On this day in 1940, the Łódź Ghetto was sealed. The center of the textile business in pre-war Poland, the Nazis quickly turned the ghetto into a forced-labor killing machine. Most of the production revolved around making uniforms for the German military. In total, 210,000 people lived in the Łódź ghetto during the war, with 160,000 of them being the city’s pre-existing Jewish population. The ghetto had thousands packed into an area of just over four square kilometers, and most of it had no running water or a sewer system. More than 20% of deaths in the ghetto were caused by starvation, which one survivor, Leo Schneiderman, described as the very purpose of the ghetto’s design. In January of 1942, deportations to the Chelmno death camp in Poland began. By that September, approximately 70,000 Jews and 4,300 Roma had been deported. At Chelmno, SS officers forced victims into the back of specially engineered vans that served as mobile gas chambers. Hundreds more were shot during the deportation process from Łódź in order to fill quotas. Deportation slowed after September 1942 and the ghetto was used as a forced labor camp until 1944. In the spring of 1944, the Germans decided to destroy the Łódź ghetto. The residents were told that they would be transferred to another labor camp in Germany, but almost all of them were sent to Auschwitz in August 1944. A group of 1,000 to 1,500 were left behind to sort the belongings of the deported and clean up the area.