Łódź Ghetto

19 January 1945: the Red Army in Łódź

Troops of the Soviet 1st Belorussian Front entered Łódź on 19 January 1945, ending German occupation of the city during the Vistula–Oder offensive.

They found roughly 870 to 877 Jews still in Łódź — people retained in forced-labour cleanup units, and others who had survived in hiding. Among them was nine-year-old Sylvia Perelmuter, liberated the day before her tenth birthday after being concealed in a cellar with eleven other children.

Local residents helped suppress remaining German resistance, and demolition charges placed in some factories were prevented from being detonated.

A ghetto already emptied

The troops entered a city containing the remnants of a ghetto the Germans had liquidated through mass deportations in the summer of 1944 — not a functioning sealed ghetto with its original population.

About 160,000 Łódź Jews had been forced into the sealed ghetto, and more than 200,000 people passed through it over four years. Approximately 43,500 died there of starvation, disease and other conditions.

Counting the survivors

Authoritative sources differ slightly on the headcount found in the city: USHMM uses both 870 and "some 877", while Yad Vashem gives approximately 900.

Those hundreds were not the only survivors. USHMM estimates a further 5,000 to 7,000 Łódź Jews lived to liberation in camps or elsewhere.

The city began restoring services and forming a new administration within days.