In September 1939 the Germans annexed the Polish city of Lódz and gave it a new name: Litzmannstadt. They burned down its synagogues and herded its 170,000 Jews into the most neglected, poverty-ridden slum section of town. The ghetto was originally established as a transitional measure, as the Nazis vowed to "cleanse" the city of Jews and "burn out this pestilent abscess." However, the ghetto was maintained for four years.

Wooden fences and barbed wire permanently sealed the Lódz Ghetto in the spring of 1940. Inside, the mostly wooden, overcrowded houses had no toilets, no running water, no sewage. The use of electricity was forbidden at night. Minimal food allocations created chronic starvation. Rats infested refuse dumps. Dysentery, tuberculosis, and typhus epidemics raged periodically. Heart disease, brought on by constant tension and hardship, claimed even more lives. Some Jews chose suicide by "going to the wire"; guards shot anyone approaching the fence.

The head of the ghetto's Jewish Council, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, hoped to keep Jews alive by turning Lódz into a giant slave-labor workshop for the Germans. Nonetheless, liquidation measures began in 1942, when 55,000 Lódz Jews were sent to the gas vans of Chelmno, Poland. By May 1944 only 77,000 remained alive. As the Soviet Army approached, the Nazis consigned the Jews who remained to the ovens of Auschwitz.