Hundreds marked the 65th anniversary of Nazi Germany's liquidation of the Lodz Ghetto on Thursday. The ghetto was the first established by the Nazis in Poland and used primarily for forced labor. Participants marched from the Radegast railway station - where the ghetto's occupants had been shipped in and shipped out - to Survivors' Park, where the ceremony took place. It featured the unveiling of a unique monument symbolizing a six-armed Jewish Star of David with 3,351 plaques dedicated to Poles recognised by Israel as Righteous Among the Nations for saving Jews during the Holocaust.
Of the 220,000 Jews from Poland and other European countries who were brought there, 50,000 died there from exhaustion, hunger and disease. Most of the rest were sent to their deaths in the gas chambers of the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Chelmno concentration camps. Only 830 people survived the Lodz ghetto's liquidation.
Before the Holocaust, the city's 231,000 Jews made up Poland's second largest Jewish community and more than a third of Lodz's population of 672,000. Today, only 350 Jews live there.