The Pavement of Hell: 3 Leaders of the Judenrat

by Leonard Tushnet

GoodReads This book is a comparison of three heads of three major Nazi ghettos in World War Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski of Lodz in Poland, Adam Czerniakow of Warsaw in Poland, and Jacob Gens of Vilna in Lithuania. The author details their lives, their ghettos and their styles of ruling, and attempts to analyze their motives and whether things could have turned out any better than they did. (All three ghettos were eventually liquidated and the overwhelming number of their inhabitants died, including the three Chairmen.) I thought it was a very thorough and clearly written narrative, and I particularly liked the section on Gens, as I had known very little about him before. Of the three ghetto leaders, I think he was probably the most effective in terms of making life livable for the Jews, even if Rumkowski's ghetto lasted the longest. The afterword puts forth the argument that the three Chairmen did the best they could, but they were ultimately powerless in the face of the Nazis, and if they failed, then anyone else would have too. I firmly agree. I would give this book four stars, even five, except I think the historiography is sloppy. The book contains no footnotes and no appendix, only a woefully short "selected bibliography," which makes it very difficult to further investigate the statements put forth and have a look at the sources.

Genres: History, Holocaust

210 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1973

Reviews

[Eve Tushnet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Weird to evaluate a book by my grandfather, but this book is a moral investigation of what it is like to take responsibility in a time when all choices are bad. My grandfather wrote several histories of various aspects of the Holocaust and this is the one with the most urgency, imo, the most direct tie to our own lives and choices.

The descriptions of ever-increasing restrictions, rules offered in bad faith, and deliberately-created Catch-22s expose tools of authoritarianism which are hardly limited to the Nazis. Each law and rule, each bureaucratic trap, each promise rescinded immediately after you've announced it to your desperate people, expresses the government's opinion of you--their belief about what you are.

"A priest in the city told [head of the Warsaw Ghetto Adam] Czerniakow that Jewish children were such skilled beggars that their starving acts appeared real."

[Meaghan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a comparison of three heads of three major Nazi ghettos in World War II: Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski of Lodz in Poland, Adam Czerniakow of Warsaw in Poland, and Jacob Gens of Vilna in Lithuania. The author details their lives, their ghettos and their styles of ruling, and attempts to analyze their motives and whether things could have turned out any better than they did. (All three ghettos were eventually liquidated and the overwhelming number of their inhabitants died, including the three Chairmen.)

I thought it was a very thorough and clearly written narrative, and I particularly liked the section on Gens, as I had known very little about him before. Of the three ghetto leaders, I think he was probably the most effective in terms of making life livable for the Jews, even if Rumkowski's ghetto lasted the longest. The afterword puts forth the argument that the three Chairmen did the best they could, but they were ultimately powerless in the face of the Nazis, and if they failed, then anyone else would have too. I firmly agree.

I would give this book four stars, even five, except I think the historiography is sloppy. The book contains no footnotes and no appendix, only a woefully short "selected bibliography," which makes it very difficult to further investigate the statements put forth and have a look at the sources.