Radogoszcz station (german: Bahnhof Radegast) is a historic

railway station Rail transport (also known as train transport) is a means of transport that transfers passengers and goods on wheeled vehicles running on rails, which are incorporated in tracks. In contrast to road transport, where the vehicles run on a prep ...

Łódź Łódź, also rendered in English as Lodz, is a city in central Poland and a former industrial centre. It is the capital of Łódź Voivodeship, and is located approximately south-west of Warsaw. The city's coat of arms is an example of cant ...

, Poland. The station, which was originally built between 1926 and 1937, was used extensively during

The Holocaust The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; ...

. It served as the '' Umschlagplatz'' for transporting

Jews Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

from the

Łódź Ghetto The Łódź Ghetto or Litzmannstadt Ghetto (after the Nazi German name for Łódź) was a Nazi ghetto established by the German authorities for Polish Jews and Roma following the Invasion of Poland. It was the second-largest ghetto in all of ...

to the extermination camps during Operation Reinhard. The "loading platform" is in Marysin, a neighbourhood in the city's Bałuty district.

The Holocaust

During

Second World War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposi ...

, the station was situated just outside the

– one of the biggest Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Europe. The ''Umschlagplatz'' at the ''Radegast'' station was the place where predominantly Jewish inhabitants of Łódź including thousands of persons expelled from across

occupied Poland ' ( Norwegian: ') is a Norwegian political thriller TV series that premiered on TV2 on 5 October 2015. Based on an original idea by Jo Nesbø, the series is co-created with Karianne Lund and Erik Skjoldbjærg. Season 2 premiered on 10 Octobe ...

were gathered for deportation directly to

Chełmno Chełmno (; older en, Culm; formerly ) is a town in northern Poland near the Vistula river with 18,915 inhabitants as of December 2021. It is the seat of the Chełmno County in the Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivodeship. Due to its regional impor ...

(Kulmhof) and Auschwitz German extermination camps. Approximately 200,000 Polish, Austrian, German, Luxemburg and Czech Jews, and many Roma, Sinti and Lalleri passed through the station on the way to their deaths in the period from January 16, 1942, to August 29, 1944. The collection point had the same significance for Łódź as the better known '' Umschlagplatz'' had for the

Warsaw Ghetto The Warsaw Ghetto (german: Warschauer Ghetto, officially , "Jewish Residential District in Warsaw"; pl, getto warszawskie) was the largest of the Nazi ghettos during World War II and the Holocaust. It was established in November 1940 by the G ...

Memorial

In 2004, the commemoration ceremonies on the sixtieth anniversary of the destruction of the Łódź Ghetto in 1944 and the departure of the last transport from Radegast spurred efforts to transform the former station into a Holocaust memorial. On August 28, 2005, a monument commemorating the Jewish victims who passed through the station was unveiled, based on design by Czesław Bielecki, and featuring the Tunnel of the Deported. The renovated station building serves as one of the divisions of the Łódź Museum of Independence.

References

{{Coord, 51.80214, N, 19.480133, E, source:plwiki_region:PL_scale:5000, format=dms, display=title Holocaust locations in Poland Disused railway stations in Poland

Poland Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It is divided into 16 administrative provinces called voivodeships, covering an area of . Poland has a population of over 38 million and is the fifth-most populou ...

Monuments and memorials in Poland Łódź Ghetto Railway stations in Łódź Holocaust trains