Before the outbreak of World War II, Lodz was home to approximately 230,000 Jews, constituting nearly one-third of the city's population. With the onset of the occupation, the city's Jewish community was subjected to increasing repression. In February 1940, a plan was published to create a "closed district" within the Old Town and Bałuty.
The ghetto was a forced labour camp with an extensive administrative apparatus. Among the dozens of departments of the Jewish administration, the Archive Department played a crucial role, collecting regulations and documenting life in the ghetto. In 1943, a group of scholars gathered around the Archive Department attempted to create an Encyclopaedia of the Ghetto. A list of planned entries was then compiled – nearly 400 of these had been completed by the time of the ghetto's liquidation.
Years later, researchers from the Philip Friedman Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Lodz undertook to complete and expand the work begun by the ghetto prisoners.
The publication "Lexicon of the Łódź Ghetto" (edited by Dr Adam Sitarek and Dr Ewa Wiatr, in cooperation with Dr Izabela Terela) is a rich resource on the history of "closed district" in Lodz. The authors have compiled and classified entries by the following categories: biographies, places, institutions, events, etc., supplementing the content with a timeline of the ghetto's history, maps and a list of streets located in the ghetto (along with pre-war and occupation-era names).
The publication is accompanied by a website with an extensive bibliography on the topic.
