On the 78th anniversary of the liquidation of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto and the 80th anniversary of the so-called Allgemeine Gehsperre (ban on leaving homes for Jews), President Andrzej Duda emphasised in his message how important is to know the full truth about the Holocaust, protected from falsification and manipulation. He added that this truth will remain a warning against disregarding chauvinism and imperialism in any of their forms.

The letter was read out at Radegast station, from where death transports left for the extermination camps. Andrzej Duda noted that in the interwar period the Jewish community in Lodz numbered nearly 233,000 people. Most of them were imprisoned in the Lodz Ghetto.

“Slave labour, hunger, disease and violence by the Nazi executioners continually took their toll there. However, the most tragic moment of this ordeal was the action known as the Allgemeine Gehsperre. From 5 to 12 September 1942, the Germans deported 15 681 people from the Lodz Ghetto to the extermination centre in Chelmno on the Ner”, wrote the president.

The Litzmannstadt Ghetto was established by the Germans in February 1940. It was the second largest ghetto in Poland, after Warsaw, and the longest-lasting ghetto on Polish territory. Initially, 160,000 people were confined there. Later, many Jewish intellectuals from the Czech Republic, Germany, Austria and Luxembourg and 5,000 Roma from Austria were imprisoned in Litzmannstadt. In total, more than 200,000 people were locked up in the ghetto.

Andrzej Duda pointed out that the biographies of the Nazi architects and executors of the genocide contribute to the picture of the moral and intellectual decline of German society in the 1930s and 1940s.

“This is why the full truth about the Holocaust, protected from falsification and manipulation, is so important. By itself, it has no power to prevent such terrible crimes in the future. However, it is and will remain a conscience-shaking warning against disregarding chauvinism and imperialism in any of their forms”, stressed the President.

Arkadiusz Słomczyński