Lodz; Monday, 25 July, 2016

After breakfast I headed back up towards Manufaktura and headed to the former palace of Izrael Posnanski to have a look around the museum that is now housed in part of the site.

Having looked round the museum I picked up the tram out to the north of the city centre and the former railway station at Radegast.

In the 4.5 square kilometres between the site of the Izrael’s factory and the station at Radegast the Nazi’s created the second largest Jewish ghetto, which included a section for Gypsies. When time came for the Nazi’s to liquidate the ghetto and send the innocent residents to their deaths it was from Radegast station that they were loaded onto cattle wagons and sent to the gas chambers or Chelmno and Auschwitz.

Today the station is a memorial to those who lived and died in the Ghetto and in the gas chambers. On a desk in the former station building are thick folders that have facsimiles of the lists that were drawn up showing the names of all the people to be deported to their deaths – the sheer size and number of the folders (and they only represent a fraction of the victims) is horrific, as are the example Cattle wagons that are sat in the station as if awaiting their next consignment.

After looking round the site I was intending on wandering back through the former ghetto site, but something made me decide to walk back to the tram stop and I’m glad I did as within 10 minutes a torrential downpour started. It was so heavy that I thought it couldn’t last that long and by the tram made it back into the city centre it would have calmed down, but I was wrong and by the time the tram reached near the hotel it was, if anything, more intense. Rather than dashing for the hotel and getting soaked to the skin I, instead, headed for the closer shopping centre.

45 minutes later, after the worse of the thunderstorm had passed over, the rain was still chucking it down and I realised that I was going to be stuck in the centre for a long time if I didn’t just brave the 70 or so meter walk across the hotel I could be stuck there for hours so, with a slight reduction in the intensity of the rain, I made a dash for it. I got to within 20 meters of the hotel when the rain picked up its intensity again and by the time I reached the cover of the hotel I was soaked.

I squelched up to my room and, after a very warm shower, changed into some dry clothes. I decided to sit out the storm in my room, which by 7pm meant sitting it out in the onsite restaurant as the rain, which had been chucking it down for four hours by now, showed no sign of easing off.

After dinner in the restaurant I headed back to my room and looked out of the window to see that the rain was finally starting to ease off – a little too late to do much with it, so instead I watched a bit of TV before turning in for an early night.