Wokół jednego listu. Losy wiedeńskich chrześcijan w getcie łódzkim

Abstract

In the autumn of 1941 approx. 20,000 Jews were deported to the Łodź ghetto from the Reich and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Among them were highly assimilated individuals, including converts. A large group of Catholics arrived from Vienna and this text is devoted to them. A letter addressed to the Center for Aid to Non-Aryan Catholics, which operated at the Archbishopric of Vienna, became an impulse for writing this article. The Viennese Catholics concentrated around Regina Fuhrman, a member of the Carmelite secular order, and they established the Catholic Community. The Jewish administration of the ghetto allocated a prayer room to be used by all Christians in the ghetto. The Christians were deported to the death center in Chelmno nad Nerem on 9 May 1942 within the framework of a large-scale deportation campaign which encompassed unemployed Western-European Jews. Many of them volunteered to leave, maintaining family or religious ties.