5. For a discussion of Yitskhok Rudashevski’s interest in literary and cultural events in the Vilna ghetto, see Document 8-4.
That world came to an abrupt end with the ghetto’s liquidation in early autumn of 1943. Like many ghetto inhabitants, Yitskhok and his family went into hiding when deportations from Vilna began, but SS officials or their auxiliaries discovered them two weeks later. In early October 1943, Yitskhok Rudashevski, together with all those concealed with him, were transported to Ponary, where they were shot to death.6
6. See Isaac (Yitskhok) Rudashevski, The Diary of the Vilna Ghetto, June 1941–April 1943 (Tel Aviv: Ghetto Fighters’ House, 1973); Alexandra Zapruder, ed., Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 190ff.
Document 4-1. Diary of Yitskhok Rudashevski, Vilna ghetto, entry for September 6, 1941, in Alexandra Zapruder, ed., Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 199–201.
A beautiful sunny day has risen. The streets are closed off by Lithuanians. The streets are turbulent. Jewish workers are permitted to enter. A ghetto is being created for Vilna Jews.
People are packing in the house. The women go back and forth. They wring their hands when they see the house looking as if after a pogrom. I go around with bleary eyes among the bundles, see how we are being uprooted overnight from our home. Soon we have our first view of the move to the ghetto, a picture of the Middle Ages—a gray black mass of people goes harnessed to large bundles. We understand that soon our turn will come. I look at the house in disarray, at the bundles, at the perplexed, desperate people. I see things scattered that were dear to me, that I was accustomed to use.
We carry the bundles to the courtyard. On our street a new mass of Jews streams continually to the ghetto. The small number of Jews of our courtyard begins to drag the bundles to the gate. Gentiles are standing and taking part in our sorrow. Some Jews hire gentile boys to help carry the bundles. A bundle was suddenly stolen from a neighbor. The woman stands in despair among her bundles and does not know how to cope with them, weeps and wrings her hands. Suddenly everything around me begins to weep. Everything weeps. [. . .]
The street streamed with Jews carrying bundles. The first great tragedy. People are harnessed to bundles, which they drag across the pavement. People fall, bundles scatter. [. . .] I walk burdened and irritated. The Lithuanians drive us on, do not let us rest. I think of nothing: not what I am losing, not what I have just lost, not what is in store for me. I do not see the streets before me, the people passing by. I only feel that I am terribly weary, I feel that an insult, a hurt is burning inside me. Here is the ghetto gate. I feel that I have been robbed, my freedom is being robbed from me, my home, and the familiar Vilna streets I love so much. I have been cut off from all that is dear and precious to me.
People crowd at the gate. Finally I am on the other side of the gate. The stream of people flings me into a gate blocked with bundles. I throw down the bundles that cut my shoulders. I find my parents and here we are in the ghetto house. It is dusk, rather dark and rainy. The little streets, Rudnitsker, Shavler, Yatkever, Shpitalne, and Disner, which constitute the [first] ghetto, look like anthills. It swarms with people. The newcomers begin to settle down, each in his tiny bit of space, on his bundles. Additional Jews keep streaming in constantly. We settle down in our place. Besides the four of us, there are eleven persons in the room. The room is a dirty and stuffy one. It is crowded. The first ghetto night. We lie three together on two doors. I do not sleep. In my ears resound the lamentation of this day. I hear the restless breathing of the people with whom I have been suddenly thrown together, people who just like me have suddenly been uprooted from their homes.
The first ghetto day begins. I run right out into the street. The little streets are still full of a restless mass of people. It is hard to push your way through. I feel as if I were in a box. There is no air to breathe. Wherever you go, you encounter a gate that hems you in. [. . .]
I decide to hunt up my friends in the courtyard. I have an idea that all of us will be there. I soon find Benkye Nayer, Gabik, and several others. The first day is spent in settling down, hunting up one another. The second evening in the ghetto, people feel a little more at home, calmer. My chums are figuring out how many weeks we shall be sitting here.
While teenagers like Yitskhok Rudashevski lamented the loss of freedom and autonomy that incarceration in the ghetto imposed, very small children, such as Seweryn Dobrecki, found resettlement away from familiar surroundings and cherished possessions confusing and frightening. Born January 26, 1936, in Łódź to the prosperous industrialist Zygmunt Dobrecki and his wife, Róża, young Seweryn was three years old when German troops invaded Poland in September 1939. One of his earliest memories of the war was the loss of his collection of toys when German troops appropriated the Dobreckis’ apartment upon their arrival in Łódź. The family attempted to flee with other refugees to unoccupied Warsaw but was turned back by a German advance on the capital. Despite Poland’s defeat, Seweryn viewed the ensuing weeks as halcyon days because he had returned to his grandmother’s familiar apartment and could play with his toys as if there were no “such thing as Germans.”
In November 1939, following the annexation of the Wartheland, the western part of German-occupied Poland, to the Reich, German authorities demanded the evacuation of at least thirty thousand Jews from Łódź, either through voluntary resettlement or forced expulsions.7 The Dobreckis presumably traveled to Warsaw in early 1940 and were interned in the Warsaw ghetto. Four-year-old Seweryn found the family’s relocation disconcerting. Yet, he discovered to his surprise that he lacked neither companions nor amusements in his new environment—although the games he and his ghetto playmates engaged in differed appreciably from the diversions the youngster had pursued in his nursery in Łódź.8
7. This order preceded the establishment of the Łódź ghetto in February 1940 and corresponded with a massive expulsion of Jews and Poles from the Wartheland. See Lucjan Dobroszycki, ed., The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto, 1941–1944, trans. Richard Lourie et al. (New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press, 1984), xxxiv–xxxvi.
8. For a detailed discussion of children at play during the Holocaust, see chapter 8.
Document 4-2. Interview of Seweryn Dobrecki by the Central Jewish Historical Commission, c. 1946, USHMMA, RG-15.084, Holocaust Survivor Testimonies, 301/3611/4-5 (translated from the Polish).
We had scarcely left Łódź when the Germans broke through the Polish front and we had to turn back to Łódź. The whole way was paved with human corpses; I turned my head away and didn’t want to look. After three days and nights we returned to Łódź, looked for Mama, and went back to grandmother’s apartment. As soon as I was back home, I immediately collected all of my belongings and my toys, fetched a playmate from downstairs, and began to play. I was enormously happy that I was back at home and that I had found all my toys; my playmate from the apartment building came to me, I played and forgot that there was such a thing as Germans.
This domestic tranquility lasted only two months. One day I went with Mama to visit my friend. On the way we saw a large white sign; I asked Mama to read it to me. She didn’t want to do it, but I begged and my mother let herself be persuaded and read to me that a resettlement was coming: that all Jews from Łódź had to move to Warsaw. I was sad and I was afraid that I would have to see again the human misery that I had witnessed when we sat in our buggy,9 and I burst into tears. I was very sad; I wouldn’t even speak to my playmate anymore. I asked Mama to take me back home.
9. That is, on their drive back to Łódź, described at the outset of this document.
After several days we had to move away. I took my [toy] pony with me, hid it under my coat, and played the whole way with my pony and did not even look at the Germans. So it was the whole way to Warsaw.
&
nbsp; In Warsaw we lived in the Jewish quarter [i.e., the Warsaw ghetto]. Mama and Papa went to work, and I stayed at home and played alone; I longed for Łódź and for my old great grandmother, who was 101 years old and who had remained behind in Łódź. I begged Mama to put me in a school where there were a lot of children. I was very happy when Mama agreed to this and brought me to a kindergarten in Chmielna Street. I was very happy; I let my toys lie and played war with the [other] children. (We made rifles and revolvers for ourselves out of sticks and string.) One camp had its headquarters behind a desk, the other behind [a number of] chairs (Germans [against] Jews and Poles). I did not want to play the Germans because I hated them, but the other boys wanted me to be the commander. Every dead person had to lie on the ground and remain lying there until the game was over. Twice the Germans won, and once the Poles and the Jews. Later the two opposing sides asked the other’s pardon, each shook the other’s hand,10 and harmony reigned, but the teacher did not let us play that for a long time as we wanted, because we had to eat, wash our hands, converse with each other, and go home.
10. That is, each boy.
Document 4-3. Two children beg on the streets of the Warsaw ghetto, September 1941, USHMMPA WS# 32327, courtesy of Günther Schwarberg.
“The Garden of Eden”: Education in the Łód´Z Ghetto
When German forces occupied the city of Łódź in early September 1939, among the initial measures taken by occupation officials was the dissolution of all Jewish community organizations. In their place, they appointed a Judenrat, which in the newly created ghetto of Litzmannstadt (Łódź),11 established in February 1940, came to be known as the Ältestenrat (Council of Elders). At its head German authorities placed Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, a former director of the Helenowek Jewish Orphanage in Łódź and a member of the banned Jewish community board. Directly accountable to the German ghetto administration under Hans Biebow, Rumkowski wielded extraordinary authority over the internal management of the ghetto, including the appointment of officials, the enforcement of public order, and the administration of goods and services. Rumkowski displayed enormous organizational skill in overseeing the ghettos’ workshops and social agencies, but he governed in an autocratic fashion, and contemporaries, like scholars today, viewed him as a controversial and divisive figure.
11. When the Germans occupied Łódź, they renamed the municipality Litzmannstadt, for long-time Nazi Party supporter Karl Litzmann, the German general who had taken the city during World War I.
It remains indisputable, however, that under Rumkowski’s leadership, the Łódź ghetto fostered an impressive array of social services. Subordinated under Biebow’s jurisdiction, the Judenrat controlled the distribution of food, the appropriation of housing, and the management of a functioning postal system, which tied the ghetto to the outside world. Despite a shortage of medical equipment and supplies, the council founded twelve hospitals and clinics and five pharmacies that served ghetto inhabitants until the summer of 1942. Perhaps because of his extensive career as the director of an orphanage, Rumkowski in particular showed a consuming interest in the education and welfare of the ghetto’s children. Under his administration, the Jewish Council established some forty-three elementary schools, two high schools, and one vocational-training facility, serving some 63 percent of the ghetto’s school-age youngsters. Marysin, the ghetto’s “green lung” located in its northeastern corner, was the site of the so-called Kinderkolonie (children’s colony), which housed sixteen hundred orphans and children of parents with exceptionally limited means. This oasis in the ghetto hosted a library, a cultural center, and a convalescent home for children. Here, away from the urban misery and despair, children could play in Marysin’s open fields, surrounded by trees and wildflowers.12
12. See Andrea Löw, Juden in Getto Litzmannstadt: Lebensbedingungen, Selbstwahrnehmung, Verhalten (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2006), esp. 189–91.
On the eve of the Jewish New Year in September 1941, the students and teachers of the Łódź ghetto presented chairman Rumkowski with an album of Rosh Hashanah greetings. Bound in wood and leather, the album contained the signatures of some fourteen thousand pupils and 715 educators who studied or taught in the ghetto’s elementary, secondary, or vocational schools. Students from each school created their own distinctive New Year’s greeting, like the one below from the pupils of Marysin, to honor the man who had so tirelessly worked to create an autonomous and functioning educational system in the Łódź ghetto.
Document 4-4. Album page of a New Year’s greeting from the children of School No. 25, to Ghetto Elder Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, Łód´z ghetto, September 1941, USHMMPA WS# 22473, courtesy of YIVO Institute (translated from the Hebrew).
May You Be Written Down and Sealed,13 School 25, Marysin
13. This traditional Rosh Hashanah greeting suggests that the names of the righteous are inscribed in the Book of Life and therefore “sealed” to live.
To you, our dear father, the good angel of children, we the children of School No. 25 wish you a year of happiness and blessing. Our hearts are filled with thanks for the food for the body and the soul which you satisfy us with day by day. And for the wonderful vision, a Garden of Eden, which you grant us.
Ghetto chronicler Josef Zelkowicz was less enthusiastic about the self-sufficiency of the Łódź ghetto as expressed through its social and welfare institutions. A scholar of ethnography and history and a contributor to efforts to record the lives and fates of ghetto inhabitants, Zelkowicz often laced detailed descriptions of ghetto life with biting satire and an underlying criticism of ghetto leaders and their policies.14 In his poignant 1941 essay “The Breadwinner,” he pondered the efficacy of an “autonomous” Łódź ghetto whose inhabitants were reduced to such miserable and degrading circumstances. Concerned with the ubiquitous manifestations of child labor, Zelkowicz seized upon the figure of the young “coal miners,” youngsters who rummaged abandoned buildings and fields in the ghetto for materials that might be sold for heating fuel on the black market. These soot-covered children were a common site in Łódź and grew in number as more and more young people found in “mining” an outlet to provide an income for their families. In a ghetto that prided itself on its educational system, Zelkowicz made it plain that not every child was going to school.
14. See Josef Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days: Writings from the Lodz Ghetto, ed. Michal Unger, trans. Naftali Greenwood (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2002).
Document 4-5. Diary essay of Josef Zelkowicz, “The Breadwinner (The Seventh Apartment),” 1941, in Josef Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days: Writings from the Lodz Ghetto, ed. Michal Unger, trans. Naftali Greenwood (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2002), 63–69.
Do you remember, Ryva Bramson,15 attending a public rally in the ghetto where a “senior” ghetto official appeared and described in his speech how the “ghetto kingdom” was organized? Surely you also remember how enthusiastic he was when he spoke about “our” police, “our” postal service, “our” factories, and—the main thing, “our” currency. [. . .]16
15. In September 1940, German authorities granted a loan of 3 million Reichsmark for ghetto welfare services. Many ghetto inhabitants applied for relief based on the loan, including dozens who falsified their claims. In order to prevent corruption, Chaim Rumkowski ordered inspectors to interview potential applicants for relief in their homes. Josef Zelkowicz numbered among these inspectors, as did his colleague Ryva Bramson. Zelkowicz wrote a number of vignettes in 1940 and 1941 based on his visits to ghetto residents in this capacity in which Bramson served as a foil for his observations.
16. The Łódź ghetto maintained its own currency, which residents dubbed the “chaimke” or “rumki,” after Chairman Chaim Rumkowski.
Today you know: if the ghetto is a “kingdom” with “our” police, “our” offices, and “our” high-ranking officials, some higher and others highest, if the ghett
o is a “kingdom” whose borders are patrolled and guarded against any trespasser, then the ghetto also has the natural resources that back “our currency” . . .
In the bowels of the ghetto . . . yellow sand is buried, with which housewives cover the splendid abjection of [their] floors. In the bowels of the ghetto is . . . clay, with which they plug the cracks in the walls and ceilings of the apartments and crypts that they inhabit, and . . . in the bowels of the ghetto, one even finds . . . coal!
The “coal mines” in the ghetto are fly-infested heaps of trash. From dawn to dusk the shafts are filled to overflowing with people large and small, elderly and children—burrowing in the muddy soil, plumbing its innards, rummaging, sifting, sorting. . . .
The “coal” that they mine is offered later on to the homes of citizens and sold for forty pfennigs, fifty pfennigs, or even more per kilogram, depending on its quality and size, and, mainly, demand.
The “coal” is excavated in vacant lots and places where buildings, fences or other structures once stood. It is really just the sooty residue of firewood, bones, stones, or rags. This “coal “doesn’t burn at all, but when you lay it on the stove over firewood, it makes the wood burn less quickly: it burns slowly along with the coal. After you stand for a few hours, blowing uninterruptedly into the opening of the stove to keep the fire from dying, the pot with the food inside comes to life. [. . .]
Children during the Holocaust Page 19