Face of the Ghetto

Exhibit Text

The Litzmannstadt Ghetto

By the spring of 1938, the Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels had already expressed repeatedly in his diary the idea of confining Jews to ghettos. After the pogrom in November 1938, the Reich Minister spoke extensively with General Field Marshal Hermann Göring and with Chief of the Security Police Reinhard Heydrich about setting up ghettos.

The first ghetto for Jews was not established, however, until after the German invasion of Poland. It was built in early October 1939 in Piotrków Trybunalski in the newly-established Generalgouvernement. As of the spring of 1940, under the direction of Reichsstatthalter and Gauleiter Arthur Greiser, further ghettos were erected in the Reichsgau Wartheland, a district that the National Socialists created out of the occupied western Polish territories. Since the plan was to have the entire Warthegau ethnically “Germanized,” the Jews were first forced into closed-off housing areas, before they were ultimately deported to the Generalgouvernement or “to the East.”

The Litzmannstadt Ghetto, by far the largest ghetto in the Warthegau – and the second-largest of all ghettos (after the Warsaw Ghetto) – was established in February 1940 in the central Polish industrial city of Łódź (renamed Litzmannstadt in April 1940). Before World War II the city of Łódź had 672,000 inhabitants. More than 230,000 Jews in Łódź belonged to the Jewish community, making it the second largest in all of Europe. When the National Socialist occupation began, a total of 435,000 Jews lived on the territory of the Warthegau – only a few thousand survived the Holocaust.

Intense persecution and harassment of the Jewish population set in as soon as the German occupation began. By November 1939, Jews were forced to wear a yellow armband. By December 1939 they had to wear a Star of David on their chest and back. The Jews were robbed, expelled from their homes, and arbitrarily selected for forced labor. The synagogues in the city were destroyed. Countless Jews fell victim to executions and mass shootings. At the end of January 1940 the German administration of Łódź began setting up a ghetto in Bałuty, the city’s poorest district.

In April 1940, more than 160,000 people were cramped into the Litzmannstadt Ghetto, which contained an area of 4.13 square kilometers. On average seven individuals had to share a single room. A “Jewish Elder” was appointed by the Germans oto head the ghetto and implement their orders. His position was also supposed to lend the ghetto the appearance of autonomy. Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski became the “Jewish Elder” in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto. From the very beginning he enlisted the ghetto residents in work as a way to ensure the existence of the camp. But catastrophic conditions quickly set in. Disease and malnutrition caused the death

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rate to rise sharply. The Litzmannstadt Ghetto played an important role in the radicalization of persecution and extermination of the European Jews. By early summer 1941, among Gauleiter Greiser’s staff, plans were already being considered to murder the Jews in the Warthegau who were “unfit for work” and to concentrate the remaining Jews into the Litzmannstadt Ghetto. In the fall of 1941 the ghetto had to take in another 20,000 Jews and 5,000 Roma and Sinti from Western Europe. Just a few weeks later in Kulmhof am Ner – 60 km northwest of Litzmannstadt – the first stationary extermination camp equipped with gas vans was put into operation. Between January and September 1942, tens of thousands of Jews from the Litzmannstadt Ghetto were murdered in Kulmhof. Only Jews who were able to work werepermitted to stay in the ghetto. The last 68,000 Jews were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in August 1944 where almost all of them were murdered.

2. Photographs from Ghettos as a Historical Source

In presentations of the history of National Socialism, photographs have until now primarily been used to illustrate historical and scholarly texts. In many cases, photographs of the persecution and extermination of European Jews serve as “icons of extermination,” used to appeal to the emotions. Photographs are less often regarded as a unique historical source and presented as such. Contrary to common views, however, photographs do not speak for themselves. Knowledge of the context in which they were made is a pre-condition for their interpretation, which requires that the photographer’s perspective and interest also be examined. Most of the pictures from the National Socialist ghettos in East Central Europe and Eastern Europe were taken by perpetrators, bystanders or chance witnesses, a fact that strongly influences the photos’ motif. In many cases the camera work and motif were influenced by the photographer’s contemptuous, even voyeuristic view of the Jews’ distress, misery and debasement. Only a few isolated photographic documents exist, if any, from many of the smaller ghettos. More extensive photographic material exists only for a few ghettos, often photographed by Wehrmacht soldiers or propaganda units that were passing through. Michael Zylberberg noted in the Warsaw Ghetto in his diary that a few hundred German soldiers were always present at the Jewish cemetery: “They gleefully photographed the dead and the accompanying relatives, and even went as far as taking snapshots of the corpses as they were laid out in the mortuary. The Nazis were particularly active in this respect on Sundays, when they would visit the cemetery with their girlfriends. This, rather than a cinema, was a place of amusement for them.” Two large photo collections of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto exist from the “perpetrator perspective.” A collection of more than 450 color slides turned up in an antiquarian bookshop in Vienna in 1987. The photos were taken by Walter Genewein, who at the time was head of the finance department of the German ghetto administration.

The collection is now held at the Jewish Museum of Frankfurt. Walter Genewein, who had volunteered for “duty in the East,” took the photos as a hobby and as part of his official duties. His perspective in many of the photos corresponds with the National Socialist ideology of a master race. Walter Genewein photographed what was believed to be the typical bearded “Eastern Jew.” His choice of subject was clearly influenced by the desire to legitimize the establishment of the ghetto and to justify the conditions that existed in it.

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Less well known are the two albums from a man named Steiner, whose first name is not known. He was evidently an ethnic German policeman who had already visited or perhaps even lived in the city of Łódź rior to 1939. His albums, which contain many dozens of black and white photos, were dedicated by Steiner to Wilhelm Albert, chief of police in Litzmannstadt, in 1942. Today they are preserved in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.

The collection, which begins with photos from 1937, contains many cynical commentaries that convey an anti-Semitism even stronger than that found in the pictures taken by Walter Genewein. The largest collection of existing photographs from the Litzmannstadt Ghetto was taken by Jewish photographers commissioned by the Jewish Council (Judenrat). A total of 27 albums contain 12,000 small format (24x36 mm) contact prints. Today they are held in the Łódź State Archive. The albums had already been bound by the photographers in the ghetto and were for the most part labeled and arranged by topic. These photographs are not only evidence of the mass crimes committed by the National Socialists, they also document the diverse and complex life that existed in the ghetto. The many thousands of photographs from the Litzmannstadt Ghetto make it by far the best and most extensively documented of all the National Socialist ghettos. All the photographs in the exhibition are taken from this collection.

3 Jewish Photographers in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto

The ghetto residents were not allowed to own cameras. A large collection of photos exists nevertheless, thanks to the Jewish Council’s “Evidenzabteilungen,” a documentation department that was founded in the summer of 1940 to contain the registration office, the statistics department and the ghetto archive. This is where the most important documents – the Ghetto Chronicle, numerous statistical data, as well as the extensive photo collection – originated, documents that today provide us with a better understanding of the history of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto.

In August 1940, a photographic office which controlled all the photographic activity in the ghetto was established within the statistics department of the Jewish ghetto administration. It was closed down on April 10, 1944. Thousands of passport photos were needed for the identification cards and work IDs of the ghetto residents. The photographers Mendel Grosman and Henryk Ross, who worked in the statistics department, were primarily responsible for creating them. Most of the photos were taken between the fall of 1941 and the summer of 1944, but in many cases it was difficult to date the photographs accurately.

The activities of the Jewish photographers, however, went far beyond merely creating portrait photos of the ghetto residents for IDs and work permits. Mendel Grosman and Henryk Ross, both of whom probably took the vast majority of the photographs, were soon working as photographers for the Jewish Council and creating documentary series of the various departments and work areas.

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As noted in the Ghetto Chronicle, there must have been other photographers in the ghetto as well because in early 1942 Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the “Jewish Elder,” agreed to the founding of an “association of unified photographers” with eleven members. No further information about this association and its activities has been found in the archival documents on the history of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto.

Lejb Maliniak, born in 1908, is the only other photographer from the Litzmannstadt Ghetto who is known by name. He had lived in Łódź before 1939 and after 1941 ran a photo studio in the ghetto at Insel Street 22, probably predominantly for the Jewish Council. Only a few photgraphs are clearly attributed to him. There are also photographs from the Litzmannstadt Ghetto in the holdings of the Yivo Institute (New York), Yad Vashem (Jerusalem), the Museum of Holocaust and Resistance at the Ghetto Fighters’ House (Kibbuz Lohamei ha-geta’ot, Israel) and other memorial museums and research institutes, many of which could not be clearly attributed to any single photographer.

Mendel GrosmanMendel Grosman (1913–1945), sometimes written as Grossman, made photo portraits and colored photos. He maintained close contact to painters and artists in Łódź. He was a well-known and recognizedphotographer in the 1930s. In 1940 he, too, was forced to move with his family into the ghetto where he began working in the statistics department. Officially he created passport photos for IDs and work permits. In August 1944, shortly before the ghetto was liquidated, he was able to hide 10,000 negatives on the rounds of the ghetto. He was deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp where he remained until April 16, 1945. Sick and exhausted, Mendel Grosman was shot during one of the death marches. Grosman’s photos were found after the war and made their way to Palestine, but most of them were later lost during the 1948 War of Independence. Grosman’s friend Nachman Zonabend was able to rescue a number of slides that are today found in different archives and museums.

Henryk RossHenryk Ross (1910–1991) came from Warsaw and in the 1930s worked as a sports reporter and general press photographer for various newspapers in Łódź. Along with Mendel Grosman, he was the most important photographer of the statistics department in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto. After the ghetto was liquidated in the summer of 1944, Ross became a member of the Jewish clean-up commando and was able to hide himself as well as his pictures and numerous documents until the city was liberated. After the war Ross ran a photo shop in Łódź for a few years. He immigrated to Israel in 1956, taking his photographs from the Litzmannstadt Ghetto with him. Some of them were presented as evidence in the trial against Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. Today approximately 3,000 of Ross’s photos are heldin the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.

4 Subject Matter

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Although the Jewish photographers’ pictures distinguish themselves strongly from the perpetrator perspective, they were made with different purposes in mind. The majority of the photos were officially commissioned, often to portray the ghetto, and to demonstrate its productivity and significance for the German wartime economy. The “Jewish Elder,” Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, had the many labor departments and their activities documented as a way to convince to National Socialists of the usefulness of the Jewish workers. In a few individual cases, the German authorities used Mendel Grosman’s and Henryk Ross’ pictures to underscore the significance of the ghetto within the National Socialist agencies and party hierarchy.

The pictures of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, giving speeches, attending celebrations, visiting social agencies in the ghetto and attending to the administrative work, also reflect an official nature. The carefully orchestrated photos of the ghetto and Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski’s self-portrayal in them fluctuate between survival strategy and personal vanity. Rumkowski’s desire to have himself portrayed was one of the main reasons for producing such a large number of photographs.

But none of the photographers limited their activities to their official commission. They were also active privately and photographed subjects that were strictly forbidden. Executions, starvation on the streets, corpses at the Jewish cemetery in the Marysin district and the deportation of tens of thousands of ghetto residents from the Radegast station to the Kulmhof extermination camp in 1942 and 1944 were some of the scenes that they captured with their cameras. Grosman, Ross, Maliniak and the other unknown photographers took pictures to document the complex, social world of the ghetto. Without being asked officially to do so, they photographed baby wards, old-age homes, soup kitchens, orphanages, hospitals, schools and religious festivities. They also photographed family celebrations and members of the Jewish ghetto police.

With their unique perspective, which always saw the people first, they clearly distinguished themselves from the non- Jewish photographers. Stigmatizing photos of orthodox Jews from Central and Eastern Europe, depicted as “Ostjuden” and typically found in the National Socialist anti-Semitic propaganda, also exist in the photos of Steiner and Genewein, but never in the photos taken by Grosman, Ross and the other photographers.

The Jewish photographers also risked their lives to document individual crimes for posterity. This is particularly true of the photographs that Mendel Grosman and Henryk Ross secretly took of the deportations in 1942 and 1944. In the photographs of large processions of people, with and without luggage, being led from the ghetto to the Radegast loading station where the trains destined for the Kulmhof extermination camp departed, it is sometimes apparent that the photographs were taken secretly from a window or building entrance. Mendel Grosman always hid his camera under his coat, which allowed him to take close-up shots of the people being deported – people who were to be murdered just a few hours later in the gas vans of Kulmhof.

It is known that in September 1942 Mendel Grosman photographed at the Jewish cemetery the corpses of people who were shot during the deportation. These pictures, however, are only

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found among the documents that were hidden in 1944. The design and character of the photo albums suggest that they were used for an official purpose within the statistics department, although they also contain a few private photos from photographers. It is no longer possible to reconstruct how and according to what criteria they were added to the albums.

All of the photos reflect an ambivalence – between official commission from Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the Jewish ghetto administration’s “Jewish Elder,” and the photographers’ covert documentation of ghetto life. The pictures tell a history of the ghetto and many stories from the ghetto. Sometimes they intentionally omit certain aspects of the reality. Photographs of official occasions exist along side private snapshots of people laughing or engaging in creative activities. These photographs document not only the short-lived moments of harmony and joy, even happiness in the ghetto, they also demonstrate the remarkable will to preserve humanity despite the inhuman reality. The pictures of deportations taken secretly provide a strong emotional contrast.

In presenting and observing these pictures, one must be aware that most of the people pictured were either murdered in the Holocaust or died from the brutal conditions in the ghetto. The pictures taken by the Jewish photographers reveal a world whose extraordinary diversity, but also unspeakable misery and cruelty, largely remained concealed from people on the outside.

The photographs document a world, a microcosm, that was larger and more remarkable than the general understanding of the word “ghetto” suggests. Making this world visible meant working against the National Socialists’ aim to lock away the European Jews, remove them from view, and ultimately, have them murdered. Given this fact, the photographers’ activity within the ghetto is a remarkable act of resistance that allowed the people in the ghetto to retain their dignity and their right to be remembered.

This photo exhibition presents a sample of the 12,000 contact prints that were compiled by the photographers of the statistics department. In selecting the photographs, an attempt was made to present every important motif. All the photos were taken between 1940 and 1944. In most cases it was not possible to determine the exact year of the photo or the name of the photographer, in which case this information was left out of the photo caption. When not otherwise noted, the quotes next to the photographs are from residents of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto.

Children

More than any other subject matter, the children in the ghetto were the frequent focus of the photographs taken by Mendel Grosman, Henryk Ross and the other photographers. They include private photos of children with whom the photographers were acquainted, children in the orphanage, at school and in the labor departments. In mid-July 1940, of the almost 160,000 ghetto inhabitants, 40,000 were children under the age of 14. Many died of infectious diseases and malnutrition caused by a lack of food and poor sanitary conditions. Oskar Rosenfeld, a

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contributor to the Ghetto Chronicle from Prague, noted at the time: “Face of the ghetto. Beautiful children, blond, but with rickets and tuberculosis. Meanwhile, with a little luck, you can encounter flocks of children with smiling faces, blue-eyed girls with curly, blond hair and reddish-blond lads …very attractive, dear creatures who, even in the bleak surroundings and amidst affliction and excrement, have been able to maintain the cheerfulness of a child’s nature. Orphans, led by their teachers, sing in the streets […]. The faces of the children are cheerful, the color sometimes even rosy, but the doctors know more: The majority suffers from rickets and tuberculosis. Most of them are candidates for death.”

After the ghetto was created and sealed off, the Jewish Council established an elaborate educational system with almost forty schools. Well over 10,000 pupils were taught in elementary and secondary schools. For many children, it was not the instruction, but the school meals that were most important. The educational system is nevertheless an example of the remarkable attempt to foster cultural and intellectual values under the extreme conditions in the ghetto.

Due to a lack of space, the schools were closed with the arrival of 20,000 Jews from Western Europe in the fall of 1941. Beginning in 1941, children who were “fit for work” were systematically assigned to labor in the many different departments. But as of 1942, especially in September 1942, children under the age of ten were deported to the Kulmhof extermination camp in a wave of deportations and murdered there. Krankenhaus, Kinderstation

Communication with the rest of the world by mail was in many ways indispensable to life. By the summer of 1940, bank transfers and financial assistance from the outside had become an increasingly important element of survival for the ghetto residents. In both 1941 and 1942, more than 160,000 money transfers arrived from abroad or from other locations where Jews were still living. Letters and postcards were censored, but they were at least a sign that someone was still alive. In early January 1942, the same time that the deportations began, the Gestapo banned mail communication between the ghetto and the outside world.

One of the albums contains a number of photos that are unquestionably of a private nature. Most of the photos were probably taken by Mendel Grosman. It is not clearly understood how these private photos relate to the other pictures in the albums. Although the album resembles the others in appearance, these photos may have been removed from official use. On the other hand, the photographers may have intentionally integrated the photos, which to a degree suggest an intact world and normality in the ghetto, into the album.

Children’s Colony

Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the “Jewish Elder,” went to considerable effort to improve the care and provisions available to the many thousands of children in the ghetto. A number of institutions – an orphanage, a baby ward, even a children’s colony – were established for this purpose. Beginning in summer 1940, 1,500 children were able to recuperate in the children’s

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colony and occasionally forget the reality of life in the ghetto. Free meals were provided there, but the children’s colony also suffered from a lack of provisions and the death rate rose rapidly.

“Jewish family life, which enjoys a deserved international reputation, has to stand a very difficult test. […] Hardship, in particular hunger, does its destructive work. Hence circumstances arise that in their gruesome reality surpass anything our imaginations can envision. But then to rescue the honor are those not uncommon cases to be considered in which pure love shines forth with its heart of gold, overcoming all difficulties. Parents and children, siblings and distant relatives sacrifice their health, even their lives, for one another. All the more tragic that it is usually done in vain.” - Ghetto encyclopedia, article on “family life”

“At school they are already talking about the end of the school year, about the holidays, the choice of secondary school, etc. I am not going to change my previous intention of attending a humanistic school. The instructors here are quite awful, but I will somehow manage to get through it all. For now it looks quite bleak for the fourth grade class. We only just passably reached our goal in a few subjects. But only just passably. The school year is supposed to be over at the end of September. […] We will become somebody!” -Dawid Sierakowiak, diary entry,August 26, 1941

Orphanage,

In 1940, the daily rations in the ghetto still consisted of approximately 1800 kcal. By mid-1942 they had been reduced to only 600 kcal – a development that was reflected in the rapid increase in fatalities. Thousands of ghetto inhabitants died of starvation. Hunger, and the memory of food from the past, took on a power that dominated everything. The rations for the workers were totally insufficient, and the portions allotted to children, the elderly and the sick were even more inadequate.

The photo albums contain a striking number of portraits of orphans. Evidently this was a subject matter that appealed to the photographers emotionally. Caring for the weakest members of the ghetto community was a matter of course to everyone. There was an unusually large number of orphans in the ghetto who had lost their parents. They had either died when they were resettled from another ghetto, sent to a forced labor camp, or deported to an extermination camp, or they had succumbed to illness and starvation. Mendel Grosman’s parents also died in the ghetto. Most of the orphans, especially the younger ones, were deported to the Kulmhof extermination camp in September 1942 where they were murdered.

“Everything is the same in the ghetto. Today the food rations for the second half of February were announced: 350 g flour, 270 g flakes, 80 g potato barley, 600 g marmalade, 450 g sugar, 300 g salt, 325 g grits, 50 g canned tomatoes, 1/2 l vinegar, a piece of soap, a packet of matches and a few odds and ends. Also 3 kg turnips and 3 kg potatoes. For Sundays, and on both February 7 and 14, half a kilogram of potatoes, makes 1 kg altogether. The distribution of 20 dkg meat and 10 dkg sausage was also announced. No coal, there are no designated allotments.” - Jakub Poznański, diary entry from February 12, 1943

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Children’s Colony

“A school was set up in the attic, a secret school that has the task of instructing children in the basic subjects – a little Yiddish, a little arithmetic. […] The theatre rehearsals were like a holiday for the children. They forgot everything, even their constant companion, hunger … There were a number of talented children and over time the rehearsals produced a fine children’s theater. […] The children felt that they were fulfilling a kind of mission, that they were performing for the people and helping them to forget their ghetto worries a little.” - Moshe Pulaver, 1944 I want once more to force myself to find the courage to live, God willing, for my child, the poor thing. We have deteriorated so because no money was sent. May God deliver us as he sees fit. Our suffering is already so great; the sins of others have already been atoned for. I pray that I will soon be released from my suffering. God let me fall asleep in peace and rest by my mother, my final request, if need be that I cross over. The child cries in hunger, the father cries for cigarettes, the mother wishes to die, family life in the ghetto. The heart still functions, but it will never survive the war.” - Irene Hauser, diary from July 15, 1942

“’My little brother died yesterday evening.’ Filled with a fear of the little figure beneath the sheet, gazing, I cried, ‘Why didn’t you tell anybody so that they could come pick him up? Why do you just leave him lying here?’ […] ‘He is dead, and there is nothing I can do to change it. But tomorrow the weekly rations are due. If I had reported his death yesterday, they would have taken his coupons. This way, at least, I will still get an extra loaf of bread.’” - Sara Plager-Zyskind

Marysin Educational Center

Marysin was a district in the northeast of the ghetto that evoked deeply contradictory associations among the ghetto residents. It was where the model institutions were planned for children and youth, but it was also where the Jewish cemetery was located. And behind it, the Radegast loading station stood, where deportation trains had been departing for Kulmhof since the winter of 1941. When it was said that someone was soon to go to Marysin, it meant that they were close to death caused by sickness or malnourishment.

Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the Elder of the Jews in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto

Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski (1887–1944) first worked as a salesman and insurance representative. Active in the Zionist movement, he headed a Jewish orphanage in Łódź in the early 1930s. In the fall of 1939 he was appointed “Jewish Elder” by the Germans and retained this position until the end. He was conscious of his power and a controversial figure, but “King Chaim I,” as he was called in the ghetto, knew how to skillfully and systematically employ labor as a way to protect the ghetto from liquidation until the summer of 1944.

Rumkowski faced the same dilemma as the Jewish councils in the other ghettos: He had no choice but to carry out the orders of the National Socialists, but at the same time he bore

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responsibility for the lives of the ghetto inhabitants and had to convince the Germans that the Jews were useful and should not be murdered. He was not able to prevent children, the sick and the elderly from being deported. On September 4, 1942, Rumkowski held a public speech that deeply impressed all the ghetto inhabitants: “We are not led by the thought ‘How many will perish?’ but by the thought ‘How many can we save?’ Hence, we, that is my closest associates and I, reached the conclusion that, however hard it would be for us, we should take the implementation of this order into our own hands. I must perform this difficult and bloody operation – I must cut off limbs in order to save the body itself. I must take children because, if not, – God forbid – others may be taken as well […]. They have requested 24,000 victims, three thousand a day for eight days. I succeeded in reducing the number to 20,000, perhaps less than 20.000, but only on the condition that these be children under the age of ten. Children ten and older are safe!

Since the children and the aged together equal only some 13,000 souls, the gap will have to be filled with the sick.” Between September 3 and 12, 1942 almost 16,000 children, sick and old people were brought to Kulmhof where they were killed. In August 1944, the ghetto was closed down with the exception of a small commando that was left behind. The last approximately 68,000 inhabitants, including Rumkowski and his family, were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Rumkowski was murdered in the gas chambers along with almost all the others.

Wedding with Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski presiding over the official marriage ceremony, June 26, 1943

Although in a state of shock, whenever possible, people tried to maintain a degree of normality. In early December 1941, for example, 25 couples among the “new arrivals” from Western Europe were officially married. Altogether 63 of the 4,210 Jews deported from Berlin to Litzmannstadt got married in the ghetto to someone from their own or from another transport. The “West Jews,” however, for the most part kept to themselves. There were even three children born in the ghetto to mothers deported from Berlin: Gitta Radomsky, born on December 3, 1941, Recha Halbersberg, born on January 25, 1942, and Tana Pollaczek, born on May 9, 1942. None of these children survived.

“You are aware that there was always a large distance between you and us. Today this distance is no longer relevant. There are no differences between us! For we are all brothers, unified by our shared misfortune. I know how great your bitterness is, after losing everything and being expelled from your homeland. Before your arrival, I appealed to your brothers, asking them to move closer together without grumbling so that the new population can have a roof over its head. My entire life I have been fulfilled by the ideal of working for the children and youths. But without reflecting for a moment, I decided with a heavy heart to close all the schools, to deprive 14,000 children of instruction, to create space for the new arrivals.” - Rumkowski’s speech to the “evacuated” from Germany, Czechoslovakia and Luxemburg on November 1, 1941.

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On a clear Sunday I organized an examination of all the Hachschara groups [groups preparing to immigrate to Palestine] and afterwards a parade in front of the chairman. That was really impressive to see. About 3,000 youths passed in formation. Hebrew orders were given, the boys and girls marched rhythmically, in a perfect lockstep. The invited guests had tears in their eyes. The youth chanted: ‘Long live the prince!’” - Jakub Poznański, diary entry

Rumkowski’s speech behind a cordon of the Jewish ghetto police, photo taken by Lejb Maliniak Rumkowski was the middleman between the environment and the ghetto residents. Within the ghetto he enjoyed almost unlimited power. He was able to bestow extra food rations, send children to a recreational home, provide people with work, but also place disagreeable people on the deportation list or assign them to forced labor outside the ghetto. Rumkowski did not decide whether deportations took place, only who was to be deported – and his decisions had to satisfy the aims of the National Socialists. For this reason, the survivors’ reports about Rumkowski range from tremendous gratitude to deep contempt.

The young artist Zvi Hirsch Szylis (1909–1987), working on his portrait of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowskis, with scenes of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto in the background. Szylis was deported to Auschwitz- Birkenau in the summer of 1944, and later sent to the Dachau concentration camp where he was liberated. He immigrated to Israel in 1957 where he continued to work as an artist. A large number of his works depict scenes from the Litzmannstadt Ghetto. - Photo probably from 1942

Children’s theater performance with banner “What rules the world,” 1941 “On Saturday, September 6, [1941] an event was organized by the Marysin administration in the hall of the cultural center under the motto ‘summer festival’. The many hours-long program was presented solely by children who were studying or recuperating in Marysin. It included choir singing, recitations, genre scenes from the life of children in Marysin, dances, works of the grotesque, and more. It was all very impressive. […] At the end of this nice performance the chairman held a short speech in which he pointed out that the well-being of the children still takes priority. No sacrifice should be eschewed to help the youngest ghetto inhabitants.” - Ghetto Chronicle from September 1941

Children’s theater performance with banner “What rules the world,” 1941

“On Saturday, September 6, [1941] an event was organized by the Marysin administration in the hall of the cultural center under the motto ‘summer festival’. The many hours-long program was presented solely by children who were studying or recuperating in Marysin. It included choir singing, recitations, genre scenes from the life of children in Marysin, dances, works of the grotesque, and more. It was all very impressive. […] At the end of this nice performance the chairman held a short speech in which he pointed out that the well-being of the children still takes priority. No sacrifice should be eschewed to help the youngest ghetto inhabitants.” - Ghetto Chronicle from September 1941

Specialized Courses

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“A student from the same grade as ours died from hunger and exhaustion yesterday. As a result of his terrible appearance, he was allowed to eat as much soup in school as he wanted, but it didn’t help him much. He is the third victim in the class.” - Dawid Sierakowiak, diary entry from May 13, 1941

Children’s Colony

“The diseases are increasing … We hear about spotted fever and that quarantines have been implemented in some camps. There is no exact information. There are enough symptoms of illnesses. Doctors with decades of experience are finally presented with mass cases of famine edema. Three months of undernourishment put thousands of people in the ghetto into life-threatening conditions. … After having survived the actual illness, many people collapsed because the damage done to the bloodstream was too far advanced.” - Oskar Rosenfeld

Baby Ward

“We have to give Rumkowski his due. He cared for children generously. He was not satisfied only with the children of the schools, but he also looked out for them outside school […] in the first place for orphans, who did not have anyone to raise them […]. Here Rumkowski truly demonstrated his love and devotion to the child. He cared for them with everything that he could, not sparing any effort and material sacrifices.” - Israel Tabaksblat, 1946

Religious life played a less important role in the ghetto than it did in freedom. The conditions in the ghetto made it extraordinarily difficult to observe the religious laws and holidays. Observing the Jewish dietary laws was basically impossible. Since the synagogues were destroyed in 1939, a new one was set up in a former cinema. “My father continued to observe the Sabbath and did not work on that day. On the days that he did not work he did not receive a portion of food, of course. Father was lucky that in the Lodz ghetto, as in Bzeziny, his work supervisor overlooked the fact that he did not appear for work on Saturdays. Father also used to get up before sunrise every day in order to put on his tefillin [ phylacteries] and pray. This too took away from his rest.” - Sara Plager-Zyskind

“Religious life. Officially there have not been any prayer services since Jomim Narojim [high holy days] 1941. Circumcision is done unofficially. Sukkoth huts are not permitted. Metaher zayn [ritual washing of the dead body], Mikvah [ritual bath] not permitted. Ceremonial Lewaje, not permitted. Matzoh [unleavened bread]: Passover 1942 Matzoh still available. Schilchelach [prayer leaders] in private apartments. Rabbinate does not exist. Marriage ceremonies by the Elder. No official Bar-Mizwah. No Beth-Midrasch […] Tojre [Hebrew Bible] is no longer studied, children grow up without Jewish, religious and traditional life.” - Oskar Rosenfeld

Jewish Cemetery

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“Cemetery death: A long extending field with a high wall that, built in the fall of 1941, turns its back on the Lodzer Cottage Maryshin … There, where one would expect to finally encounter a more cheerful peacefulness, there, at the villa quarter at the end of the ghetto, far from the actual ghetto city, lies the “green law” for the dead. Not a green lawn. Brown, thick muddy earth, on which thousands of gravestones already stand … The dead are carried without cease from the mortuary to all areas of the cemetery. […] The earth fills up with the dead. Those are the ones who were condemned to the Lodz ghetto, and to a brisk death. The starving, the freezing, the damned, the suicide victims. […] Mass mortality in the death corner of Europe!” - Oskar Rosenfeld

Old-age home, photo taken before September 1942

“Today a new tremendously important welfare organization was founded. It is the old-age home for the newly arrived population in the ghetto. The number of old people among the new population is strikingly high, but thanks to this institution, a special home especially for them can address the most urgent problems that have emerged as a consequence of the ghetto population growing by more than 20,000 people. […] The buildings will provide housing for a few thousand elderly. Today the first 46 residents moved into the home.” - Ghetto Chronicle from December 1, 1941

The interior of an apartment, probably 1942

“The people had changed after three months of starvation. Almost all of them had crooked backs, quivering legs. Illness crept up. Even young people caught pneumonia. Thousands of sleepless people rolled back and forth on the cots, since their bones ached when they lied down, and they dreamed of dishes like potatoes, apples, sausages, pastries, of beer and wine and coffee. The palate sweat, grimacing in reaction to sweet and bitter … The smell of soup made the hungry people weak, but the hands automatically reached out for the tin bowl in which the soup was poured daily. Soup over and over again … thin soup, scanty soup, thick soup, but soup … It was no longer about eating, but about postponing the hour when the collapse would inevitably happen. Every day a person died here and there in the camps, it was sometimes three, sometimes seven. No one gave a damn about the dead.” - Oskar Rosenfeld

“Resettled” Jews from Germany, fall 1941 or spring 1942 “After two or three weeks, the resettlers were assigned apartments. Incidentally, the rooms that they were assigned could hardly be characterized as apartments. Even when the man the Nazis appointed as Jewish Elder and his administration had the best intentions – and in this case they certainly did not – it would have been absurd to assign accommodations and apartments that permitted a normal life to all those who had been resettled to the ghetto. The living conditions were atrocious even before the German Jews had arrived […] Later, the new arrivals from the West began to die off in huge numbers: from rampant consumption, dysentery, typhus, and most often simply from starvation. Or when the Germans again demanded a certain number of Jews for the “evacuation,” it was the new arrivals who were the first to be handed up.” - Arnold Mostowicz

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“Resettled” Jews from Germany, fall 1941 or spring 1942 The situation that the 20,000 Jews from Western Europe faced after they arrived in the ghetto in the fall of 1941 led them to try to distance themselves from the Polish Jews. Wearing the badge with the German word “Jude” that had been required in the Nazi state helped serve this purpose. It became a characteristic of the “resettlers” that they kept their “Jewish star.” The population that had been living in the ghetto since 1940 wore a different identifying badge on their clothing, a different star without lettering. It was not uncommon for “Ostjuden” who had been deported from Western Europe to insist on being allowed to retain the German “Jewish star.”

Apothecary in the ghetto, 1941 or 1942

“For a while now it has become very difficult to get the necessary injections. There are a few here who buy up these shots legally or illegally and then sell them at much higher prices. That is why the special division [of the Jewish police] has intervened in this affair. Later some medicine such as Vigantol, Coramin and others were distributed to the needy for free. […] I was given an address where I could get Vigantol privately. In fact I received ten cubic centimeters for 28 marks. It supposedly came from smuggled goods, but I don’t believe that anymore. I think it is more likely that the seller got it from the apothecary. Original packaging, sealed bottle. - Jakub Poznański, diary from January 25 and February 4, 1943

Labor I

The many photographs of the labor departments in the ghetto make up the largest part of the entire photographic collection. The goods production in the ghetto was documented in detail – either as a long shot of the workshops or as a close-up of individual workers. The interests of the National Socialist ghetto administration coincided here with the hopes of the ghetto inhabitants. The “Jewish Elder” Chaim Rumkowski had already proposed to the German authorities in early April 1940 that they allow 8–10,000 Jewish skilled laborers to work in return for food supplies.

At the end of 1940, 19 different labor departments in the ghetto were operating with 7,000 workers. In 1943, more than 60,000 people were working in 96 departments. “Work is our only chance” was Rumkowski’s widely varied motto. The production had been yielding respectable profits for the Germans since mid-1941: The army garment office as well as many private companies such as Josef Neckermann, the Hamburger Alsterhaus and the Felina Mannheim had part of their clothing industry produced here. The ghetto inhabitants that did not find work did not receive sufficient food and suffered greatly from undernourishment. Death soon approached “every cot, every broken window pane and asked: ‘when may I come?’…” (Oskar Rosenfeld)

As of 1941, children were increasingly and systematically employed in the many labor departments. Given the catastrophic food supply, this allowed them to improve their families’ chance of survival, but having employment also provided a certain degree of protection from

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deportation. Many labor departments intensified their training of children and youths in order to delay their deportation for as long as possible. The motto “Work is our only chance” now took on a new meaning: Initially, people had first to work before they received any food, but by late 1941, anyone “unfit for work” was threatened by deportation and gassing.

Children were also assigned to work with mica splitters, a raw material used to produce transistors and radio equipment. “The measures to employ children over the age of ten are making headway. […]. The marginal number of children who are not yet employed will receive a job in the next few days. Something interesting has now come to light: About a hundred children have given fake names, names that do not even exist in the ghetto or names of people who have been resettled or passed away. Rumors are spreading among the population that the chairman is also trying to employ even younger children, 8 years and older.” Ghetto Chronicle from July 2, 1942

Bootleg Division

“Let’s assume the best case: that the worker does not have to share his extra ration with family members who are unemployed and that he can consume everything by himself. He enjoys this advantage only as long as he works. That is a terrible thought and as unsocial as it gets. But that is just the way it is with the idea of work in the ghetto. There are good reasons for this, background circumstances. The worker has to give the last of his strength. Having done that, he may go to ruin. There is no room in the ghetto for the sick – except in Marysin [at the Jewish cemetery.]!” Oskar Singer

Labor II

The “Jewish Elder” Chaim Rumkowski subordinated everything to work. “The best birthday present for the chairman [Rumkowski] – honest and useful work,” ran the headline of the Yiddish ghetto newspaper in March 1941. The work shifts ran 10 to 14 hours a day. The youngest laborers in the workshops were barely eight years old. By late 1940, the ghetto administration, for a “Jew lending fee,” arranged to have many thousands of ghetto residents work as forced laborers for numerous building projects in the Warthegau.

The German municipal administration of Litzmannstadt evaluated the significance of Jewish labor in a report from December 1940: “From an ideological position, the working Jew, who presents us with an exploitable capital, is in large-scale operations comparable to a machine. It can only be worked at full steam when it is oiled.”

But the food supply in the ghetto remained totally inadequate. At the very latest when the deportations began and the first rumors about mass murder spread, people in the ghetto increasingly expressed the view that the labor productivity delayed extermination but did not stop it: “Brothers!,” the partisans of the Vilnius Ghetto appealed to the Jews of all the existing ghettos in 1942, “Destroy the illusion that economic necessity can save us. Throw away the hope that the Germans, out of economic considerations, are not going to kill off the 40,000

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Jews in Białystok and the more than half a million in Warsaw. The eradication of the Jews is a central operation. It is not dependent on any local organ. To have work and to avoid going to the front, the Germans in Grodno, Białystok and Warsaw could delay the destruction of the ghettos for a short time. But the eradication is a systematic process that will catch up with everyone sooner or later. Here, the political program dictates over all economic factors.”

Metal Department I

It is seldom possible to identify the people in the photographs. The boy in the middle is Chaim Mietek Glezer, born in 1930. He was forced to move into the ghetto with his family in the spring of 1940. His father worked as an engraver in the metal department. He organized a job for his son, producing tin toys in the artistic sheet metal plant. Mietek Glezer was deported with the other ghetto inhabitants to Auschwitz-Birkenau in the summer of 1944. He survived the Holocaust and immigrated to Israel in 1950 where he died in 1988. Over a period of ten years his widow filed a suit against the German pension insurance to receive an adequate pension for the work that Mietek Glezer did in the ghetto. Her claim was legally approved in February 2010.

Rubber FactoryThe people who were deported to Litzmannstadt from Western Europe in the fall of 1941 were often too old to do physical labor. This was particularly true for the more than 4,200 Jews from Berlin. “The people had fallen down too quickly and were unable to recover in so short a time. The attorney from Frankfurt or the bank director from Berlin was not really able to find the determination to haul the heavy vegetable wagon. […] He lived in the collective under the worst conditions and after suffering severe psychic trauma caused by the resettlement, had no transition before he was expected to pull the cart.” - Oskar Singer

Printing Press/Sign Workshop at Sulzfelder Street “The Jewish Elder’s printing press printed two kinds of calendars: The office calendar and the annual calendar. 1800 copies were printed of the first one, 4000 copies of the other one. The office calendar, consisting of weekly sheets, was printed in German and Yiddish. It is adorned with a picture of the chairman. The calendars are intended for use in the offices, departments, workshops and institutions of the Jewish Elder.” Ghetto Chronicle from January 6, 1942

Small-Furniture Factory

“Dilapidated barracks, dark work rooms with sweating, emaciated, silent figures working at racing speed in front of loud machines, beaten hungry faces, swarming people in overcrowded chambers, a few vegetable fields that defied the barren ground between the destroyed buildings, one or two half dried out, scraggly trees on Baluter Ring, that served as something like a market square, and above it a sky that with its cloudless and radiant blue, felt less like a blessing and more like mercilessness.” - Friedrich Hielscher

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Tailor Division for Youths, summer 1942

The tailor division for youths, set up in early July 1942 in the building of the tailor department, conducted courses for 300 children at a time. The photographs of the departments were usually official commissions, meaning they were requested by the “Jewish Elder.” Hence it can be assumed that the photo was taken shortly after the tailor division for youths opened, as a way to document the work of the “Jewish Elder.” The Ghetto Chronicle refers to “advanced training courses” that were offered by this division and that the courses were attended by children who already worked in the tailor department – almost 2,000 children in early summer 1942. “All the tailor sub-divisions and related workshops (hosiery factory, saddler department, etc.) delegated the most talented children to the courses.” - Ghetto Chronicle from July 23, 1942

Embroidery Department

“If you want to find employment, you have to prove that you can do many things that are in demand outside the ghetto, and do them well. This advice was the most accurate and useful of all. In fact, it was the only way to get along in the ghetto, where it was both forbidden and impossible to produce anything for one’s own consumption. If people wished to work and stay alive, they had to manufacture for export, in consideration of which one could obtain food from the outside.” - Josef Zelkowicz, June 28, 1942

Jewish Police and Firemen

Wehrmacht divisions and German police battalions guarded the boundaries of the ghetto, which was more hermetically sealed than most of the other ghettos. German uniformed police, criminal investigation police and the Gestapo were based within the boundaries of the camp and occupied foremost with stealing Jewish property. In order to maintain order within the ghetto, but also to reduce German intervention from the outside, on May 1, 1940, the first day that the ghetto was closed off, Rumkowski, the chairman of the Jewish Council, created a Jewish police force (OD), commanded by Leon Rozenblat. The main task of the “ghetto police” was to maintain peace and order. But it was also used in the fight against smuggled goods and trading at highly inflated prices. In 1943, the ghetto contained five police districts with almost 1200 police officers. Quite a few of them had been policemen prior to 1939. Many of them signed on with the police force because it entailed privileges and better access to food supplies. Furthermore, police officers’ family members were provided a degree of protection from being deported to their death.

Rumkowski presided personally over his own ghetto court, which dealt mostly with issues of stolen food in the ghetto. The police force also had its own prison for implementing sentences. The Jewish police, however, received its orders not only from Rumkowski, but also from the German occupying authority, including the SS. The ambivalent role of the ghetto police and the claim that it collaborated with the Germans derived from its involvement in organizing deportations to Kulmhof. In May 1942, in a talk with Friedrich Hielscher about the gassings in

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Kulmhof, Leon Rozenblatt, the head of the Jewish police force, said that “as soon a new Jew-train arrives, I have a week to name just as many Jews for evacuation as have just arrived. […] Righteous God, can this be true? we ask each day. But it is really true. And I have to select the people. If I refuse, I will be shot. So that is the simplest solution for me. But what happens then? The SS already said that then they will select them. That means those that have not yet broken down, the pregnant women, the rabbis, the scribes, the professors, the poets are the first to land in the ovens. But if I stay, I can choose the volunteers. They often push their way to the front. And sometimes I have gathered as many as I need. And sometimes there are fewer. Then I can take the dying that the Jewish doctor gave me the names of, and if that is not enough, then the fatally ill. But what about when even that is not enough, what do I do then?” - Leon Rozenblat

Leon Rozenblat (1892–1944), born in Lemberg, commanded a mortar battery unit of the Austrian Army on the western front in World War I. He worked as a bank employee during the years between the two world wars. Beginning in February 1940 he served as commander of the Jewish police force in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto. In September 1941 he was appointed Rumkowski’s deputy. In 1942 and 1943 he was also in charge of the ghetto’s own fire department with 170 firemen. When the deportations took place, he was head of the evacuation commission and thus responsible for compiling the lists of people to be transported out of the ghetto. He was transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau with the last transport in August 1944 and died there. According to a statement from a survivor, he died at the hand of another camp inmate. “I asked the community elders, the rabbis, the scribes. They all said to me: You are doing the right thing. Stay, and make the selections the way you have figured it out. I asked the communities in which we divided the ghetto, I asked the elderly, the condemned, the fatally ill: they all agreed with me. […] If you know a better way than the one I have found, then tell me what it is: Should I stay or should I allow myself to be shot?” - Leon Rozenblat, speaking with Friedrich Hielscher during his visit to the ghetto in May 1942.

Fire Station on Hamburger Street

“All day the ghetto was still reeling from the huge flames that were created by the small-furniture factory that was burning on Wesola Street. […] The Jewish fire department that appeared at the site one minute after the alarm was given, immediately notified the city fire department that arrived with 15 trucks. The commander of the city fire department led the extinguishing operation, during which the Jewish fire department served quite heroically. […] But the three-story building burned down to the ground. The damages are very great since not only the new machines, but also the other furnishings, the wood supplies and finished products fell victim to the fire – recently up to 3000 children’s beds and carriages were being produced each week.” Ghetto Chronicle, entry from December 23, 1942

Fire station on Hamburger Street

“We, the police and firefighters, had to lead the selected people to the collection point where they were “loaded” […] I had duty in the hospital that served as a prison for the deportees.

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Police and firemen had to load the people. The SS monitored our work. Infants, children, invalids, old people were thrown onto the vehicles likes sacks and the healthy crawled onto the top so that the majority on the car was suffocated or scrunched. Deafening cries filled the night. The SS fired a number of shots blindly into the crowd, costing many Jewish policemen and firefighters their lives. The dead bodies were added to the load. Police and firemen who were too humane with the people being loaded were demoted by the SS. That means their caps and bands were torn off and they were loaded onto the car and to their death.” Erich Radomsky

The Fate of Austrian Roma and Sinti in the Ghetto

From November 5–9, 1941, 5,007 Roma and Sinti from Burgenland were deported to Litzmannstadt. They were crowded into the northeastern section of the ghetto and hermetically sealed into an area with terrible sanitary and living conditions that was fenced off and guarded by the uniformed police. The Roma and Sinti were forced to live in 15 buildings situated on two hectare of land – without furniture, without a kitchen and without sanitary facilities. By mid-November 1942, a typhus epidemic broke out causing the death of more than 700 people, mostly children, in the following seven weeks. The doctor and ghetto resident Arnold Mostowicz, who in the fall of 1941 treated the camp inhabitants that had fallen ill, wrote in his memoirs: “In the beginning a kind of statistic was kept. But later it was given up. Death certificates were not even issued. The dead were buried anonymously at the Jewish cemetery that was only two steps away from the camp.”

When the Roma and Sinti arrived in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto, the Kulmhof extermination camp was already under construction. The typhus epidemic in the “gypsy camp” may have been the main factor that led the National Socialists to begin the mass murder with this group of people. From January 5–12, 1942, the 4,300 Roma and Sinti who were still alive were deported from the Litzmannstadt Ghetto to Kulmhof and murdered in gas vans. The “gypsy camp” was closed down and a short time later reincorporated into the territory of the ghetto. Arnold Mostowicz commented that “the Germans did not even try to keep the fate of these people a secret. From whom should they have kept it secret? From other sub- humans awaiting a similar fate?” None of the Burgenland Roma and Sinti survived. All the existing photographs were taken after the “gypsy camp” was liquidated.

Photo taken after the liquidation of the “gypsy camp,” spring 1942 “In the morning the terrible sounds of cries and screaming were heard coming from the houses. Through their open windows we could see the latest victims of the Nazi barbarism. In the midst of the winter, in freezing weather the murderers had smashed all the windows, leaving barely a single pane unbroken.” Ya’akov Nirenberg, 1948

At the corner of Sulzfelder Street/ Blechgasse, photo taken after the liquidation of the “gypsy camp,” spring 1942

“Our gravediggers had to gather corpses that were strewn about along with musical instruments. Among them were the bodies of naked Gypsy women and detached limbs. Not

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one of them remained alive. After disinfection, the area of the camp was returned to the ghetto. The Jews were given the job of taking apart the barbed wire fences, and cleaning and painting the rooms in order to remove any bloodstains which remained. The whole ghetto was in a state of shock. The first two people from the ghetto who entered the camp, Aryeh Printz, the guide from the resort for straw shoes, and the photographer, Mendel Gross [Grosman], trembled at the sight of the German writing that the Gypsies had left on the walls of the houses.” - Sara Plager-Zyskind

Deportations 1942

More than 43,000 people died directly in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto between 1940 and 1944 as a consequence of undernourishment and epidemics. The abominable conditions in the ghetto had an impact on the radicalization of persecution. On July 16, 1941, Rolf-Heinz Höppner, head of the Posen division of the Security Service of the Reichsführer SS, wrote to Adolf Eichmann, Reich Security Main Office department head responsible for the deportation of the Jews, that “there is the risk that, in the coming winter, it will become impossible to feed all the Jews. It must be seriously considered whether the most humane solution would be to finish off the Jews unfit for labor by using some fast-acting method.” The deportations from the Litzmannstadt Ghetto began in January 1942. Approximately 55,000 people had been deported by mid-May 1942, including 10,000 Jews that had arrived in the ghetto on twenty transports from Western Europe in the fall of 1941. The “evacuation” – the euphemistic term employed by the Nazis, ended in the Kulmhof extermination camp. By December 8, 1941, the “SS Special Commando Lange” had already begun conducting mass murder using three gas vans that killed the victims with exhaust fumes. Tens of thousands of Jews from other ghettos in the Warthegau were also gassed in Kulmhof. Almost 16,000 children, sick and elderly were deported to Kulmhof during the Aktion Gehsperre (Operation Curfew) that took place between September 3 and 12, 1942: “They threw some of the sick right out the windows [of the hospitals], down onto the waiting vehicles, regardless of whether someone had just been operated on, or a woman had recently given birth, or someone had an infectious disease. They were stacked up in the cars like packages, one on top of the other, and they stuffed in as many as possible.” (Ruth Alton) At first it was not known what fate awaited those being deported, but soon rumors spread that they had been murdered. During the deportation that took place in September 1942, the ghetto inhabitants learned with certainty that those carried off were to be killed.

Before Deportation

“The Jews did not budge. During the first day of the deportation, on August 4, instead of 2,000 people, only 150 reported for the transport. […] The ghetto was bombarded by speeches by Rumkowski on the one hand and Biebow on the other. Twice a day Biebow came to the factories and spoke at length to convince us to leave. In the beginning, crowds still came. Later the same people had to be sent from one factory to the other, in order not to leave the speaker without audience. The speeches were a hoax. Biebow swore that no one would lose a hair of this head, and that he himself was building the ghetto in another location, protected from the

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war activity. The number of candidates did not increase. The trucks left empty, with no more than two to three hundred people a day. […] Armed German divisions entered the ghetto, surrounded the most densely populated neighborhood and began to drag people out and take them to Marysin. The operation continued like this day after day.” Ya’akov Nirenberg, 1948

Preparing for deportation to the Kulmhof extermination camp, June/July 1944

“The vehicle [the gas van] had a special construction. It looked approximately like this: It was the size of a normal truck, the color gray, and hermetically sealed in back with two doors. Its interior was lined with sheet metal, there were no seats. The floor was covered with wooden grating, like in a bathroom, with a straw mat on top. Two small windows were set between the back construction and driver’s cab through which one could look with electrical lamps to see if the victims were already dead. […] The first car came at around ten o’clock in the morning. We buried the corpses from four cars until one [o’clock]. All the victims came from Łódź. The emaciated bodies covered with wounds and abscesses made it evident that starvation prevailed in Łódź. We felt sorry for them because they had suffered for so long and starved in the ghetto to survive the hard times, only to end now with such a terrible death.” - Description from a man named Szlamek, a member of the Jewish special commando in the Kulmhof extermination camp, February 1942

Walking to the Radegast loading station, 1942 Vague rumors about the fate of those who had been evacuated circulated in the ghetto. Nonetheless, many of the Jews who had been deported from Western Europe to Litzmannstadt in the fall of 1941 believed that the upcoming “ evacuation” could not be worse than life in the ghetto: “If we take the example of the transport ‘Berlin III,’ then only 980 persons remained from the ca. 1,100 arrivals (that is how many made up a collective). Of these, ca. 180 persons died during the course of a month, and about 150 elderly were brought to the old-age home. About 100 people found some kind of work, of the remainder, more than half had been laid low with swollen limbs […] Among them about 50 have war medals, and still, they unanimously agreed not to make an effort to stay, but instead to leave together on a transport. They have had enough of this paradise!” - Ghetto Chronicle from April 29–30, 1942

Deportations 1944

For a time after the large wave of deportations in 1942, no further ghetto inhabitants were transported to Kulmhof to be murdered. The ghetto had basically been transformed into a huge forced labor camp and served as an indispensable production site for the Wehrmacht. The ghetto and city administrations, including Gauleiter Arthur Greiser, shared the common goal of achieving sizable profits. In the meantime, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler was entertaining the idea of turning the ghetto into a concentration camp and transferring its Jewish workers to forced labor camps of the SS in the Generalgouvernement. These plans fell through as a consequence of the war’s development. After Himmler and Greiser agreed in the spring of 1944 to have the remaining Jews in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto murdered, the “special commando” in

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Kulmhof started up its killing operations for a second time. During the course of three weeks, from June 23 to July 14, 1944, another 7,196 Jews from the ghetto were murdered. The ghetto was liquidated for good in August 1944. The last 68,000 inhabitants of the ghetto were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp between August 9–29, and with few exceptions, were murdered there. A Jewish clean-up commando of about 800 people remained behind in the ghetto to rid the grounds of any traces of the crimes committed there. Afterwards they were supposed to be killed as well, but managed to hide until liberation. The ditches that had been dug out for them are still recognizable at the Jewish cemetery in Łódź. A total of 152,000 people were murdered in the Kulmhof extermination camp, including Jews from Litzmannstadt and countless other ghettos in the Wartheland, approximately 4,300 Roma and Sinti, and an estimated few hundred Polish civilians. About 80 children from Lidice in Czechoslovakia who, according to the SS race experts were “not capable of being Germanized,” were also among the victims.

Walking to the Radegast loading station, 1944

“When the ‘order for people’ [the Germans’ demand that the Jewish Council supply a certain number of individuals for deportation] is not implemented accordingly, they threaten to close down the ghetto. Just take us all and eradicate us: To me it seems a thousand times more merciful to exterminate the children with their parents. But that is the barbarity. The Germans still need us young people, who are able to work. Only when the immense hunger and hard work has caused us to lose our strength, and after they have pressed the very last drop out of us, is it our turn. Ruth Alton

Walking to the Radegast loading station, 1944

“Men, women and children, weighed down with their luggage, trotted in a seemingly endless procession. They left the ghetto with ambivalent feelings. Some hoped for a better fate at a new location, while others were unable to conceal their fear about this journey into the unfamiliar. […] If I had only been able to snatch a window seat so that I could look at the fields and woods passing by, and see the little houses, winding creeks and grazing cows. […] That was not a passenger train that approached us. It was a long series of freight cars like the ones used to transport cattle. […] We shouldn’t have left the ghetto. It was too late.” - Sara Plager-Zyskind

Belongings left behind before deportation, 1944

“The featherbeds, most of them in bright red covers, were piled high in the middle of the courtyard, like a coral riff around which the bleary and colorless masses of anonymous evacuees surged. These people have come here to make some money off the last of their belongings so that they can improve at least the first hours of their totally uncertain, unfamiliar future outside the stifling wires of the ghetto that had also provided them emotional protection. What awaits them, they do not know and who could tell them?” Ghetto Chronicle from June 27, 1944

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View from the office of the statistics department to the pedestrian bridge at Kirchplatz. Two streets leading out of the Litzmannstadt city ran right through the ghetto, dividing it into three parts. Special gates allowed the ghetto inhabitants to pass these streets, which were fenced off by barbed wire. By the summer of 1940, the streets could be crossed using three wooden bridges. “When I glanced at the garden next to the house, I saw my older daughter standing there dreamily looking at the sky where a rainbow had just appeared. I asked her what she was thinking, upon which, after pondering a moment, she answered, childlike, ‘Father, you taught us from the Holy Scripture that God created the rainbow as a sign that there would not be another Great Flood on the earth that would wipe out the living creatures. How should I explain this sign today, in times of flooding from fire and blood, in which millions of people all over the world perish?’” - Letter from the Litzmannstadt Ghetto,