Survivors' Park and Marek Edelman Dialogue Center

Survivors' Park (Park Ocalałych) is an 8.5-hectare memorial park in northern Łódź that honours the people who lived through the Łódź Ghetto, and it houses the Marek Edelman Center for Dialogue on its grounds. It opened on 30 August 2004, the 60th anniversary of the ghetto's liquidation, and people visit for a quiet green space where the city's wartime history is written into the landscape itself, tree by tree.

The park's most personal feature is a grove of 418 memorial trees, each one planted by a survivor of the Łódź Ghetto and marked with a plaque bearing that person's name. Beyond the trees, the grounds hold the Monument to Poles Saving Jews, designed by Czesław Bielecki, a Memorial Mound that rises above the flat parkland, and a statue of Jan Karski, the wartime courier who carried news of the Holocaust to the Allies. Together they turn an ordinary walk into a series of encounters with individual names and stories rather than abstract memorial forms.

The park sits near the area of the former Łódź Ghetto, one of the largest ghettos established under German occupation, and its opening date was chosen to mark 60 years since that ghetto was liquidated in 1944. Where many memorials commemorate the dead, this one was conceived specifically to honour those who survived, which is why survivors themselves planted the trees that anchor the site. The naming of the on-site Center for Dialogue after Marek Edelman, a leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and later a Łódź resident and cardiologist, ties the place to the wider Polish-Jewish history it works to keep in living memory.

Within the park stands the Marek Edelman Center for Dialogue, an institution that runs exhibitions, education programmes and cultural events built around the city's multicultural past and its Jewish heritage in particular. It gives the green space an indoor counterpart, so a visit can move from reflection outdoors among the trees to a programme or display inside. For current exhibitions, event listings and opening hours, check the centre's official channels before you go, as these change through the year.

Survivors' Park lies in the north of the city on ul. Wojska Polskiego, away from the main promenade of Piotrkowska Street, and it pairs naturally with other sites of Łódź's wartime and Jewish history, such as the Radegast railway station memorial and the Jewish Cemetery nearby. It suits travellers who want space to walk and reflect rather than a quick photo stop, and it works well as a slower morning or afternoon within a broader trip. See our Łódź guide for how the park connects to the rest of the city.