Stained with a Different Darkness

By Stefan Kanfer

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."

No anti-Semitic caricaturist in Der Stuermer 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