Lodz Ghetto: A Community History Told in Diaries, Journals, and Documents

This is an EXCELLENT collection of primary source documents relating to the history of the Lodz ghetto, including photographs (some are even in color), texts of speeches, diary entries, private letters, fragments of the official Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, published bulletins and more. I was amazed by the variety of content here. Included is what appears to be the full text of the Anonymous Boy whose Lodz diary was found in the ruins of Auschwitz -- something I'd always wanted to read, I'd only seen fragments of it before. The documents are strictly limited to the ghetto itself: there are none about events on the Aryan side of Lodz, or any from any of the death camps the Lodz Jews were deported to.

These documents are simply presented, show more without commentary, for the reader to form their own opinions from. There is an afterword, however, discussing the ghetto's controversial chairman, Mordecai Chaim Rumkowski, and what his intentions were and how much he knew and whether he did more good or harm. The afterword tends to be pretty sympathetic to Rumkowski, pointing out that if he failed to save the Lodz ghetto, none of the chairmen in the other ghettos fared any better.

I would highly recommend this book to any serious scholar of the Holocaust, separately or in conjunction with other books on Lodz. show less

"Here are the private journals of people trapped in a besieged and doomed city-- a 'collected consciousness' of written remnants from the longest-lasting concentration camp of Jews in Nazi Europe, illustrated with more than 200 photographs, many in full color." This excerpt is taken from the back cover of the book.