On 21 March 2024, Jews from Łowicz and the surrounding area who were murdered by the German occupiers between 1940 and 1943 were commemorated.

The Institute of National Remembrance, together with the Warsaw Ghetto Museum, is creating a project to disseminate knowledge about the life, struggle and extermination of Polish Jews in the ghettos of German-occupied Poland. The social and educational action consists in commemorating the victims of the Holocaust in the towns and cities in the Mazowieckie Voivodeship where the ghettos were located.

During the ceremony, Dr Mateusz Szpytma, deputy president of the Institute of National Remembrance, recalled that the Germans destroyed not only the lives of the Jews of Łowicz, but also what was left after them. They burnt down the synagogue, ruined the Jewish cemetery (kirkut), and the matzevot were used to reinforce the banks of the Bzura River.

“Today, through this commemoration, the placement of this matzevah, we are in a sense overcoming this German occupation legacy by placing here information about all those inhabitants of Łowicz and the surrounding area. In this way, this matzevah returns in a symbolic way”, said Dr Mateusz Szpytma.

The Matzevah of Remembrance unveiled in Łowicz was co-financed by the Office for the Commemoration of Struggles and Martyrdom of the Institute of National Remembrance.

Researchers estimate that around 4,500 Jews lived in Łowicz in 1939.

The town was part of the territory of the Nazi General Government created in October 1939, in the Warsaw district. The Jews were first exposed to harassment and physical attacks, and then were subjected to the legislation that the Germans introduced in the area. Their workshops and workplaces were confiscated, their property was taken away; they were forbidden to practice religious observance or participate in school education. 

Over time, displaced people from areas incorporated into the Third Reich began to arrive in the town. The number of Jews in Łowicz increased from about 4,500 to about 8,200. In the spring of 1940, a ghetto was established in the centre of Łowicz. On 22 February 1941, the Jews of Łowicz were ordered to be relocated to the Warsaw ghetto. Those who survived the following months shared the fate of the other inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto, deported in the summer of 1942 to the Treblinka extermination camp. Only a few survived.

Adrian Andrzejewski