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No anti-Semitic caricaturist in Der Stürmer could have created a more grotesque figure. Rumkowski grows plump while others starve, collects scrolls and awards from the abject poor, noisily reassuring them that only he can resolve the temporary embarrassments of history. Naturally the record has only fulsome praise for the Eldest; after all, he oversaw the writing. But events betray the man. A boy of eight informs against his parents. A desperate police hunt is organized to track down three wandering fowls from a neighboring farm. Punishment for the theft of a shirt is two weeks' imprisonment; for two pairs of socks, one month in jail. The entry for Wednesday, March 8, 1944, dryly notes, "After the Eldest's proclamation concerning the surrender of musical instruments [to the Nazis], the owners immediately began to register them . . . Four pianos, all of them first-rate makes and nearly new, with a total value of approximately 7,000 marks, were bought for a total of 600 marks. Splendid mandolins, guitars, zithers, lutes, flutes, clarinets, saxophones, trumpets, cymbals, and so forth, were assigned an average price of 2 or 3 marks apiece. For all the instruments surrendered, the Eldest received a total of about 2,400 marks (the present market equivalent of roughly 2,000 saccharine tablets)."
Yet Rumkowski was not motivated entirely by greed and fear. All along, he apparently believed that by slowly feeding weak or ill Jews to the death camps he could manage to save the majority. As the Chronicle makes clear, it was a fatal deception. When the Red Army liberated in 1945, only 877 prisoners remained. Rumkowski was not among them. He had been sent to die in Auschwitz a few months before.
Unlike so many Nazi victims, the committee of scribes never made a secret journal in which their horror or fury could be expressed. Why were they content to note dispassionately the inadequacies of shelter, the sacrifice of infants and ancients to hunger and cold? It may be that they had an incomplete understanding of their own tragedy. Even Nazis as highly placed as Albert Speer testified that they could not fully comprehend the fate of the Jews; how could deprived, unworldly scholars hope to understand the meaning of the Final Solution?
Yet there seems a larger purpose to the keeping of these tear-stained records. Upon his arrival at Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel was told by an older inmate to resume his Talmudic studies because "otherwise in a month you will no longer know what having a soul could possibly mean." By closely, even coldly, examining their reduced circumstances, the writers managed to retain their souls and their sanity. Certainly these tractable, frightened men might have done more. In the end they do not appear to be recording angels of the Holocaust but only its cost accountants. Still, that role is powerful enough. It has been 40 years since the Lodz ghetto was shut down. One has only to glance at the headlines from the Middle East to know how high a price the world continues to pay for the crimes that were committed there.
—By Stefan Kanfer