Radegast station

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Radegast is a former train station in Łódź, Poland. During World War II, in the course of the Holocaust, the station, located at the time near the boundary of the Łódź Ghetto, was the place where the Jewish inhabitants of Łódź were gathered for transport out of the Ghetto and the city to the Kulmhof and Auschwitz death camps. About 150,000 Jews passed through the station on the way to their deaths in the period from 16 January 1942 to August 29, 1944. The station thus had the same significance for Łódź as the much better known Umschlagplatz had for Warsaw.

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. In 2005 a museum located in the station building was opened. On August 28, 2005, a monument commemorating the Jewish victims who passed through the station was unveiled.