THE CHRONICLE OF THE LODZ GHETTO, 1941-1944 Edited by Lucjan
Dobroszycki; translated by Richard Lourie, Joachim Neugroschel and
others; Yale; 551 pages; $35Ghetto is an Italian word, but it is defined in German. In 1939 the
Third Reich took the obsolete custom of separating Jews from the human
community and gave it new meaning. No longer were there merely segregated
facilities, suffocating laws and a curfew. By the '40s isolation
had become a euphemism for what Nobel Laureate Nelly Sachs calls
“Habitations of death . . . staining each minute with a different
darkness.”The fate of one such ghetto has become an emblem of resistance: the
Warsaw inmates, pitifully outnumbered by SS troops, battled with
pistols, rocks and knives against tanks and cannons. In May 1943,
along with the buildings that held them, the fighters were reduced to
ashes. Monuments have risen to commemorate the uprising, and periodically a
dwindling number of survivors meet to recall the martyrs and make the
celebrated vow “Never again.” But another ghetto existed
about 75 miles from Warsaw and an eternity away from a deaf,
distracted world. Hardly anyone, then or now, ever knew of Lodz. And
yet it was there, in the second largest concentration in all of Europe,
that some 240,000 Jews were crowded. Within the barbed-wire boundaries
a microcosm arose. Children were born, stores were opened, a road
constructed, hospitals set up, administrators employed, records kept.
It is these records, miraculously preserved in private libraries and
underground caches, that provide the first detailed portrait of a
Holocaust society. In The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, Editor Lucjan Dobroszycki, a
survivor, presents an eerie and horrific scene told in terse entries,
like a nightmare dreamed in pieces.These are no Dostoyevskian rages scribbled in the flare of matchlight.
They are collective efforts, calmly set down by a committee of
professionals including a historian, an ethnographer and a Bible
student. Because the daily reports could have been read by Nazi
authorities, they are necessarily devoid of comments about jackboot
cruelty or speculations about the neighboring death camp of Chelmno,
less than an hour's drive away. But an undertow of agony tugs at the
facts. That road, praised as “a monument to the ghetto's vitality,”
leads to a cemetery where more than 43,000 inmates, many of them
children, will end their stay. Potato peels are a prized dinner item.
Notes of suicides bracket a “highly successful symphony concert at the
House of Culture.”The dark star of the Chronicle is one Mordecai Chaim Rumkowski, a
character who might have tumbled from the pages of an Isaac Bashevis
Singer novel. Installed as a leader called the Eldest of the Jews, he runs the ghetto
with a lethal mix of egomania and compassion. No one can marry without
his permission; no one is born or dies without his notice. Rumkowski
orders postage stamps bearing his likeness; sycophants and fools dance
in constant attendance. He seems fond of his charges, but he fully cooperates
with the Nazis, supervises “deportations” that go
directly to the ovens of Chelmno, and discourages rebellion
of any kind because “nothing bad will happen to people of good
will.”
