An eye-witness account of the destruction of the Jewish community of Lodz by a man who was deported from that Polish industrial center last August was given here today. The witness was Jacob Hirenberg, a leader of the Jewish Socialist Bund, who has just arrived in Belgium after being liberated from a German concentration camp, to which he was sent from the Oswiecim death camp, his first stop after being deported from Lodz.
In May of 1940, Nirenberg, disclosed, the 158,000 Jews of Lodz were confined in a ghette. Later 50,000 Jews from other countries of Europe were brought there. about a quarter of the over 200,000 ghetto residents died from starvation and disease and hundreds were shot, From December 15, 1941 to August 8, 1942, over 71,000 Jews were taken from Lodz to the Chelmno death camp and murdered. From August, 1943, to July 1944, about 8,000 were sent to Oswiecim.
The last large transport of deportees left lodz for Oswiecim and Birkenan in August, 1944, and Nirenberg and 90 of his co-workers in the underground were among them. The transport also included 8,000 children under the age of ten.
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