The German army occupied the Polish city from Łódź on September 8, 1939 , a week after the invasion of Poland began and, with it, the Second World War. Located 120 kilometers southwest of Warsaw, it was the second city in the country by population (almost 700,000) and the most powerful economically, with a strong textile industry that the Nazis would take advantage of thanks to Jewish slave labor. They renamed it Litzmannstadt [1] and created the first Polish ghetto there , with the close collaboration of the president of the Judenrat Chaim Rumkowski , which would also be the last to be closed and the second largest after the one in the capital. Before its creation, the Jews already suffered from the violence of the occupiers:groups of EinsatzKommando [2] with the help of part of the German minority, they beat and practiced torture. The Star of David was compulsory, their property was arbitrarily confiscated, and they were prohibited from going to synagogues, riding city buses, and owning radios or cars.
On December 10, a secret circular from Friedrich Uebelhoer, the city's German governor, referred to the future ghetto as "a transitional resource," because "the ultimate goal is to be to completely burn this focus of infection”, referring to the Jewish race [3]. In February 1940 it was announced that the Jews of Łódź , some 160,000 [4] should relocate to an isolated area in the center of the city [5], an area that was closed off on May 1 with a high fence surrounded by barbed wire. Whoever was arrested outside could be shot on the spot.The cruelty was extreme and on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays the Volksdeutsche (members of the German minority) starred in the Bloody Days, in which they murdered the Jews in their own homes, implanting a regime of terror [6].
The "reign" of Chaim Rumkowski
There was no water or electricity, and hunger and disease soon decimated its occupants. The Germans provided them with very little food to force them to take jewelry and other valuables out of their hiding places , which they were forced to sell very cheaply to buy food. Members of the German minority in the surrounding areas grew rich from this business. Even before the creation of the ghetto, the Germans established the Jewish Council (Judenrat ) , made up of Hebrews, and on October 13, 1939 they appointed Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski as president. , with the mission of transferring the Jewish population to the area where the ghetto was going to be formed, which should have a certain autonomy, but always under the strict guidelines of the Third Reich. Rumkowski was given very specific instructions:“You must ensure order, in particular, of economic life, the food supply, the use of labor, public health and public welfare. He is authorized to take all necessary measures and issue all necessary instructions to achieve this goal, and to implement them through the Jewish police force under his command”[7], four hundred guards armed with batons.
Chaim Rumkowski was born on February 27, 1877 in Ilyino, Velikoluksky region, in the Russian Empire, and was a run-down insurance broker who had lived in Łódź since 1917 and he had Polish citizenship from the following year. He was a widower (he later married, on December 27, 1941, the lawyer Regine Weinberger), ran an orphanage between 1925 and 1939, and enjoyed a certain sympathy for his pious works, a sympathy that he soon ended. Egotistical and authoritarian, he exercised absolute power over his fellow citizens, to the point of being known as 'King Chaim I' for his absolutist behavior . He displayed good organizational and administrative skills, which suited the Germans . Its economic efficiency largely explains the survival of the ghetto, the first to open and the last to close.
he was granted considerable administrative autonomy , as long as he guaranteed production in the factories, basically textiles and from which, among other things, thousands of uniforms for the army came out, made by some 15,000 tailors who had food privileges. Rumkowski agreed with the occupiers to hand over non-productive Jews , who were going to move out of the ghetto for a supposed resettlement in the East that concealed deportation and extermination [8]. He issued marriage or divorce licenses, sanctioned adulterers, served as chief rabbi, and led religious ceremonies wearing luxurious robes. He sometimes traveled in a kind of chariot pulled by a donkey, was surrounded by a court of sycophants, punished his opponents and wove a wide network of spies and confidants.
“He was a tyrant, who behaved exactly like a führer and directed his lethal terror against anyone who dared to confront his lowliness ”, according to Yehuda Leib Gerst, a survivor of the ghetto. Adam Czerniaköw, the Jewish leader of the Warsaw ghetto, called him “cocky”, “very self-promoting” and “dangerous”. The description of Primo Levi, Auschwitz survivor and later writer (“He was an energetic, uneducated and authoritarian man”) contrasts somewhat with that of Vasili Grossman, who entered Łódź with the Red Army and who described Rumkowski as a “Jew”. illustrated and specialist in statistics” [9]. His government was described as a "Kafkaesque kingdom" , in which he formed “a powerful gerontocracy, while the rest of the population died of causes so natural such as starvation, dysentery and tuberculosis” [10].
The initial inhabitants of the ghetto were soon joined by Jews from Germany, as a consequence of Adolf Hitler's order of September 1941:he wanted a Reich Judenrein (free of Jews) immediately . The first deportation, in October, included 20,000 Rhineland Jews and 5,000 Gypsies. From Hamburg came 16-year-old Lucille Eichengreen, who would survive deportation to Auschwitz in 1943 and later dedicate her life to bearing witness to her horror [11]. The newcomers adapted poorly, because they came from areas with a higher economic level and because, in general, they were not well received, given the unbearable overcrowding who was already suffering. Despite everything, a certain cultural life developed in the ghetto :there was theater, music, official currency, a newspaper [12]…
Chaim Rumkowski before the deportations
At the end of 1941 the Nazis began to eliminate those they described as "useless mouths":elderly, sick and children who contributed nothing to industrial production . They were told that they were going to be transferred to other places (they called it, with evident black humor, receiving “a wedding invitation” [13] but in reality the created extermination camp in Chelmno awaited them). , about 75 kilometers to the west. There, an old mansion was refurbished as a place to receive the deportees and a residence for the camp staff. The first group included not only Jews from Łódź, but from other regions[14].
The deportees were transferred by train to a station near Chelmno , where they arrived in trucks to be transferred, they were told, to another place. They were forced to undress to go to the showers and to get rid of their few valuable objects, but they were taken to some vans in which they were locked up and killed by inhaling engine fumes . They were buried in mass graves in a forest four kilometers away. Adolf Eichmann, lieutenant colonel of the SS and one of the key players in the Holocaust, who visited the camp, described the usual protocol at the trial to which he was subjected in Jerusalem, to which he confessed with horror, especially when someone extracted the teeth of the corpses with a pair of pliers. He tried to justify himself before the judges, who finally sentenced him to death [15]. Chelmno was the first camp to use gases for large-scale extermination and the first outside the USSR where Jews were mass murdered.
Rumkowski collaborated in the deportations . In a famous speech on September 4, 1942, he addressed his fellow citizens asking them to hand over children, the sick and the elderly to try, according to him, to prevent a major deportation. “I never imagined that I would be forced to carry this sacrifice to the altar with my bare hands. In these old years I must put my hands together and beseech you:Brothers and sisters:Give them to me! Fathers and mothers, give me your children!” And later:“In the ghetto there are many patients who can be expected to live only a few more days, perhaps a few weeks. I don't know if the idea is diabolical or not, but I must say:Give me the sick. Instead we can save the healthy.” He asked those who requested this inhuman sacrifice to think “logically” and put themselves in his place:“You will come to the conclusion that I cannot proceed in any other way” [16]. The inmates were still unaware that their loved ones were going to be killed, not simply transferred .
Lucille Eichengreen recalls:“I couldn't understand how someone he could want to convince some parents to give him their children”. “People were shouting:how can you ask us to do that? How are we going to do it? He limited himself to responding:If we don't do it, it will be worse." Karin, Lucille's sister, was twelve years old and the maximum for her deportation was eleven, but still she was taken to Chelmno, where she died, even though Lucille made her up to look older than her. . Jacob Zylberstein, 19, a Holocaust survivor, said of Chaim Rumkowski that he "was a real coward" and that "before he handed over the children he had to have committed suicide." The scenes were tragic as German and Jewish police rounded up those targeted for deportation [17]. Josef Zelkowicz writes in his diary:“It is useless for the child to cling with both little arms to his mother's neck. It is no use for the father to fall on his knees, in front of the threshold, and bellow like a dying ox:"Only over my corpse will you take my son." It is no use for the old man to cling with his bony hands to the cold wall and to his bed [saying]:'Let me die here in peace.' It is no use for the patient to bury his feverish head in the damp and sweaty pillow and sob there what may be his last tears. It's no use. The police have to deliver the order.”The Germans acted brutally and when they wanted to take a four-year-old girl and her mother tried to prevent it, they gave her three minutes to hand her over and, when she didn't, they killed them both right there.
Laurence Rees wonders about Chaim Rumkowski's attitude , one of the greatest experts on the Holocaust:“Did he have in his hand any realistic alternative that was not to submit to the German demands? The leader of the Warsaw ghetto, Adam Czerniaków, took his own life when the deportations began, but this did not help the other Jews too”[18].
Rumkowski asserted his position to sexually abuse young Jewish girls , whom he forced to become concubines. They knew that only then could they save themselves from deportation. Eichengreen was one of them and recounted lurid episodes [19]. Everything was known in the ghetto. "He abused women with impunity," writes Laurence Rees, who claims that when Rumkowski ran the orphanage before the war there were already rumors of something similar [20].
In March 1943 the Germans considered that, except for the 67,000 who remained in Łódź, the Jews of the Warthegau (part of occupied Poland to which the city and the ghetto belonged) had been already deleted. They closed the camp and sent the personnel to fight against the Yugoslav partisans, but the closure was only a parenthesis:it was reopened in April 1944, the personnel returned and the murders resumed, although this time the corpses were cremated:they were they had built crematoria . Now it was a question of eliminating all Jews from the ghetto, not just the unproductive ones. Transport resumed on June 23, 1944 and in just under a month more than 7,000 had been exterminated, a figure that seemed small to Nazi officials, who began to replace this camp with Auschwitz-Birkernau :Zyklon B gas was faster [21].
The Nazis did not protect Rumkowski and the faithful servant was also deported along with his family and gassed . There are various versions of his death. According to one of them, his brother was singled out for deportation and Rumkowski, to avoid it, got on the train with him and threatened to march to his death as well, assuming that the Nazis would give in, which, evidently, they did not. Another version ensures that Chaim Rumkowski was on the list of deportees, although he tried to avoid it by all means the German industrialist Hans Biebow , enriched by slave labor and who had the director of the Judenrat an essential collaborator. Biebow was unable to prevent him from being sent to Auschwitz, but managed to get him to travel in a special car and not overcrowded like the others. He delivered a letter to the commander of the reception camp requesting favored treatment, but, in case of reaching his destination, the letter did not save his life [22].
The order to close the ghetto Heinrich Himmler gave on June 10, 1944 , four days after the Normandy landings. General Vasili Chuikov's 8th Guards Army occupied Łódź on January 18, 1945, five days ahead of schedule, so the Germans did not have time to destroy the city . In it was Vasi Grossman, who wrote:“After the final annihilation of the ghetto, 850 people remained there. The entry of our tanks saved their lives” [23].
As for Chelmno, before the advance of the Red Army they tried to erase the evidence of the extermination and the surviving Jews were forced to dig up the corpses of those killed and cremate them. Evacuation began on January 17, 1945. “Meanwhile, the last 48 Jewish prisoners were murdered. There was an attempted confrontation and three managed to escape. The rest died” [24].
Life in the ghetto has been widely recorded graphically thanks to Henryk Ross , photojournalist before the war, who took photographs for identification cards and others to be used as propaganda for the economic efficiency of Łódź. At great risk to his life, he also took images of everyday life and of Nazi brutality [25]. In 1944 he buried in a box more than 6,000 negatives, which he was able to salvage after liberation and although many had irreversibly deteriorated, about half could be revealed and show an exceptional insight into life in the ghetto. Ross, the photographer from Łódź, testified as key witness in Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem .
Bibliography
Primary sources:
- “Give me your children”:Voices from the Łódź Ghuetto' https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/give-me-your-children- voices-from-the-Łódź-ghetto. Source:United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- ‘Give me your Children. Chaim Rumkowski / 4 September 1942’ (Edited version of the speech) https://www.speech.almeida.co.uk/chaim-rumkowski. Source:Figures of Speech
- ‘Memory Unearthed. The Łódź Ghetto photographs of Henryk Ross’ https://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/memory-unearthed. Source:Museum of Fine Arts Boston
- ‘Rumkowski’s Address at the Time of the Deportation of the Children from the Łódź Ghuetto’. September 4, 1942 https://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%205375.pdf. Source:Yadvashem
- ‘The Łódź Ghetto:The Deportation of the Children from the Łódź Ghetto. September 4, 1942'. Rumkowski's edited speech. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-deportation-of-the-children-from-the-Łódź-ghetto-september-1942. Source:Jewish Virtual Library
- ‘The Łódź Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross. A Collection of Holocaust Photographs’ http://agoŁódź ghetto.com/ Source:The Lodz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross
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- ANSÓ, Federico de. ‘A brief history of the coinage of the Łódź and Terezin ghettos, as well as other camps and commemorative issues. Buenos Aires Numismatic Center. Work published previously to the XXXIV National Conference on Numismatics and Medallistics. Concordia, Entre Rios. Argentina, 2014. http://www.cnba.org.ar/holocaust.html
- ARENDT, Hannah:‘Eichmann in Jerusalem. Penguin Random House Mondadori (DePocket). Barcelona, 2010.
- BEEVOR, Antony:'The Second World War'. Past and Present Editions. Palma de Mallorca, 2012.
- BEEVOR, Antony, and VINOGRADOVA, Luba:‘A writer at war. Vasili Grossman in the Red Army, 1941-1945'. Booket. Barcelona, 2012.
- ‘Songs from the Łódź Ghetto’ https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/music/Łódź-ghetto.asp
- ‘Chelmno’ https://www.yadvashem.org/es/holocaust/encyclopedia/chelmno.html
- COLLOTTI, Enzo:‘Nazi Germany’. Publisher Alliance. Madrid, 1972.
- ‘The murder of the Jews of Poland’ https://www.yadvashem.org/es/holocaust/about/fate-of-jews/poland.html
- LEVI, Primo:‘The Drowned and the Saved’ (Auchwitz Trilogy). Peninsula Editions (Austral). Barcelona, 2018.
- ‘Łódź Ghetto’ https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/about/ghettos/Łódź .html
- REES, Laurence:‘Auschwitz. The Nazis and the Final Solution. Criticism. Barcelona, 2007.
- REES, Laurence:‘The Holocaust. The voices of the victims and the executioners'. Criticism. Barcelona, 2017.
- ROSENFARB, Java. 'The last poet of Łódź'. https://www.letraslibres.com/mexico-espana/el-ultimo-poeta-Łódź
- SILVER OCHAYON, Shreyl. 'The Final Days of the Łódź Ghetto'. https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/about/ghettos/Łódź.html
- WEINBERG, Gerhard L.:‘A world in arms. The Second World War:An Overview'. Grijalbo. Barcelona, 1995.
- ZALOGA, Steven J:‘The Invasion of Poland:Blitzkrieg’. RBA. Barcelona, 2007.
Notes
[1] Town of Litzmann in honor of Karl Litzmann (1850-1936), a German general who conquered Łódź in the First World War.
[2] Squads that followed the occupation troops with the mission of violating or even exterminating the conquered populations.
[3] ‘The Holocaust. The voices of the victims and the executioners'. Lawrence Rees. Criticism. Barcelona, 2017. p. 206.
[4] According to Vasili Grossman in the ghetto there were originally 165,000 Jews from Łódź, 18,000 from Luxembourg, Austria, Germany and Czechoslovakia, 15,000 from Polish settlements and 15,000 from Czestochowa. The maximum population reached 200,000. ‘A writer at war. Vasili Grossman in the Red Army, 1941-1945'. Antony Beevor &Luba Vinogradova. Booket. Barcelona, 2012. p. 388.
[5] Plan of the Łódź ghetto in Steve Sem-Sandberg's Empire of Lies. Mondadori Literature. Barcelona, 2012. p. 639.
[6] ‘A writer at war…’, p. 388.
[7] ‘The Holocaust…’. P. 208.
[8] Rumkowski “not only ran the ghetto autocratically as a private fiefdom, but also decided who should die and who would survive by selecting who should be taken to Chelmno and Auschwitz”, the two extermination camps to which the Jews of the ghetto would end up being deported. ‘A writer at war…’, p. 389
[9] ‘The Holocaust…’ p. 209 and 'The sunk and the saved (Auschwitz Trilogy'. Ediciones Península. Barcelona, 2018. p. 521.
[10] Java Rosenfarb, Holocaust survivor, in ‘The Last Poet of Łódź’. https://www.letraslibres.com/mexico-espana/el-ultimo-poeta-lodz
[11] Lucille (born Cecilie Landau) arrived in Łódź with her mother Sara, who was to die there, and her younger sister Karin, who was deported to Chelmno, where she was murdered. Her father, Benjamin, had also been assassinated in 1940 in Dachau.
[12] Cultural life was relatively rich, despite the suffering. On Coinage in the Ghetto:'A Brief History of Coinage in the Łódź and Terezin Ghettos'. Federico de Anso. Numismatic Center of Buenos Aires, 2014. Concordia, Entre Ríos, 2014 http://www.cnba.org.ar/holocaust.html
The first series of banknotes was issued on May 15, 1940 and is made up of values of 50 pfenning and 1, 5, 10, 20 and 50 marks. The first stamps were ready on March 9, 1944, with the effigy of Chaim Rumkowski, but the Germans canceled their release and only a few were sold. About the newspaper, the Ghuetto Zeitun, it published articles by Rumkowski himself, glorifying his politics, and by authors chosen by him who praised him excessively. On music:The conductor was the composer and violinist David Beygelman, who died in Auschwitz in February 1945. The theater's artistic director was Moshe Pulaver. The House of Culture was closed in mid-1942 and converted into a pillow factory.
On songs with lyrics of hope:‘A writer at war…’, p. 388. Others were remembered by survivors and recorded by current singers by the Munich Historical Committee, under the direction of Shmerke Kaczerginski. Some can be heard (and read their lyrics and additional comments) at https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/es/exhibitions/music/Łódź-ghetto.asp
On the poet Simkha-Bunim Shayevich and other aspects of cultural life, Java Rosenfarb, a survivor of the Shoah, offers extensive and detailed information in 'The Last Poet of Łódź https:/ /www.letraslibres.com/mexico-espana/el-ultimo-poeta-Łódź
[13] ‘The last poet of Łódź’. Java Rosenfarb. https://www.letraslibres.com/mexico-espana/el-ultimo-poeta-Łódź
[14] According to ‘Chelmno. Extermination Camp', from the Shoah Resource Center, the Yad Vashem International School for the Study of the Holocaust (https://www.yadvashem.org/en/holocaust/encyclopedia/chelmno.html) came from Łódź to Chelmno on December 7, 1941, and according to 'Auschwitz. The Nazis and the Final Solution. Lawrence Rees. Criticism. Barcelona, 2007. p. 131, on January 16, 1942.
[15] Eichmann's statements are collected in 'Eichmann in Jerusalem'. Hannah Arendt. Penguin Random House Mondadori (DePocket). Barcelona, 2010. p. 130:“I don't know how many Jews entered [the truck], I could barely look at the scene. No, I couldn't. He couldn't bear that anymore. The screams…". She also describes the burial in mass graves:“They were thrown into the hole, and I seem to still see the man dressed in civilian clothes in the act of extracting their teeth with pliers. That was too much for me. I got back in the car and was silent.” Eichmann, one of the senior leaders of the Final Solution, fled to Argentina after the war, but was located there by the Mossad, kidnapped in 1960, tried and sentenced to death by hanging in Israel in 1962.
[16] The sentences of the speech and the reactions of those who were there are taken from ‘Holocaust…’, p. 459 and following. An edited version of the speech in 'Give me your Children. Chaim Rumkowski / 4 September 1942’ https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-deportation-of-the-children-from-the-Łódź-ghetto-september-1942
[17] Members of the Jewish police were given documents with which they could save family, friends or people of their choice, which caused deep resentment and hatred in the rest of the population.
[18] ‘Holocaust’, p. 466.
[19] “He sexually harassed me. He took my hand and placed it on her penis, he told me:'put her to work'. 'Auschwitz...', p. 146 to 148.
[20] ‘Holocaust…’, p. 466). Rees refers for these issues to Michal Unger:'Reassessment of the Image of Morcechai Chaim Rumkowski', Yad Vashem, 2004. p. 13.
[21] Chelmno (Extermination Camp) https://www.yadvashem.org/en/holocaust/encyclopedia/chelmno.html
[22] ‘The sunken…’. p. 524) and ‘A writer at war…’, p. 390.
[23] ‘A writer at war…’. p. 389.
[24] Chelmno (Extermination Camp) https://www.yadvashem.org/en/holocaust/encyclopedia/chelmno.html
[25] The Memory Unearthed exhibition was held at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston from March 25 to July 30, 2017 and 4,000 of Ross's photographs can be viewed at www.mfa.org. Photos of Henryk Ross can be seen here.