Łódź Ghetto: A History

Isaiah Trunk, Yeḥiel Yeshaia Trunk

Indiana University Press, 2006 - History - 493 pages

In his comprehensive examination of the Lódz Ghetto, originally published in Yiddish in 1962, historian Isaiah Trunk sought to describe and explain the tragedy that befell the Jews imprisoned in the first major ghetto imposed by the Germans after they invaded Poland in 1939. Lódz had been home to nearly a quarter million Jews. When the Soviet military arrived in January 1945, they found 877 living Jews and the remains of a vast industrial enterprise that had employed masses of enslaved Jewish laborers. Based on an exhaustive study of primary sources in Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, German, and Russian, Isaiah Trunk, a former resident of Lódz, reconstructs the organization of the ghetto and discusses its provisioning; forced labor; diseases and mortality; crime and deportations; living conditions; political, social, and cultural life; and resistance. Included are translations of the 141 documents that Trunk reproduced in his volume.

Contents

• List of Abbreviations: ix
• Chapter V: xxi
• Map of the Łódź Ghetto: lx
• Foreword: 1
• Establishment of the Ghetto: 9
• Provisioning: 104
• Chapter III: 114
• Forced Labor: 148
• Diseases and Mortality: 198
• Persecutions Murder and Deportations: 224
• Chapter VI: 225
• Internal Conditions: 294
• Chapter VII: 297
• The Problem of Resistance: 394
• Conclusions and Summations: 400
• Street Names in Łódź Ghetto: 411
• Notes: 417
• Subjects Index: 483

Popular passages

Page 454 - The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.‎

Page xvii - Cambridge, in the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), and in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Bristol.‎

Page 272 - I would never have imagined that my hands would deliver the sacrifice to the altar. In my old age I must stretch forth my arms and beg: Brothers and sisters, yield them to me! Fathers and mothers, yield me your children.‎

Page li - Rumkowski remarked: The ghetto has been dealt a grievous blow. They [the Nazis] demand that we give them that which is most precious to it — the children and old people. I was never privileged to have a child of my own, and therefore I devoted my best years to children. I lived and breathed together with the children. I never imagined that my own hand would have to bring the sacrifice to the altar. In my old age I am compelled to stretch out my hand and beg: "My brothers and my sisters, give them...‎

Page 2 - Bibliographical Series issued jointly by the Yad Vashem Martyrs' and Heroes' Memorial Authority in Jerusalem and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York. The first volume, Guide to Jewish History Under Nazi Impact (1960), edited by Jacob Robinson and Philip Friedman, is an authoritative guide to all sources for this subject.‎

Page 424 - The Documents of the Lodz Ghetto: An Inventory of the Nachman Zonabend Collection. New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 1988.‎

Page xxxiv - He is replete with self-praise, a conceited and witless man, and a dangerous man, too, since he keeps telling the authorities that all is well in his...‎

About the author

Isaiah Trunk (1905-1982) was Senior Research Associate and Chief Archivist at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. He is author of Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation.

Robert Moses Shapiro is Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies, Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He is editor of Holocaust Chronicles: Individualizing the Holocaust through Diaries and Other Contemporaneous Personal Accounts.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Łódź Ghetto: A History
• Authors: Isaiah Trunk, Yeḥiel Yeshaia Trunk
• Editor: Robert Moses Shapiro
• Translated by: Robert Moses Shapiro
• Contributors: Israel Gutman, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Indiana University Press, 2006
• ISBN: 0253347556, 9780253347558
• Length: 493 pages
• Subjects: History / Europe / Eastern; History / Holocaust