8 August (Tuesday) The 80th anniversary of Dawid Sierakowiak’s death
11.00 AM – Kaddish at Dawid Sierakowiak’s tomb [PL]
The prayer will be delivered by Dawid Szychowski, the Rabbi of Łódź, and Marian Turski, Dawid Sierakowiak’s schoolmate.
Venue: The Jewish Cemetery | Bracka 40
12.00 AM – A walking tour of the Jewish Cemetery [PL]
Host: Justyna Tomaszewska | Just Lodz
Entrance: a Tzedakah of 10 PLN toward saving the monuments of the Jewish Cemetery
Venue: The Jewish Cemetery | Bracka 40
6.00 PM – Dziennik Sierakowiaka – the screening of [Sierakowiak’s diary], dir. Michał Bukojemski (Poland 2016, 57’) [PL/ENG]
Free entrance.
Venue: The Marek Edelman Dialogue Center in Łódź | Wojska Polskiego 83
24 August (Thursday)
12.00 AM – In search of the past at the State Archive in Łódź – a workshop especially for the second– and third–generation family members of the Survivors [PL]
Registration at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Venue: State Archive in Łódź | pl. Wolności 1
Organizer: State Archive in Łódź and The Marek Edelman Dialogue Center in Łódź
A workshop in Polish, aimed at those who are interested in discovering their roots, and whose stories are connected with Łódź and the local ghetto. After a general introduction, the participants will receive guidelines that will help them continue genealogical research. Prior registration required.
25 August (Friday)
10.00 AM – Following Zosia Lubińska into the Łódź ghetto – a walking tour with Zofia Lubińska–Rosset, a Survivor [PL]
Host: Joanna Podolska | The Marek Edelman Dialogue Center
Registration at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Start: Łódź | Urzędnicza 9
Zofia Lubińska–Rosset survived the Litzmannstadt ghetto. In 2022, she released her memoirs entitled “Okruchy pamięci” [Shreds of memory]. Her story about life and the atrocities of the Second World War is another publication in the “Ludzie” [People] series released by the Dialogue Center. When the war broke out, Zosia was only six. In 1940, she ended up in the Litzmannstadt ghetto, together with her parents. She survived the Allgemeine Gehsperre, the liquidation of the ghetto, and then the Ravensbrűck, Königs Wusterhausen, and Oranienburg–Sachsenhausen concentration camps. For a long time, she had been reluctant to speak about what she had been through. Many years later, she decided to tell her story. The tour will proceed along the same route which the young Zosia followed daily, leading from her home on Urzędnicza to the place where she worked on Brzezińska (presently Wojska Polskiego).
12.00 AM – In search of the past at the State Archive in Łódź – a workshop especially for the second– and third–generation family members of the Survivors [ENG]
Registration at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Venue: State Archive in Łódź | pl. Wolności 1
Organizer: State Archive in Łódź and The Marek Edelman Dialogue Center in Łódź
A workshop in English, aimed at those who are interested in discovering their roots, and whose stories are connected with Łódź and the local ghetto. After a general introduction, the participants will receive guidelines that will help them continue genealogical research. Prior registration required.
6.00 PM – The Letter for the living / List do potomnych – monodrame by Jane Arnfield based on Chava Rosenfarb’s Tree of Life [PL/ENG]
Free entrance.
Venue: The Marek Edelman Dialogue Center in Łódź | Wojska Polskiego 83
Jane Arnfield is an academic, performance artist and director. She is Associate Professor of theater at the Northumbria University and a former guest lecturer at the University of Łódź. She cooperates with theatrical groups and performance artists. Her research interests include theatrical adaptations of biographies and testimonies.
6.30 PM – Litzmannstadt Getto in Chava Rosenfarb’s prose – the screening of an interview and a discussion on Chava Rosenfarb’s life and works with Jane Arnfield, an actress and theatrical director, John Crust, a journalist and academic teacher, and Joanna Podolska, a literary scholar and the editor of the Polish translations of Rosenfarb’s books. [PL/ENG]
Free entrance.
Venue: The Marek Edelman Dialogue Center in Łódź | Wojska Polskiego 83
26 August (Saturday)
12.00 AM – We all long as one. Following the women of the Łódź ghetto [PL]
Host: Ewa Kamińska–Bużałek, Izabela Olejnik | Łódzki Szlak Kobiet [Łódź Women’s Trail]
Start: The Rynek Bałucki market hall, access from the direction of Zgierska
Organizer: Łódzki Szlak Kobiet
They used lipsticks to appear healthy and fit for work so as to avoid deportation from the ghetto. They wrote poems and journals, even though pencils were so hard to come by. They fought for their survival and the lives of their children.
Łódzki Szlak Kobiet is offering you an opportunity to retrace the steps of the Jewish women of the Litzmannstadt ghetto. We will be talking about prewar female artists and writers confined to the ghetto, about women who had been transferred to a city they knew nothing about and then forced into the ghetto, and about the challenges and obstacles they had to face daily.
During the tour of the grounds of the former ghetto, we will tell you their stories and take you to places that bore witness to them. The voices will once again be heard of Chava Rosenfarb, Melania Fogelbaum, Irene Hauser, and Rywka Lipszyc, as we read out fragments of their wartime diaries, novels, and poems.
3.00 PM – Lala, historia pewnego cudu [Lala, the story of a miracle] – storytelling [PL]
Written and narrated by: Beata Frankowska
Music (accordion and singing): Robert Lipka
Free entrance
Venue: Park Ocalałych/the amphitheater near the Dialogue Center | Wojska Polskiego 83
A story based on one chapter of Roman Kent’s autobiography Courage Was My Only Option. In his own words, “this is a story about children and their beloved dog, but it is first and foremost about understanding a child that I was; Lala’s story is a story of a miracle”. Lala taught little Romek about true love and the experience of loss. When the Shoah came, it was Lala that gave the little boy hope and strength to survive the Litzmannstadt ghetto, as she trotted between the factory, where she fed her puppies, and the ghetto, where she comforted children of men as best she could. Thus, although many years have passed, Lala still lives in the memories of Roman Kent, his children, and grandchildren, who keep asking for the story to be recounted to them. Let it warm your hearts, too.
6.00 PM – The ghetto topography – a lecture based on cartographic materials and a 3D model of the Litzmannstadt ghetto
Host: Izabela Terela | The Museum of Independence Traditions in Łódź
Venue: al. Pamięci Ofiar Litzmannstadt Getto 12 | The Museum of Independence Traditions in Łódź, Radegast Station Branch
“The revamping of the permanent exhibition – Radegast Station Branch” is a project co–financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage under a special–purpose fund.
Organizer: The Museum of Independence Traditions in Łódź
A look at the ghetto from the perspective of the process of its creation and functioning. Cartographic materials and a 3D model of the ghetto will be used to analyze its topography, changing perimeter, and individual zones.
9.00 PM – Havdalah – the closing ceremony of the Shabbat [PL]
Venue: The Jewish Community of Łódź | Pomorska 18
Organizer: The Jewish Community of Łódź
27 August (Sunday) – The Survivors’ Day
10.00 AM – A walking tour of the Jewish Cemetery [PL]
Host: Dawid Szychowski, the Rabbi of Łódź, and Paweł Kulig from the Guardians of Remembrance association
Entrance: a Tzedakah of 10 PLN toward saving the monuments of the Jewish Cemetery
Start: The Jewish Cemetery | access from the direction of Zmienna
12.00 AM – Remembering the Łódź ghetto – a walking tour of ghetto memorial sites [PL]
Host: Izabela Terela | The Museum of Independence Traditions in Łódź
Start: The Jewish Cemetery | access from the direction of Zmienna
Tickets required. Payment on site, cash only.
Entrance: 10 PLN regular, 5 PLN reduced (holders of benefit cards)
Organizer: The Museum of Independence Traditions in Łódź
The city of Łódź, and the area of the former ghetto in particular, features numerous sites memorializing the Second World War: the tour will focus on those devoted to the memory of the people locked up in the Litzmannstadt ghetto.
3.00 PM – The certification of new trees of remembrance in the Survivors’ Park [PL/ENG]
Venue: Park Ocalałych | Wojska Polskiego 83
Every year since 2004, Survivors or their descendants, arriving from all over the world, have planted trees memorializing those who lived through the war. Presently, the Survivors’ Park boasts more than 650 such trees.
3.30 PM – GENIUS LOCI. Pinkus/Panusz – film presentation prod. HaKoach (Łódź 2023, 51’) and meeting with Henryk Panusz [PL/ENG]
Free entrance
Venue: The Marek Edelman Dialogue Center in Łódź | Wojska Polskiego 83
The Pinkus tenement house gives rise to Kościuszko Avenue – the central thoroughfare of downtown Łódź. Before the war, the owners and residents looked out of its windows at the Reform Synagogue opposite. This is one of the many memories of Henryk Panusz, the grandson of Mendel Pinkus – the builder of the largest 19th–century tenement house in Łódź, a retired professor of molecular biology and a social worker.
"Genius Loti. Pinkus/Panusz” is a story about how great dreams and achievements intertwine with the inexorable reality of the history of the country, the city and the hero himself.
Film financed by the EVZ Foundation (Stiftung Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft) as part of the project „PoMoc&Kontakt. Commitment to Survivors in Łódź, Poland”
5.00 PM – Love at the end of the World – the screening of a documentary and the presentation of a book by Tonia Rotkopf Blair, and the meeting with Doniphan Blair, a movie director and son of a Łódź ghetto Survivor [PL/ENG]
Venue: The Marek Edelman Dialogue Center in Łódź | Wojska Polskiego 83
Doniphan Blair began "Our Holocaust Vacation" as a research project in the late 1980s and went on to scout the project, write its shooting script, including the performance pieces, do some camera and editorial work, and compose half the music.
Born in 1954, Doniphan was painting and making films by the time he got to high school. He spent much of his twenties backpacking around the United States, Asia and South America, often stopping to live with locals or work on projects. Notable among the latter was founding an artist’s commune in San Francisco (1975), joining a theatre collective in Peru (1980) and in 1980 making a short feature film in Brazil with renown Brazilian photographer Mario Cravo Neto. He studied film at the San Francisco Art Institute, graduating in 1990.
28 August (Monday)
10.00 AM – A walking tour of the Jewish Cemetery [ENG]
Host: Joanna Podolska | The Marek Edelman Dialogue Center
Registration at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Entrance: a Tzedakah of 10 PLN toward saving the monuments of the Jewish Cemetery
Venue: The Jewish Cemetery | Bracka 40
12.00 AM – In search of the past at the State Archive in Łódź – a workshop especially for the second– and third–generation family members of the Survivors [ENG]
Registration at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Venue: State Archive in Łódź | pl. Wolności 1
Organizer: State Archive in Łódź and The Marek Edelman Dialogue Center in Łódź
A workshop in English, aimed at those who are interested in discovering their roots, and whose stories are connected with Łódź and the local ghetto. After a general introduction, the participants will receive guidelines that will help them continue genealogical research. Prior registration required.
3.00 PM – The International Day of Reading Comics in Public – performative reading of comic books in the Survivors’ Park [PL]
Venue: Park Ocalałych | Wojska Polskiego 83, 91–755 Łódź
Organizer: Centrum Komiksu i Narracji Interaktywnej [Center for Comics and Interactive Narratives], EC1 Łódź
The outdoor event in the Survivors’ Park will demonstrate how the Dialog Center’s publishing endeavors are inclusive of the comic culture, at the same time offering guests an opportunity to take part in a unique project. The activities planned include reading historical–themed comics in public, an artistic workshop for children and teenagers, live drawing sessions, and various games and competitions. The occasion will be capped by the premiere of Maciej Cholewiński and Łukasz Godlewski’s graphic novel “Ważny był tylko numer” [The number was all that mattered], published by the “Contur” Association of Artists. The event will be attended by the authors of the comic and other people involved in the creation process. The event will be accompanied by an outdoor exhibition of boards from the comic book Only the number was important.
To date, the Dialogue Center has issued the graphic novel “Naród zatracenia” (autors: Maciej Świerkocki (text) and Mariusz Sołtysik)). [The lost nation] and the comic “Edelman” (autors: Michał Arkusiński, Maciej Cholewiński, Piotr Kasiński).
The International Day of Reading Comics in Public is 28 August, the birthday of Jack Kirby (1917–1994), an American comic book artist and the creator of the X–Men, Hulk, and the Fantastic Four. The tradition of celebrating this day originated with American journalists and bloggers Brian Heater and Sarah Morean, the idea being to change the perception of comics as infantile entertainment, in favor of regarding them as valuable publications recognized by art and literary critics.
5.00 PM – The ghetto of Dawid Sierakowiak. The topography of “Dziennik” – a lecture by Dr. Adam Sitarek from the Center for Jewish Research at the University of Łódź [PL/ENG]
Free entrance
Host: Adam Sitarek | The Center for Jewish Research at the University of Łódź
Venue: The Marek Edelman Dialogue Center in Łódź | Wojska Polskiego 83
The lecture will present the literary topography of Dawid Sierakowiak’s Diary, one of the most important records of the Holocaust. Born in 1924, Sierakowiak had extraordinary observation skills. That and his encyclopedic knowledge made his journal – which he started in summer 1939 – a unique resource for studying the history of the Litzmannstadt ghetto. The text is full of topographic references to the occurrences felt and seen by the author. All this allows for charting out the map of Dawid Sierakowiak’s experience of the ghetto.
The study is part of the project “Warszawa / Łódź. Atlas literatury Zagłady” [Warsaw/Łódź. An atlas of the Holocaust literature] run at the Institute of Literary Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, in cooperation with the Center for Jewish Research at the University of Łódź.
6.00 PM – The meeting with Leon Weintraub, a Survivor of the Łódź ghetto [PL/ENG]
Free entrance
Venue: The Marek Edelman Dialogue Center in Łódź | Wojska Polskiego 83
Leon Weintraub was born on 1 January 1926 in Łódź, to Szul–Szloma, who died in Łódź in 1927, and Natalia, who perished in Auschwitz in 1944. In order to provide for her children (Leon had four sisters), Natalia opened a small laundry at Kamienna 2. Before the war broke out, Leon had completed six grades of elementary school and continued learning at that level before education in the ghetto was discontinued in the fall of 1940.
Leon Weintraub the his family was forced to move to the ghetto in the winter of 1939. The fourteen–year–old Leon could continue his education from the spring of 1940, before all schools in the ghetto were closed in the fall. He worked at a galvanizer’s, then at a tinsmith’s, and then as an electrician. In August 1944, he was sent on a transport to the Auschwitz–Birkenau camp, where he was separated from the rest of his family.
After a few weeks, he managed to ran out of the camp, having escaped the guards’ attention and joined a transport headed for Głuszyce. His next camp was Dörnhau/Kolce, where he had to work in his “expert” capacity, doing electrical works, i.e. fixing overhead power lines for the Todt paramilitary organization. He remained in Kolce until late February 1945 and, following the “march of death”, was deported to the Flossenbürg camp, and then “evacuated” to other labor camps. He was freed by the French troops near Donaueschingen on 23 April 1945. Feeble and sick, he was treated for a couple of weeks in the local hospital, and then in a French military sanitarium in Reichenau. There, he accidentally learned that three of his sisters were still alive in Bergen–Belsen, where he traveled in September 1945.
In the fall of 1946, he began medical studies in Göttingen. He returned to Poland in November 1950 and worked as a gynecologist in Warsaw after graduation. In March 1969, following the rise of antisemitic sentiments in Poland, he was dismissed as the head doctor of the obstetrics–gynecology ward in Otwock and emigrated with his family to Sweden, where he still lives, being in constant touch with his homeland.
In 2022, Magdalena Jaros published an interview with Leon Weintraub entitled "Reconciliation with evil". Leon is also the hero of many documentaries, and to this day he conducts meetings with young people in Germany and Poland, during which he educates in the Polish–Jewish dialogue.
29 August (Tuesday) Main commemorations of The 79th anniversary of the liquidation of the Litzmannstadt Getto
30 August (Wednesday)
6.00 PM – An Evening with Konstanty Gebert – Special Event Marking 75 Years of the State of Israel [PL/ENG]
Registration at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Venue: The Marek Edelman Dialogue Center in Łódź | Wojska Polskiego 83
For a small country in Asia, Israel assumes an outsized role in the world's collective imagination. How did that happen? And what do we mean when we talk about Polish–Israeli – as opposed to Polish–Jewish – relations, both highly contentious issues in Poland?
To hear the answers to these questions and more, join us for a special evening with Konstanty Gebert at the Dialogue Center in Łódź, where we'll discuss his latest book, "Pokój z widokiem na wojnę. Historia Izraela" (A Room With a View of War: A History of Israel). We'll also record the first live–audience episode of the podcast Ziemia Zbyt Obiecana (The Overpromised Land), featuring special guest Joanna Podolska.
The event is hosted by the Marek Edelman Dialogue Center in partnership with ELNET (European Leadership Network) and Agora Publishing House.
Ziemia Zbyt Obiecana is the first Polish–language podcast about Israel. Host Konstanty Gebert takes audiences on a sweeping tour of the country's history and society, exploring everything from Israel's vibrant and diverse population and the heterogeneous identities of its diaspora, to contemporary debates on what it means to be Jewish.
Konstanty Gebert is one of Poland's leading Jewish journalists. He is the author of numerous book and a former long–time contributor to the daily Gazeta Wyborcza and the monthly journal Midrasz. Gebert has guest lectured at the world's top universities. His previous book, "Ostateczne rozwiązania. Ludobójcy i ich dzieło" (Final Solutions. The Perpetrators of Genocide and Their Work), received the 2022 Beata Pawlak Award and the Klio Award, and was nominated for the Nike Literary Award.
31 August (Thursday)
2.00 PM – The border of worlds – the border of humanity. Extermination of Jews in the „lost quarter od Łódź” – lecture with a guided tour of selected permanent exhibitions of the Museum of the City of Łódź [PL]
Host: Anna Łagodzińska–Pietras | The Museum of The City of Łódź
Venue: Muzeum Miasta Łodzi | Ogrodowa 15
Entrance: 7 PLN (standard ticket), 5 PLN (discounted ticket)
Registration: The Education Department of the Museum of the City of Łódź, phone +48 692 926 319 or 42 307 13 82 (monday–friday 8:00–16:00)
The meeting will be focused on the scale model of the "lost quarter of Łódź" – the area of the city located in today's Staromiejski Park. In 1939, life was vibrant there, Yiddish could be heard at numerous stalls, shops and workshops, and melodious Hebrew came from the nearby synagogue and bet midrash. Not much later, in February 1940, the tenement houses in this area became mute witnesses of the Jews moving to the ghetto, and finally, in the following year, the described part of Łódź was razed to the ground in order to create an ideologically drawn border between the two worlds. One of them was fenced off with wire and guarded by soldiers, in the other numerous newcomers were making their new lives. In this way, Nazi propaganda drew a clear line of humanity.