Liquidation: Visualizing the Łódź Ghetto

Following the occupation of Poland in 1939, German authorities took steps to isolate Jews from the rest of the population by forcing them into ghettos. In February of 1940, they established the Łódź ghetto in the city of Łódź, Poland. They surrounded the ghetto with barbed-wire fencing, assigned special police units to guard the ghetto perimeter, and established more than 100 factories inside the ghetto to take advantage of the free, forced labor. By Spring 1940, about 200,000 Jews and some 5,000 Roma had been forcibly moved from their homes in various places in Europe and deported to this ghetto

Living Conditions

The living conditions were horrendous. Conditions included buildings with neither running water nor a sewer system, hard labor in factories, meager food rations, overcrowding and starvation. Over the course of four years more than 20 percent of the ghetto’s population died due to these conditions

Liquidation

In January 1942 deportations to killing centers began. German authorities deported Jews from Łódź to the nearby Chełmno killing center. By late September 1942, they had deported over 75,000 people. Major deportations then halted for months. In the summer of 1944, German officials “liquidated” the Łódź ghetto and deported almost all of the remaining population to the Chełmno and Auschwitz-Birkenau killing centers. When the Soviet Army troops arrived in Łódź in January 1945, they found only 877 Jews alive.

In early 2017, Sarah Maravetz and Gillian McCallion, students at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in the Master of Professional Studies in Information and Data Visualization were given data sets regarding the Łódź Ghetto and an assignment to design a data-based exhibit for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM).

As part of a residency at USHMM over five days in June 2017, they created a model and design plans with feedback from instructors and museum staff.

Over the next two years, the team from MICA met with the exhibitions team at USHMM who took on the task of building a larger model. A prototype of the exhibit was built and installed by the exhibition specialists at United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for the duration of July 2019.

Liquidation was conceived as a time-based data visualization installation to explore and understand the growth and destruction of the Łódź Ghetto in Poland between 1940 and 1944.   The early design featured fiber-optic cables with lights to represent individual residents of Łódź. The light strands dimmed with each resident’s death or deportation from Łódź, resulting in a dim room at the conclusion of WWII and the “liquidation” of the ghetto.  The intention of the work was both to memorialize those lives lost and to present the story of Łódź in an innovative way

A team of USHMM exhibitions specialists built many iterations and experimented with materials and technology.   During this iterative process, the design evolved several times; strands of LED lights replaced the original proposed fiber-optic cables. Rather than each strand representing an individual or group of individuals, the lines of LEDs on each strand move up or down with population change. The outline of the ghetto streets was added to the design, creating a backlit focal point on the ceiling from which the light strands are suspended. A timeline projection and water droplet animation were added to the floor beneath the installation.  

The finished installation is time-based and completes a cycle every 2 ¹/₂ minutes. For each month of time, the light strands pulse, the number of lights reflecting the fluctuation in population. The steady pulses of light falling from the ghetto’s borders above represent months. During each pulse-month, the height of the light depicts the relative size of the ghetto’s population at that time. 

A timeline is projected onto the floor beneath the installation, marking each month, 1940-1944. There is also an animation of droplets rippling in water projected above the timeline on the floor. The ripples show the relative scale of the departures from the ghetto each month.