THE CHRONICLE OF THE LODZ GHETTO, 1941-1944 Edited by Lucjan Dobroszycki; translated by Richard Lourie, Joachim Neugroschel and others; Yale; 551 pages; $35
Ghetto 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."