The Łódź Ghetto did not produce an armed uprising. The largest and longest-surviving Polish ghetto, holding around 200,000 Jews at peak and the only major Polish ghetto still operating into 1944, ended without the kind of fighting last stand that took place in Warsaw, Białystok and Vilna. The reasons are particular to Łódź, and they have been the subject of one of the more difficult arguments in the literature of Holocaust resistance. The Łódź Ghetto record is what survival through cooperation looks like when it is pursued to its furthest extent, and it raises the question of whether the strategy was right.
The setting
Łódź was Poland’s second city before the war and the centre of the Polish textile industry. The pre-war Jewish population of around 230,000 was around a third of the city. The Germans renamed the city Litzmannstadt in April 1940 after the First World War general Karl Litzmann, in line with the broader Germanisation of the annexed western Polish territories. The Łódź Ghetto was sealed in April 1940. The German civil administration, under the regional Gauleiter Arthur Greiser, kept the ghetto operating as a textile manufacturing centre to supply Wehrmacht uniforms.
Rumkowski
The chairman of the Łódź Judenrat was Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, a 63-year-old former orphanage director who had been appointed by the Germans on the basis of his administrative experience. Rumkowski pursued the strategy of survival through productivity to its furthest possible extent. The Łódź Ghetto became, under his administration, an industrial operation, with around 100 factories employing the great majority of the ghetto population. Rumkowski negotiated with the German authorities for the ghetto to be kept productive. He believed, and argued repeatedly, that as long as the ghetto produced uniforms and other goods for the German war machine, it would not be liquidated.
The strategy bought time. The Łódź Ghetto outlasted every other Polish ghetto by a year or more. It was finally liquidated in August 1944, when the rest of the ghetto system had already been destroyed. The strategy also required Rumkowski to comply with German deportation demands when they came. The most painful single instance was the deportation of September 1942.
The September 1942 deportations
In early September 1942, the German authorities ordered the deportation of around 20,000 Łódź Jews. The German demand specified categories: children under ten, the elderly over sixty-five, and the unproductive. Rumkowski accepted the demand. On 4 September 1942 he gave a speech to the assembled ghetto in which he asked the population to give him the children and the elderly. The speech, recorded in shorthand by listeners and published in the post-war Łódź ghetto archive, contains lines that have been quoted ever since: Brothers and sisters, give them to me. Give them to me, fathers and mothers, the children. Around 16,000 children and elderly were taken to the Chełmno extermination camp in the following weeks and murdered. Rumkowski had personally signed off on the deportation lists. He had argued that the alternative was the immediate killing of the entire ghetto.
The argument over Rumkowski has continued ever since. He had bought time for around 80,000 Łódź Jews who would have been killed if the ghetto had been liquidated in 1942. He had paid for that time with the deportation of the children and elderly to certain death. The exchange is the moral problem that Łódź poses, and the question of whether his calculation was right has no clean answer.
The underground
The Łódź Ghetto did have an underground organisation. The Łódź Communist underground, the Bund socialist underground, and the Hashomer Hatzair Zionist youth movement each had small networks. They produced clandestine newspapers and held discussions of resistance plans. They did not arm an uprising. The ghetto’s isolation, distance from any partisan-controlled forest terrain, and tight German surveillance made armed action effectively impossible. The underground concentrated on documenting what was happening: the diaries kept inside the ghetto, the photographs taken clandestinely by the ghetto official photographer Henryk Ross (around 6,000 of which survived the war), and the records of the ghetto archive.
The end
The final Łódź deportations of August 1944 sent the remaining 70,000 ghetto inhabitants to Auschwitz. Most were murdered on arrival. Rumkowski himself, deported on the last transport, was killed at Auschwitz, reportedly beaten to death by Łódź Jewish prisoners who had recognised him. The accuracy of that report is uncertain.
Around 7,000 to 10,000 Łódź Jews are estimated to have survived the war. Some had escaped from the ghetto to Soviet territory in 1939. Some had been deported to slave labour at Buna-Werke and other Auschwitz sub-camps and survived. Some hid in non-Jewish Polish homes during the final liquidation. The post-war Łódź Jewish community was small and largely emigrated by the late 1940s.
The archive
The Łódź Ghetto produced one of the largest documentary records of any ghetto. The ghetto administration kept extensive records of every aspect of its operation. The ghetto archive, the Daily Bulletin written in German for the German authorities and a parallel Yiddish chronicle, the photographic record by Ross, the personal diary of David Sierakowiak (who died in the ghetto in 1943, aged 19), and the various memoirs by survivors, together produce a documentary picture of ghetto life more complete than for any other ghetto. The Łódź Ghetto archive is held today at the Polish State Archive in Łódź and at the Yad Vashem and USHMM holdings.
What it means
Łódź is the case in which the Holocaust’s moral arithmetic shows its hardest form. Rumkowski’s strategy preserved tens of thousands of lives that would otherwise have been lost. It also delivered the children and the elderly to certain death. Both effects are real. The standard post-war judgement of Rumkowski has been negative, with various epithets attached to him in the Holocaust literature. The judgement has, in recent decades, been complicated by the recognition that he had inherited an impossible position and that the alternative, immediate liquidation, would have produced more deaths sooner. There is no settled answer. There is the record of what he did, and the record of what survived because of it.
See also
Sources
- Lucjan Dobroszycki (ed), The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto 1941-1944, Yale University Press, 1984
- Isaiah Trunk, Łódź Ghetto: A History, Indiana University Press, 2008
- David Sierakowiak, The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak, Oxford University Press, 1996
- Robert Marin Liebman, Memoir of the Holocaust, multiple editions
- USHMM: Łódź