Radegast Station — Industrial Logistics Turned Toward Deportation
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Transcript
Radegast began as a freight station serving the Łódź ghetto’s forced-labor economy. Food and raw materials entered; finished goods left. From 1942, the same railway infrastructure became a major point of deportation to the Chełmno and Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camps. The official Łódź tourism portal estimates that about 145,000 Jews passed through the station in deportations. This is why the site must be told as infrastructure, not only memorial architecture. Railways, schedules, warehouses and administrative lists made mass persecution operational. The surviving wooden station and later memorial force industrial Łódź’s story into its darkest form: logistics designed for production were repurposed for systematic murder.