Sieradz Land (Polish: ziemia sieradzka; Latin: Terra Siradiae) is a historical region in central Poland, a part of Łęczyca-Sieradz Land (Polish: ziemia łęczycko-sieradzka).
Sieradz Land is bordered by Greater Poland in the west, Łęczyca Land in the north-east, Lesser Poland in the south-east and in the south, and Wieluń Land in the south-west. It lies at the Warta, on the left bank of Pilica and on the south-west bank of Ner rivers. It spans an area of 9,700 km2 and has about 950,000 inhabitants.
The Łęczyca Land and Sieradz Land combined roughly correspond with present-day Łódź Voivodeship.
On September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany launched its invasion of Poland, nearby Wieluń was bombed and the area between the German border and the Warta River was occupied. During the invasion, German troops committed numerous massacres of Polish civilians in the region, including at Pławno, Kajetanowice, Uniejów, Wylazłów, Balin, Chechło, Dominikowice, Czekaj,[3] and a massacre of Polish prisoners of war, including 19 officers, at Moryca and Longinówka (see Nazi crimes against the Polish nation).[4] Eventually, these lands were partly in the General Government and partly directly annexed to Third German Reich, and administered as part of the province of Reichsgau Wartheland.[5] The local Polish and Jewish populations were subjected to persecution. Sieradz was the location of one of the most important German prisons in Reichsgau Wartheland, with several more prisons subordinate to the main prison in Sieradz, located in Burzenin, Janiszewice, Niechmirów, Złoczew, and subcamps in Herbertów and Zelów.[6] Its prisoners, predominantly Poles and Jews, were subjected to insults, beatings, forced labour, tortures and executions.[7] Prisoners were given very low food rations, and meals were even prepared from rotten vegetables, spoiled fish and dead dogs.[8] Many prisoners died of exhaustion, starvation or torture.[8] After the war, Polish historian Antoni Galiński was able to identify 968 people who died or were shot in the prison and its subcamps in 1940–1945, however the overall number of deaths is certainly higher.[9] In April 1940 and June 1941, the Germans murdered 581 patients of the psychiatric hospital in Warta as part of Aktion T4.[10]
Language
The Polish language of the inhabitants of the Sieradz Land (along with that of the Łęczyca Land) is considered the closest to the Polish literary language, as the region did not develop its own dialect, but was a place of blending of dialects from the neighboring larger regions of Greater Poland, Lesser Poland and Silesia.[11]
^Wardzyńska, Maria (2009). Był rok 1939. Operacja niemieckiej policji bezpieczeństwa w Polsce. Intelligenzaktion (in Polish). Warszawa: IPN. pp. 93–95, 99.
^Sudoł, Tomasz (2011). "Zbrodnie Wehrmachtu na jeńcach polskich we wrześniu 1939 roku". Biuletyn Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej (in Polish). No. 8-9 (129-130). IPN. p. 80. ISSN1641-9561.
^Studnicka-Mariańczyk, Karolina (2018). "Zakład Karny w Sieradzu w okresie okupacji hitlerowskiej 1939–1945". Zeszyty Historyczne (in Polish). 17: 187–188.
Koter, Marek (2016). "Historyczno-geograficzne podstawy oraz proces kształtowania się regionu łódzkiego". In Marszał, Tomasz (ed.). Miasto–region–gospodarka w badaniach geograficznych (in Polish). Łódź: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego. ISBN978-83-8088-004-7.
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