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July/August 2008—Book Reviews

The Death of Jewish Lodz

Michael T. Kaufman

Ghettostadt, Lodz and the Making of a Nazi City By Gordon J. Horwitz Belknap Press 2008, $29.95, pp. 416

This is a remarkable book. With honorable modesty and an unerring tone, Gordon J. Horwitz has accomplished something quite rare and important. In a single book he conveys the awesome scale of the Holocaust—with its multitudes of victims and its long years of suffering and dread—while also emphasizing the particularity of individual experiences. This meticulously researched work makes us familiar with the uncommon lives of men, women and children as they were herded to a common tragic fate.

At the same time, Horwitz graphically demonstrates the causal links between Nazi theory and practice, tracing how ideological rantings about “Lebensraum” and a resurgent Teutonic Reich led to bureaucratically imposed genocide. He has done this by focusing on the experiences of Lodz, Poland’s second-largest city, during the German occupation from 1939 to 1945. Before the war, Lodz and its textile mills were home to more than 200,000 Jews, who accounted for roughly a third of its population and constituted the world’s fourth-largest Jewish community after New York, Warsaw and Budapest.

At the start of the war in September 1939, the Nazis overran Lodz and incorporated it as the sixth-largest city in the German Reich. By the spring of 1940, they had sealed off a small neighborhood, forcing Jews to move into what would become the largest ghetto after Warsaw and the longest-lasting one. They renamed the city Litzmannstadt, after a German general of World War I.

I must admit that I cannot remember a time when I did not know about Lodz and its Jews. In 1942, when I was four, my parents would tell me in Polish about the city where they were born and where in 1936 they had left their families behind. In New York, where the three of us fled from Paris after France fell in 1940, my mother would talk to me about her family and my father’s relatives. Nothing had been heard from any of them for a very long time. At the end of the war, my father learned that all but three of these people had perished either in the ghetto or at Auschwitz. What I learned back then was that I was, and am, a child of Lodz.

As an adult I read many books of Holocaust testimony, among them The Chronicles of the Lodz Ghetto, a compelling assemblage of day-to-day reportage gathered by sharp-eyed scribes commissioned by the ghetto’s Jewish leadership. Horwitz has relied heavily on this treasure.

When I lived in Poland for nearly four years in the 1980s as The New York Times correspondent, I often walked the streets of Lodz, trying to imagine the place as it was before and during the war. I visited the Jewish cemetery looking for headstones of ancestors that I never found. On those solitary wanderings I would sometimes experience jolts of empathy. Something similar occurred quite often as I read Horwitz’s book. I could not read much more than 25 pages at a time without having to stop and sit still for a while.

He has painstakingly entwined two narratives, the first about life and death in the ghetto and the other detailing Nazi efforts to build a modernized Germanic city of the future cleansed of Jews. A history professor at Illinois Wesleyan University, Horwitz has long been interested in how the Nazi confinement of Jews was perceived by local people living nearby. His 1990 book, In the Shadow of Death, was subtitled “Living Outside the Gates of Mauthausen.”

In extending this approach to a major urban setting like Lodz, Horwitz has brought the tragic epoch into a sharp historical context, succeeding in describing how a maddened zeitgeist settled over Lodz and so much of Europe.

The book tells of the ghetto’s early years when Jews were regularly forced onto trains to Chelmno, 37 miles away, where in 1941 the Germans built their first death camp in Poland on a five-acre site. The arrivals were loaded into large trucks and told they were being sent to showers. The truck gates were locked and carbon monoxide was piped in. The trucks then drove the bodies to mass graves in the nearby Rzuchow forest. Eventually Chelmno’s victims would come from many places besides Lodz, and in 1947 Polish investigators estimated that some 340,000 people were killed at the camp. Meanwhile, as the liquidation of the ghetto intensified, more and more Lodz residents were sent to Auschwitz.

Horwitz deservedly devotes a good deal of attention to the tragic and controversial figure of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, who, as head of the Ghetto’s Jewish Council, advanced a strategy of submissive accommodation to the Nazis, believing some Jews might live longer if the residents made themselves economically useful to their overlords. “We must work in order to be able to exist,” he would declare. Then, on September 4, 1942, he conveyed a German demand that all children under 10 be surrendered for deportation. “I bear no tidings of consolation today,” he told the crowd, tearfully adding, “I have come like a thief to deprive you of that which is dearest to your hearts.” In the Warsaw ghetto, Adam Czerniakow, Rumkowski’s counterpart, killed himself rather than deliver a similar message. Within two weeks, 15,859 residents of the Lodz ghetto, children and older people, were sent to their deaths.

After describing such events in powerful detail, Horwitz shifts his focus from the ghetto to the city of Litzmannstadt beyond its borders. There, at the very time that the ghetto children were being seized from their parents, a film crew from Berlin was making a propaganda film intended to proclaim the rapid transformation of old Lodz into the modern, easternmost city of the Reich: It boasted of the city’s new parks, swimming beaches, widened roads, a zoo and health clinics providing child-rearing courses for new mothers. A newly established opera opened its season with Hansel and Gretel, and a new Museum of Pre-History emphasized the Germanic origins of the region.

Lodz, that old Lodz, the metropolis with living and hopeful Jews, has been the setting for two notable literary works. The first, The Promised Land, was written in 1899 by the Polish writer Wladyslaw Reymont, who won the Nobel Prize for literature 25 years later. His novel about Lodz focused on the rapid transformation of a sleepy 18th century market town into a booming smoke-belching industrial city often called “the Manchester of the East.” Prominently portrayed are Poles, Germans and Jews, all ensnared in a tempestuous economy of fluctuating fortunes. The second work, drawn from similar material but shaped from a more Jewish perspective, is The Brothers Ashkenazi, written in Yiddish two years before the war began by Israel Joshua Singer, the older brother of Isaac Bashevis.

Horwitz’s book is not a novel, but as I read it, I kept thinking how useful and poignant it might be if some imaginative teacher, maybe in Poland or Germany, organized a course based on all three books—two dealing with the rise of Lodz and its founding peoples, and the other the story of the fall and the destruction of its Jews.

Michael T. Kaufman is a retired foreign correspondent of The New York Times. He is the author of Mad Dreams, Saving Graces: Poland, a Nation in Conspiracy and more recently, Soros, the Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire.