A ghetto’s document of despair

Press, 15 November 1984, Page 12

A ghetto’s document of despair

At Lodz, in Poland, the chroniclers kept a daily record of aJewish community waiting for extermination. WALTER SCHWARZ, of the “Guardian,” discusses a memoir of the Holocaust.

Why did the Jews let it happen? Young Israelis often ask this with anger and incomprehension. They may find fresh clues in the “Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto 1941-1944” — one of the most horrifying testimonies of the holocaust, published by Yale University Press. , This is'not one man’s subjective reminiscence, but a sober, official, day-by-day record by the ghetto administration of what happened to nearly 200,000 Jews as they waited — partly knowing, partly refusing to know — for extermination. i

Was it incredibly, faith, hope against hope? Or a numbness caused by continuous horror, hunger, and overwork in what had become a slave-labour city run by the slaves themselves? The team of chroniclers was qualified enough for a considered answer: it included an ethnographer, a philosopher, a biblical scholar, a novelist, and a journalist.

The framework of their account is prosaic: each day begins with the weather and records births, deaths, suicides, and other events, such as roundups for the irregular mass exodus, known as “resettlement,” ordered by the Germans and organised by the Jews, for an officially unknown destination.

The emotional tone is necessarily restrained because the Germans could have found the document at any moment. Even, when they shoot women or hang a petty criminal in public, or order a fresh “resettlement,” the Germans are referred to as “the authorities,” more deadpan in horror than a medieval chronicler. Yet the feelings bf these sober chroniclers keep breaking through, and so do their questions. In September, 1942, after the roundup, for “resettlement” of 15,000 people in a week, one of them wonders why, “after this terrible shock, the populace was obsessed with everyday concerns

— getting bread, rations and so forth.”

“Is this some sort of numbing of the nerves, an indifference, or a symptom of an illness that manifests itself in atrophied emotional reactions? Naturally here and there are some mothers weeping in a corner for a child or children shipped from the ghetto.” After another roundup, a chronicler ventured further. “Nearly everyone is affected this time. Everyone keeps losing a relative, a friends, a room-mate, a colleague. And yet, Jewish faith in justice that will ultimately triumph does not permit extreme pessimism. People try to console themselves, deceiving themselves in some way. But nearly everyone says to himself and others: God only knows who will be better off, the person who stays here or the person who leaves.” The Lodz chronicle has, been abridged and edited into one big, 535-page volume by Mr Lucjan Dobroszycki, a Polish historian who was in the ghetto himself from the age of 15 to 19 — one of the very few who survived thanks, to a timely transfer to a labour camp that was to be liberated by the Russians.

Mr Dobroszycki, on a recent visit to Britain from the United States, said he saw the record as “an important psychological document, of universal relevance, on how people react when they are completely sealed off.” Explaining the immediate success of the book when it came out in the United States last month, he said people were “tired of emotional language on this subject. Often what the literature, of the Holocaust has given us is death, death, death, without realising that half a minute of life is life. The chronicle, like no other source, depicts life and death together.” The juxtaposition is unbearable, as we read of marriages, birthday celebrations, petty crimes and the endless obsession with food.

“Strings of all kinds are being pulled just to somehow or other obtain a little potato peel.” Mr Dobroszycki agreed that the psychology of acceptance —

indeed of active co-operation — presents a puzzle. For a start, the inmates of the ghetto could have got out. The Lodz ghetto, the secondlargest concentration of Jews in Europe at the time, had none of the high walls and barbed wire of the Warsaw ghetto. “There was just an ordinary fence. Anyone could have slipped across but nobody did. Lodz, unlike Warsaw, had no Jews living outside the ghetto. There would have' been no cover, no point.” Lodz, renamed Litzmannstadt by the Nazis, was in a district incorporated in the Reich, and Jewish homes outside the ghetto were occupied by new settlers from Germany. This total isolation and the resulting helplessness may ex-: plain the absence of any resistance or uprising.

Then there was constant false hope. Reassuring postcards arrived from deportees, who had been forced to write them as they arrived at the Chelmno extermination camp. At the centre of the dilemma between hope, despair and resistance, was the strange personality of Chaim Rumkowski, the “Eldest of the Jews” and chairman, with almost unlimited powers, of the ghetto administration.

His “special section” organised the roundups, selecting and sorting the victims according to quotas and guidelines provided by the Germans.

This went on month after month, with occasional remissions that produced euphoric optimism. The chroniclers are as dead-pan and diplomatic about Runakowski as they are about the Germans. It emerges that he believed — at least for a time, or at least pretended to believe — that the ghetto’s frantic industrial output could save at least the physically fit from deportation. He also believed that if the Jews did not organise the operation themselves the Germans would do it, with more random ruthlessness. Yet his necessary relationship with the Germans naturally made him suspect. A private diary describes Rumkowski as “a well-mannered man, tidy, peaceful, good, religious, ironic, slovenly, insidious, unpredictable, treacherous, murdderous.”

Half-hero, half victim, Rumkowski seemed to bear the Lodz tragedy on his own shoulders. He acted alone, without confidants. He had been a failed businessman, with no more than formal education and had been in charge of the -ghetto’s orphanage before his promotion.

With hindsight it is impossible to believe that Rumkowski, at least, did not know where the deportees were going, for clues were horribly evident all along: .Suddenly no more baggage was allowed on the trains. . ?

Huge piles of used under-clothes.'. arrived at the ghetto .with orders they should be cleaned and repaired for shipment to Germany. Inside some of the pockets,

“rumskis” were found — the ghetto currency bearing Rumkowski’s face.

Still deadpan, the chronicle comments: “the obvious conclusion is that some of the clothes belong to people, deported from the ghetto.” Rumkowski must have known early on what the resettlement was. His men selected troublemakers and criminals first, then the old and infirm, and finally, because work was the only salvation, the small children.

These roundups broke down some of the chroniclers’ usual phlegm, but they drew a moral from them.

“A shameful, shocking street scene: Jews hunting other Jews like game. A real Jew-hunt, organised by Jews. But what is to be done? There is no choice. Anyone who is called up must report. If he is then exempted well and good. If not he must go. Such is the harsh law of the hour.”

Life went on. On May 31, 1941, the house of culture put on a review in Yiddish, with skits on current events, recitations and dances. ‘This show can without reservation be ranked among those put on stage by good pre-war theatres.”

Work went on, increased to 12 hours a day, six-and-a-half days a week, including children from the age of nine, in Rumkowski’s desperate efforts to stave off further resettlement.

Younger children tended to stay indoors. “Their songs are less like children’s songs than plaints, sad and serious, about rations or the resettlement. One has a sister who has been resettled, or a brother or even a father or mother. It is not unusual to hear them say ’if we are still alive then . .

So the ghetto remained more or less ordered and civilised to the end. It was the only way to be, as Rumkowski must have understood all along., In the end, in August,<l944, the final trains of deportees left, and the ghetto was liquidated. Rumkowski, his wife and the son they had adopted in the ghetto, left too, on a train to the Auschwitz death camp. Behind him, 877 people were left to clean up the site.