In the Beginning Was the Ghetto: Notebooks from Lodz

by Oskar Rosenfeld, Hanno Loewy (Editor, Introduction), Brigitte Goldstein (Translator)

From February 1942 to July 1944, Oskar Rosenfeld served in the statistics department of the Lodz ghetto. A Jewish playwright and journalist, he kept his own records - meticulous and harrowing notes on life and conditions in the ghetto - for the fictionalized account he hoped to someday write. Upon the liquidation of the ghetto, he and the nearly eighty thousand remaining inhabitants were deported to Auschwitz, where he perished.

Rosenfeld's notebooks offer a wrenching view of life in the ghetto and the day-to-day struggle for survival of what was, initially, a population of more than one hundred thousand. Rosenfeld's keen observations and vivid narration of the stories of his fellow sufferers have the haunting immediacy of eyewitness testimony. Descriptions of ever-present hunger, forced labor, disease, degradation, and deportation are juxtaposed with those of the attempts of the imprisoned to maintain a cultural, social, and religious life and to preserve their dignity. Perplexed by evil of such unprecedented magnitude, Rosenfeld wrestles with the question, What mind could have contrived this universe of horrors, beyond anything known in history? He concludes with bitter irony, "In the beginning God created the ghetto."

This English translation of Rosenfeld's notebooks projects his voice to a wider world, as he had hoped; it also marks one of the most important new publications documenting the unspeakable cruelty and inhumanity of the Holocaust and the indomitable spirit of its victims.

Genres: Holocaust

344 pages, Hardcover

First published March 31, 2012

Reviews

[El · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oskar Rosenfeld was a writer before the war, though during the war he and many others were forced into Ghetto Litzmannstadt, the second largest Jewish ghetto in Poland after the German occupation. The Lodz ghetto was turned into an industrial center to provide goods and supplies for Nazi Germany. Rosenfeld worked in the statistics department, keeping record of supplies coming in and out of the ghetto, the numbers of deaths and the kinds of deaths. On his own time he kept notebooks detailing his experiences in the ghetto, the people, the extent of the details surrounding their deaths (being shot while trying to escape the neighborhood in a rather complicated form of suicide), his concerns for his wife and other family and friends, the constant worry.

I was impressed by the "beauty" of Rosenfeld's words, sort of ironic considering the subject matter of a disgusting, dirty neighborhood in one of the most horrifying periods of history. The notebooks here (edited and abridged where necessary) cover most of 1942 until the July of 1944, a month before he was taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau where he was murdered in the gas chamber.

[Meaghan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is in many ways similar to Korczak's Ghetto Diary; though the latter is much shorter and less detailed, both provide a haunting and vivid picture of life and death in their authors' respective ghettos. As for Rosenfeld's notebooks, never before have I been so enlightened as to what the Lodz ghetto was really like. Like Korczak, Rosenfeld was an established writer before the war with plenty of sterling talent, put to good use here. It's a shame that he died before he could turn his notes into a proper novel or history of the ghetto.