Łomża () is a city in north-eastern Poland, approximately to the north-east of Warsaw and west of Białystok. It is situated alongside the Narew River as part of the Podlaskie Voivodeship. It is the capital of Łomża County and has been the seat of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Łomża since 1925.
Łomża is one of the principal economic, educational, and cultural centres of north-eastern Masovia as well as one of the three main cities of Podlaskie Voivodeship (beside Białystok and Suwałki). It lends its name to the protected area of Łomża Landscape Park. The town is also the location of the Łomża Brewery.
History
Early history
thumb|left|[[Cathedral of St. Michael the Archangel, Łomża|Cathedral of Saint Michael the Archangel]]
Łomża was founded in the 10th century, on the site of the present day village called Stara Łomża (Old Łomża). It was first mentioned in official records in the 14th century. Łomża received its municipal rights in 1416, and became an important political and economic center in the mid-16th century.
Late modern period
As a result of the Partitions of Poland Łomża was annexed by Prussia in 1795. In 1807 it was included in the short-lived Polish Duchy of Warsaw, within which it was the seat of the Łomża Department. In 1815 Łomża became part of Congress Poland, which was forcibly integrated into the Russian Empire over the course of the 19th century.
After the Russian massacres of Polish protesters in Warsaw in 1861, Polish demonstrations took place in Łomża, at which even romantic poet Władysław Syrokomla gave a public speech, however, they ended in October 1861 when the Russians imposed martial law. Afterwards the Polish resistance began preparations for an uprising. The victims were tortured and murdered in gruesome ways: some had their eyes gouged out, bones broken, or insides torn out before they died. From November 1863, the Russians carried out mass arrests and confiscations of Polish property, and many insurgents escaped from the country. Russians deported hundreds of Poles from the county to Katorga to Siberia, and Łomża was one of the sites of Russian executions of Polish insurgents. At the place of the executions, Poles put up crosses several times, and the Russians removed them.
thumb|left|Stary Rynek (Old Market Square) in 1912
thumb|World War I internment camp for Poles
During World War I, the Russian administration was evacuated in June 1915, and the city was occupied by Germany from August 1915 until 1918. Łomża had a local branch of the secret Polish Military Organization, which was also joined by local scouts who carried out intelligence and sabotage operations against the German occupiers. In 1916 the Poles finally erected a still preserved monument at the site of the Russian executions of Polish insurgents. but it was still reintegrated with the reborn Polish state.
During the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–1921, the city was attacked by the Russians on 29 July 1920. On 4 August the Russian military took Łomża. Polish forces defended the city until 15 August, when Polish Fourth Army of General Leonard Skierski attacked the 15th Army, led by Soviet General August Kork. The Polish army successfully took back control of Łomża from Russian forces. Germans carried out searches of Polish offices, organizations, and Catholic institutions, including the bishop's seat and the Capuchin monastery, and banned preaching and the organization of meetings.
On 26 September 1939 a Soviet aircraft dropped anti-Polish propaganda leaflets, which stated that "Poles are not capable of self-governing their country," so "the Soviets come to take care of them out of mercy." Soon afterwards the city was turned over by the Germans to the Red Army, which entered on 29 September and was incorporated into the Byelorussian SSR. The Soviets established a local station of the NKVD, and the Polish population was subjected to various repressions. In January 1940, the Soviets changed several street names, even calling one 17 September Street, after the day of the Soviet invasion of Poland. At least 32 Poles from Łomża were murdered by the Russians in the Katyn massacre in 1940. The Soviets carried out arrests of the Capuchin monks and expelled Benedictine nuns in mid-1940. According to Soviet data from September 1940, over 330 Polish families were deported from the district to the USSR. The Soviets held 2,128 people in the local prison as of 21 June 1941, the day before Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and on 20–21 June they carried out mass deportations of Poles to Russia. Łomża remained under Soviet control until Operation Barbarossa.
thumb|upright|Monument to local fallen and murdered soldiers of the [[Home Army]]
In June 1941, at the onset of the Russian campaign Łomża was captured by the Wehrmacht and used as a communications hub by the German forces. Hundreds of Poles, including those initially held in the local prison and local Polish intelligentsia, were murdered in large massacres in nearby villages of Sławiec, Jeziorko and Pniewo in 1942–1943. The Jewish population of Łomża, which numbered 9,000 at the beginning of the war, was almost entirely wiped out, murdered at a nearby forest or sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp to be murdered there. Only a few dozen survived. Since 1943, the Sicherheitspolizei carried out deportations of Poles including teenage boys from the local prison to the Stutthof concentration camp.
The Polish underground resistance movement organized secret education, military training, medical courses, published Polish underground press, organized aid for Polish prisoners of war, and conducted guerrilla warfare. Even teenagers participated in the resistance. Several resistance members were arrested by the Soviets. In 1941 the local resistance was weakened when the Soviets arrested its commander.
The Red Army fought back and successfully captured Łomża on 13 September 1944. Afterwards the city was restored to Poland, although with a Soviet-installed communist regime, which remained in power until the Fall of Communism in the 1980s.
Recent period
On 21 May 1945, the Polish anti-communist resistance broke into the communist prison in Łomża. In the following years, the resistance remained active in Łomża, including the local organizations Bracia Atomów, Polska Armia Powstańcza (Polish Insurgent Army) and Młodzi Patrioci Polscy (Young Polish Patriots), which engaged in educational and sabotage activities.
Between 1946 and 1975, the oldest part of the city was rebuilt. New housing estates came into existence along with several industrial plants, among them Łomża cotton and furniture factories and starch manufacturer PEPEES, as well as municipal thermal power station. The city transit system was also established during this time. By the beginning of the 1970s, the population had reached almost 30,000 inhabitants. It was the capital of the Łomża Voivodeship from 1975 to 1998.
Jewish community
References to Jewish residents in Łomża () date to 1494. The population numbers date back only to 1808, when 157 Jews were officially counted. A magnificent stone synagogue was built there in 1881 on the initiative of Rabbi Eliezer-Simcha Rabinowicz. The Great Synagogue designed by Enrico Marconi became a centre of the Zionist movement. In 1931, there were 8,912 Jews who lived in the city.
thumb|upright|[[Great Synagogue (Łomża)|Great Synagogue of Łomża before destruction by the German Nazis in 1941]]
World War I was especially hard on the Jewish community of Łomża, which was a major battle area against German military forces. In 1915, the Jewish Aid Society estimated that 22,000 Jewish residents of Łomża were made homeless from the war.
On 29 October 1941 German troops forced over 1,000 Jewish residents of Łomża to kneel in trenches, and they murdered them all with machine guns. They continued murdering entire families.
On 12 August 1941, a Łomża Ghetto was created in the vicinity of the Old Market Square (Stary Rynek). The Nazi Einsatzkommando under SS-Obersturmführer Hermann Schaper committed mass killings of alleged Soviet collaborators a few days later. The number of Jews herded into the Łomża Ghetto from surrounding villages and towns including Jedwabne, Stawiski, Piątnica, Rotki, Wizna, Łomża, and others, ranged from 10,000 to 18,000. Over two-thousand people were murdered in the Giełczyn Forest outside of town. Many Jews perished from malnutrition and diseases such as dysentery and typhus. The rest were shipped to Auschwitz. The Łomża synagogue was destroyed. The ghetto was liquidated in the final deportation action on 1 November 1942. Only a small number of the Jews of Łomża survived the Holocaust; some found refuge with Catholic Polish families.
One of the only visible remnants of the city's Jewish history is the Jewish cemetery. In 1999, the Łomża Jewish Cemetery Foundation was officially founded as a charity devoted to restoring the cemetery, showing respect to the deceased buried there, and to improve relations between Poles and Jews. Among them, the Łomża Brewery (large-scale producer of beer), DOMEL (producer of unleaded windows), FARGOTEX (importer of upholstery fabrics), Konrad (importer of farm animals), Łomża furniture factory (Łomżyńska Fabryka Mebli), PEPEES (producer of potato starch), Purzeczko (the personal and property protection). On top of that, the city is a registered office of the Podlaskie Agency for Restructuring and Modernisation of Agriculture.
By the end of 2007, the number of people steadily employed in Łomża was 13,408, including 7,170 women, however, the unemployment rate () remained considerably high at 14.1 percent. The number of businesses registered by the end of 2008 was 6,421 of which 6,280 belonged to the private sector.