90 granite plates were mounted onto the places which once delimited the borders of the Łódź Ghetto, just one day before the 70th anniversary of its liquidation in August, 2014.

Litzmannstadt was the German name given to Łódź by Adolf Hitler on the 11th of April, 1940. Out of all the ghettos created by Germans across Europe, the Łódź Ghetto existed for the longest period of time. August 29th, 1944 is considered to be the date of its liquidation. According to various sources, 145 thousand people perished in the Łódź Ghetto, with only 7 to 13 thousand survivors.

The curator of the project, Wiktor Skok, explains:

"The initial idea came from me and my JUDE band. On a certain day – or night – without asking for anybody’s permission, we wanted to mark out the ghetto’s contours. At the time, we managed to get our hands on all kinds of testimonies, scraps of information, and finally, old maps. The second half of the 1990s certainly wasn’t an easy time to access this kind of information. We searched for traces ourselves, we tried to reconstruct it from fractions of data, and various fragments… We would go to the Redegast station [the Marysin station from which people were transported to the camps in Chełmno by the Ner river and to Auschwitz-Birkenau], which at the time was an abandoned building, surrounded by a dump for construction debris. From the mid-1980s, I used to enter the Jewish cemetery through a hole in the fence, and later I spent some time there as I was working on the renovation of Israel Poznański’s family grave. No, it was not some kind of a methodical building, or a reconstruction of history. I was interested in the alternative stories of the city, which ran parallel to those proclaimed officially. I was educated during a period when the official discourse only told the story of a revolutionary, 'red' [Communist] Łódź."

The Germans tooks over Łódź on the 8th of September, 1939, and the city was renamed Litzmannstadt in honour of General Karl von Litzmann, who had fought a battle near the city during World War I. Almost immediately, currency trade was limited, and Jews were forbidden to trade in leather and textile goods. Next, the doors of all housing spaces which were home to Jewish families had to be marked, and Jewish people were ordered to wear an armband bearing the star of David, regardless of their age and sex. In the following months, they were forbidden to trade, to walk on the Adolf Hitler Straße (the name given to the main street of Łodź under Nazi occupation, present-day Piotrkowska street), to spend time in parks, and to use public transport.

In early February 1940, Jews were gathered on the territory of the ghetto, and through to the 30th of April – the date of the final closing of the ghetto walls – 160,320 people were collected there, 153,849 of whom were originally from Łódź. Throughout the years that followed, Jews from across the voievodship of Łódź were also transported there, as well as those from liquidated ghettos in other cities, and even Jewish citizens from other occupied countries. In 1941, a group of five thousand Roma and Sinti people were also moved into the ghetto.

Skok goes on to comment:

"In the early 2000s, I shared my idea with some people engaged in the official activities devoted to restoring the memory of the Jews of Łódź. The concept then ceased to be our conspiracy. It won the interest of Joanna Podolska, who was a journalist for the Łódź edition of the Wyborcza daily at the time. Thanks to her initiative, in 2004, during the 65th anniversary of the Łódź Ghetto, the pavements of Łódź were painted with inscriptions that said "Litzmannstadt Getto 1940-1944”. The signs were created by volunteers and students of Bałuty schools, with the assistance of municipal authorities and the Gazeta Wyborcza daily. I did not take a direct part, but I was happy to hear about the engagement of children and youth. Mounting the granite plates straight into the pavement is a good way of crowning this project. The lapidary character is intentional. The aim is to mark out the scale of the ghetto within the city’s proportions. To show how huge an area played a part in the tragedy. After many adventures, after more than a decade, the project has been finalized in the end. Much has changed during this period. Remembering the Jewish community is no longer a taboo, it is now part of the conscious identity of the city"

The ghetto area encompassed 4.13 square kilometres, and it was located within the Bałuty and Old Town areas, the derelict districts of Łódź. The Litzmannstadt Ghetto was divided into three parts, with the Zgierska and Limanowskiego streets made exempt from its boundaries, as they constituted important urban communication routes (bridges were raised above these streets). The Germans cut off the entire sewage system - it was an especially heavily-guarded and tightly-sealed ghetto. The dwellers of the ghetto, from the age of 10 to 65, were forced to do slave labour for the occupiers, working 10 to 14 hours a day. The ghetto produced clothing, shoes and equipment for the army of the Third Reich. The total liquidation of the ghetto took place in August, 1944. According to various sources, only 7 to 13 thousand people survived.