Yad Vashem has very few New Years cards in its collection from the war period itself. The Jews in Europe were engaged in a daily life and death struggle; clearly they were not in position to “celebrate” the Jewish New Year by exchanging cards. The cards pictured here were sent from the Lodz Ghetto in 1940.
On September 8, 1939, the Germans occupied Lodz and renamed the city Litzmannstadt (after the German general Karl Litzmann, who had conquered it in World War I). Lodz was home to 223,000 Jews on the eve of World War II. At the war’s end, no more than 7,000 Jews from the Lodz Ghetto had survived the camps.