Referring to the concept of lieux de mémoire, developed by a French historian Pierre Nora, the author writes about practices commemorating the past and describes spaces subordinated to the function of commemoration. The area of her interests covers celebrations commemorating the events in Łódź on 29 August 1944. On that day, in Łódź (at that time – Litzmannstadt), the last transport of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto Jews left the Radegast Station for Auschwitz-Birkenau. Initially, the Radegast Station provided only cargo transport services for the ghetto, then it became a location from which Jews were transported to work outside the ghetto, and to which Jews from other places in Poland and Europe were moved. From this station during the year 1942 Jews were deported to the extermination centre in Chełmno on the Ner and since August 1944 – to the camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. In total, Germans deported approximately 145.000 Jews. Together with the last transport, the Litzmannstadt Ghetto ceased to exist. The journey to the concentration camp on that August day was not only a tragedy experienced by hundreds of people crammed into cattle wagons, but also a symbolic date that put an end to the existence of the Łódź Jewish Community and Jewish local society which, before the outbreak of World War II, constituted one-third of the city population. In the article, the author explains why certain memorials are becoming the most important places of yearly commemorations of the Jews deported from the ghetto to death camps. She also discusses the meaning of practices connected with visiting lieux de mémoire.
The article demonstrates the manner in which by viewing a city as a cultural text one may discover within it, as in the case of a palimpsest, certain concealed and convoluted contents which exist “now” and had been created “in the past”. The author reconstructed the palimpsest demeanour of industrial Łódź by telling the story of a town whose industrial character was determined already prior to the delineation of lots intended for the construction of the first houses, while the course of history and human decisions altered, and frequently destroyed the specificity of the town, cultivated for more than a century. In this fashion the author proved that the town is composed not only of its material elements but that it consists of numerous mutually penetrating strata of cultural signs, both material and “spiritual” (symbols, events, human ideas, dreams and activity), raised by successive generations. Many of those which “once” created industrial Łódź, such as: factories or a joint community of past experiences and memory, continue to function up to this day among assorted strata (visible and invisible) and various milieus. The provision of professional care for the decaying Łódź factories (i.e. the erection within the factory walls of culture centres under the supervision a conservator) would make it feasible not only to reconstruct the industrial reality of the town and to create within the space of the industrial building a new stratum of meanings, but also to reinforce the bonds between the inhabitants with the town and vicinity.
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