Lodz is not just a dirty, industrial city. This place, packed with grey buildings, possesses some veritable treasures. I invite you on a trip to not-very-sad-and-grey-city Lodz.
Radegast (Polish: Radogoszcz) is a former railway station in Lódz, Poland. It was built during World War II just beyond the boundary of the Lódz Ghetto to serve as its main transport link to the outside world. In the course of the Holocaust, the station was the place where Jewish and other inhabitants of Lodz were gathered for transport out of the Ghetto and the city to the Kulmhof and Auschwitz death camps. About 150,000 Jews passed through the station on the way to their deaths in the period from January 16, 1942, to August 29, 1944. The station thus had the same significance for Lodz as the better known Umschlagplatz had for Warsaw.
In 2004, the commemoration ceremonies on the sixtieth anniversary of the destruction of the Lódz Ghetto in 1944 and the departure of the last transport from Radegast spurred efforts to transform the former station into a Holocaust memorial. In 2005 a museum located in the station building was opened. On August 28, 2005, a monument commemorating the Jewish victims who passed through the station was unveiled.