20 Zlotys In Memory of Victims in Łódź Ghetto

The Łódź Ghetto — known to its German administrators as Litzmannstadt Ghetto — was the second largest in occupied Poland, confining over 200,000 Jews between 1940 and its liquidation in August 1944. Unlike Warsaw, Łódź held out longer partly because its Judenrat chairman Chaim Rumkowski pursued a brutal calculus of industrial productivity, arguing that a ghetto that worked could not be killed. He was wrong. The last transports to Auschwitz-Birkenau departed in the summer of 1944, and Rumkowski himself died there.

This coin was issued sixty years after that liquidation. The oxidized finish was a deliberate production choice, not a patination artifact.