The Lodz ghetto was set up by the Germans in February 1940 in the city of Lodz in Poland. In typical manner, the Nazis isolated the Jews of the city from everyone else by confining them to small, restricted, living quarters that were surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. Some 160,000 Jews lived here, most having neither running water nor sewers. Food was scarce, and starvation and disease were very common. Within the ghetto, the people were forced to hard labor in German factories, but at least they were together as a community. As time progressed, the Germans sent over 20,000 additional Jews from Germany and western cities to the already overpopulated ghetto; from here many thousands were sent to almost certain death at the concentration camps of Chelmo and later Auschwitz. The Germans destroyed the Lodz ghetto in early 1944.