A GHETTO NAMED BALUTY (2008)

The Litzmannstadt Ghetto - today's Baluty

The Lodz ghetto was established in May 1940, and more than 160,000 Polish Jews were hermetically sealed inside. A year later, they were joined by transports from Prague, Vienna, Luxembourg, Berlin and other large German cities – a total of 200,000 Jews. The inhuman overcrowding, hunger and filth helped spread epidemics. The assimilated Central European Jews found themselves among the highly traditional local Hasidic population speaking a foreign language (Yiddish) and starved after a year in the ghetto. One half of these Czech Jews did not survive the first winter. They were consumed by hunger, filth and epidemic. In Lodz, the Prague Jews suffered from the Nazis' measures as well as at the hands of the Jewish ghetto authority, which hated them for being different. The reminiscences of members of the Prague transports to Lodz show the bare essence of suffering. Of five thousand deported Jews, only 240 desolate individuals survived the war.

In 2005, director Pavel Štingl visited the site of the former Litzmannstadt ghetto – today's Baluty district. To his surprise, the place looked much like it did in surviving wartime photographs. Living in the devastated houses was a very distinct social group which markedly differed from the residents of surrounding neighbourhoods in Poland's second-largest city...

"People say that Auschwitz was the worst, but that was no longer life at all", says one of the survivors in our film, adding: "In terms of actual living, Lodz was the worst because in Auschwitz we were just insects meant to be squashed...Today, I understand why they took us there. Because I have never seen such a terrible place anywhere else in the world. But I don't understand how people can live in Baluty today, now that it is no longer surrounded by a fence... Nobody is keeping them there, but there they are; and it has changed so little!"

The ghetto was liquidated in the summer of 1944. The last work gangs moved out everything that remained in the poor, pitiable homes and erased all traces of the four years of suffering, all traces left by the living and the dead. Unlike other concentration camps, which today are museums or an integral part of the landscape, following the war the former Litzmannstadt ghetto was resettled. New life stories were lived – in the same buildings marked by the stigma of the area's horrible past.

The current inhabitants of this part of Lodz represent a peculiar and socially dramatic microcosm of the town. People living nearby tend to be afraid of "Balutars". The neighbourhood is ruled by misery, unemployment, alcohol and violence. The documentary and photographs explore the life of the people living in this place and offer a timeless illustration of the half-life of suffering caused by racial hatred, war and the unique history of the entire twentieth century.