in the ghetto in Bałucki Square
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Piotr Piluk
There is a granite plaque immured into the wall of a small gray building in Bałucki Square. It marks the wartime seat of the Gestapo police
and the Schupo in the ghetto. The inscription appears to be of strictly
informative nature. The place seldom sees expressions of human memory - mainly when flowers are brought by representatives of Jewish and
combatant organizations and the municipal authorities. Despite the fact
that the plaque is situated in the very center of the non-existent ghetto, it
provides very weak testimonial of its existence.
In Lutomierska Street, near the Old Town church, there stands a small
monument with a bilingual inscription in Polish and German. It commemorates the Jews from Hamburg, who were deported in wartime to the
Łódź ghetto. Its location may be justified by the fact that the Germans
changed the name of Lutomierska Street to Hamburgerstrasse. The monument was inaugurated in 1994, on the fiftieth anniversary of the liquidation of the ghetto; the original idea came from a group of residents of
Hamburg who had come to Łódź. Presently, the place plays no role in
either Polish or German, or Jewish memory. It seems entirely foreign.
The artificial space of today's Staromiejski (Old Town) Park, which
is the outcome of the Germans having leveled in 1940 a part of the town
in order to separate the ghetto from the rest of the city, cuts in deeply like
a blade into the big-city architecture. Even today it constitutes a distinct
boundary between the Jewish world - that of the ghetto - and the Aryan
world, a boundary that the Germans had demarcated when establishing
their new order during the last war. The Staromiejski Park is the place of
the oldest synagogue in Łódź, erected in the early years of the 19th century, standing in a maze of narrow noisy lanes. Today it is filled with
greenery, closed off at the north end by the lifeless space of the Old
Market, now devoid of its original architecture replaced after the war
with modern buildings. There is little of the big-town ambience here. At
the edge of the park there is a monument designed by Gustaw Zemła. It
stands near the spot of the former synagogue. The monument depicts
Moses, elevated on a pedestal, holding the tablets of the Decalogue - in
contradiction to one of the principal tenets of Judaism, which is the ban
on figural representations. Hence, the sculpture of an eminent Polish
artist appears to be a less than fortunate choice, a fine gesture on the part
of the municipal authorities wishing to commemorate the city's former
inhabitants, but one which has taken on a barely acceptable form, even if
the inauguration ceremonies were attended by the then Chief Rabbi of the
Republic of Poland, Pichas Menachem Joskowicz. A solemn inaugura-
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grafika znajduje siǗ w wersji papierowej pisma
The Decalogue Monument in Staromiejski Park; designed by Gustaw Zemła,
executed in 1995
tion followed by silence, nothing. Except for children playing ball in the
summer, for which purpose the wall shoring up the slope where the statue of the prophet stands is exceptionally well suited. Another monument
to oblivion.
The Jewish cemetery holds a special place in the memory of the
tragedy of the inhabitants of the Bałuty district of Łódź. Just in front of
the gate leading to the house of eternity (term originates from Hebrew)
there stands a monument to the Jews of Łódź, victims of the Holocaust.
The author of the design is Jewish artist Adam Muszka, who was associated in the years following the war with the Jewish Social and Cultural
Society in Poland and the Jidysz Buch (Yiddish Book) publishers. The
symbolism of the severe form made in light-colored sandstone is
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Piotr Piluk
grafika znajduje siǗ w wersji papierowej pisma
Victims of the Holocaust Memorial in the Jewish Cemetery in Łódź; designed
by Adam Muszka, executed about 1963
obvious. The shape of the tall and slender obelisk is strongly reminiscent
of crematorium chimneys, while the relief decorating the adjoining
pedestal depicts a mass of shattered leafless branches - a moving metaphor of death and the Holocaust - from which a single shoot of new life
grows. Hope of resurrection. On the pedestal, and in opposition to the crematorium chimney, there rises a menorah, which is one of the symbols of
the Jewish nation and the emblem of the restored state of Israel after 1948.
It is virtually this monument alone that embodies in the present the
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remembrance of the tragedy suffered by the Jews of Łódź. It is here that
twice a year commemorative ceremonies are held, on the anniversaries of
the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto in April and the liquidation of the Łódź
ghetto in August. These ceremonies are initiated by the Jewish community of Łódź, participants including combatant organizations, city authorities, the army and boy and girl scouts.
There is one other spot in the Jewish cemetery - the ghetto field,
where tens of thousands of Jews from the Jewish ghetto, victims of
hunger, illness, bestial torture and barbarian executions, were buried. In
the early 1990s, a project to commemorate the graves was partly implemented, but its conception appears for a variety of reasons to be, again,
less than fortunate.
The cemetery wall is also a place bearing witness to the past. Even
today there are pits dug alongside it, prepared by the Germans for the last
few hundred Jews that were left in the ghetto after its liquidation, their
task being to clean up the place. The taking of Łódź by the Soviet armies
rescued these people from certain execution. These unfilled graves are
a telling sign today, visualizing the scale of Nazi crimes in Łódź: tens of
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Seat of the criminal police (Kripo) in the ghetto, situated in the Roman-Catholic
presbytery building in Kościelna Square
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Piotr Piluk
thousands of the ghetto dead in the nearby sections of the cemetery and
the few hundred who avoided that same fate.
And, finally, there is individual, Jewish memory. On the inside wall
near the gate survivors have for years been placing plaques in memory of
the murdered members of their families. Many plaques appeared after
1989, once restrictions on travel from the West were lifted.
A place of oblivion, entirely absent from the memory of Łódź residents, is the Radogoszcz district railway station, from where about seventy thousand of Jews from Łódź started on their final journey in the
summer of 1944, heading for death in the Nazi concentration camp at
Auschwitz. Another place of oblivion is the deserted and neglected hospital in Łagiewnicka Street, whose broken windows can be seen from
afar. There is also a little red house, the presbytery building of the
Roman-Catholic church in Kościelny (Church) Square, where the
Germans set up a station of the criminal police (Kripo). Jews were tortured here in order to get them to tell what property they owned, the often
inconsequential belongings they needed desperately in order to survive.
There are many more places like that, because the architecture inside the
ghetto has been preserved in fairly good condition, a mute witness and
simultaneously a participant of the Jewish tragedy. The streets, the cobblestones, the courtyards and gates of the townhouses, all assure an
immediacy of contact with the authentic space of the ghetto despite the
sixty years that have passed since its liquidation. This space has not
avoided transformations, but it remains clear; in itself, it constitutes
a veritable, anonymous monument, an integral component of the urban
fabric of Łódź. Nothing like that exists in Warsaw - the district of the
ghetto there has disappeared and virtually nothing remains. Yet the memory of the Warsaw ghetto is everlasting while few remember the ghetto
in Łódź.