Ghetto

In the spring of 1942, the Nazi's relocation of Roma groups to the existing Jewish ghettos was on the way. Anyone trying to flee and live elsewhere risked fines or imprisonment. This decision was extended to many cities in Nazi-occupied Poland in the summer and autumn of 1942.  

The ghettos were closed, guarded areas where Jews and Romas were cut off from the rest of the population. The ghettos were heavily overpopulated, and food was constantly in short supply. Jews, as well as Sinti and Roma people, were exploited, providing slave labor in German factories and workshops. The ghettos also served as assembly points that would enable people to be deported to concentration camps and extermination camps.  

Life in the ghettos was marked by starvation, rampant disease and arbitrary punishments and executions. In several ghettos, Sinti and Roma people were forced to wear armbands. Unlike the white armband of the Jews bearing a blue Star of David, the Roma groups were usually forced to wear a white armband bearing a Z in different colours depending on the ghetto. 

Łódź Ghetto

In November 1941, about 5,000 Sinti and Roma people, more than half of them children, were deported from Austria to Łódź in Poland. They were forcibly placed in a segregated part of the Jewish ghetto that came to be known as the Łódź Roma ghetto. 

The heavily guarded Roma ghetto was surrounded by barbed wire and deep, water-filled ditches to prevent the spread of infection. Up to 25 people were forced to share and live in a single room. These rooms were unheated and unfurnished, and there was no access to running water. Only open latrines were available in the yard. 

A typhoid epidemic broke out in the Roma ghetto shortly after their arrival, and around 700 Sinti and Roma people died within seven weeks. The Nazi leadership decided to liquidate the Roma ghetto and murder everyone in it to prevent the spread of infection to areas outside the ghetto. 

In December 1941 and early January 1942, all of the 4,300 or so survivors of the Roma ghetto were sent to the newly established Chełmno extermination camp. Everyone sent to Chełmno was murdered in gas vans and buried in mass graves.   

Deportations

Several thousand German Sinti and Roma people had already been deported to various concentration camps in Nazi Germany in 1938 and 1939 as part of the Nazi campaign against people perceived as asocial, workshy and criminal. 

In the autumn of 1939, the Nazis decided that almost all Sinti and Roma people living in Nazi Germany would be deported to the east, to the newly established General Government in occupied Poland. The first deportations to the General Government took place in May 1940, when around 2,500 people were removed from their homes.  

Plans for deportations were temporarily halted due to the large-scale displacements of Poles, Jews, ethnic Germans and others by the Nazis. The freedom of movement of Roma groups in Nazi Germany was restricted instead, and many people were forcibly placed in the Roma internment camps created around the country. 

The next major deportation of Roma groups from Nazi Germany took place in November 1941. At that time, around 5,000 Austrian Sinti and Roma people were transported to the Jewish ghetto in the Polish city of Łódź, where they were placed in a segregated Roma section.