Polish city of Lodz to commemorate liquidation of Jewish ghetto

This weekend, Poles will commemorate the 60th anniversary of the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto in Lodz by the Nazis. In 1939, Lodz had the second-biggest Jewish community in Europe, after Warsaw. 235,000 Jews lived there, a third of the city's total population. Only around 5,000 to 7,000 survived the German occupation and the ghetto, the first on Polish soil, established in 1940. In the summer of 1944, the ghetto was liquidated and most of the remaining Jews were sent to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Today, Lodz's Jewish community counts only 250 members.