Ghetto Inflation: An Interactive Timeline
Tracing the story of money, and its effects on people, in wartime Lodz
Today, to mark the 80th anniversary of the liquidation of the Lodz Ghetto, Tablet is publishing an interactive version of a groundbreaking economic study set inside its gates. This work, by a young scholar named Joshua Blustein, certified the ghetto as one of the 63 examples of hyperinflation in world history.
Why would we choose to commemorate the destruction of this community by focusing on, of all things, monetary policy?
Because, as diary entries of those imprisoned show, schooling oneself in the market often meant the difference between surviving another day, and not. It was central to their experience, and so any serious attempt at understanding this history must engage with it deeply.
This Tablet project will show you how.
The timeline, which users can personalize, is refracted through dozens of firsthand diary entries, speeches, photos, and letters, all held together by the vise of inflation—opening and closing, each time tighter than the last. In relaying this history through numbers, it becomes profoundly human—a version of a story that many people think they know, but likely have never had affect them in this way.
There is also, I should add, a larger context for this project—which is the increasing trend toward de-personalizing, universalizing, and de-Judaizing the Holocaust. Of the 13 Holocaust research centers in New York and New Jersey, 11 have by now diluted their original Holocaust focus and added “and Genocide” to their names. Worse, many of these institutions, originally founded and funded by Holocaust survivors, have either dismissed or become hostile to the Jewishness of the Shoah. Instead, several are dedicated to bashing Israel, including “1948: A Global History” and “Race, Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism in Global Perspective,” the latter with an eye toward “whether Israel should be characterized as a settler colonial state.”
That the Holocaust happened to Jews is an afterthought, even an inconvenient one.
Inspired by Josh, we refuse to toss the Shoah into the gray canvas of all the world’s tragedies subsumed—not because it’s sui generis on an objective historical scale (though it is), but because the Holocaust happened to our families, to our communities, to us. We see not faceless skeletons, interchangeable with any other faceless skeletons, but Jewish lives connected to our own, ancestors who didn’t get to give the world—and us—the gifts they were meant to.
This work is done in their memory.
—The Editors
Your Needs in the Ghetto
If you, God forbid, had lived in the Lodz Ghetto, you would be given a two-week ration and sometimes a workplace soup—which together ranged from ~1,000 to 1,400 calories per day. Worse, you would receive it all at once, and were expected to store and ration it to last two weeks. But because it was so meager, you would likely gulp it all down immediately—and then have nothing left for the remaining time. If you didn’t die in that time, you’d end up flocking to the black market as your only resort—but that would pit you against both the German and Jewish authorities, who outlawed and harshly punished this sort of private commerce.
As this one anecdote shows, it is impossible for nearly all contemporary readers to properly conceptualize this torturous experience. The story of monetary policy in the Lodz Ghetto is one of terrorizing constriction—the constant opening and closing of a vise that, each time, shut tighter than before. It’s a phenomenon that can certainly be learned by a basic telling of the facts. But technology allows us to do more: By creating a timeline built around original sources, and making it both interactive and personal, readers can get a more visceral, and arguably more lasting, understanding of this history.
The amounts you will see throughout this timeline are black market prices. A black market, underground economy, or shadow economy is a clandestine market or series of transactions that has some aspect of illegality or is not compliant with an institutional set of rules. If the rule defines the set of goods and services whose production and distribution is prohibited or restricted by law, non-compliance with the rule constitutes a black-market trade since the transaction itself is illegal.
Though the Jewish Council set its own prices for “official” goods, we ignore them, as they do not represent the true worth of these goods to the ghetto populace. Only voluntary transactions between buyers and sellers—which occurred in private, or black market, trade—informs us of an item’s value. For instance, in mid-March 1944, the ‘official’ price of canned meat was 1.5 ghetto marks (set rather arbitrarily by ghetto bureaucrats) while on the street it sold for 850—a differential of 56,567%.
As the people in the Lodz Ghetto came to understand all too well, the numbers in that second category were the ones that meant more—for people’s livelihoods, and often their actual lives. Those are the numbers that, however blessedly unreal they are to us today, make up the reality of life in the ghetto. They are the numbers that tell the truth, and so they are the numbers we want readers to experience.
Personalize your experience of the Lodz Ghetto timeline
1941
The transitional period (of 1940) comes to an end, as the basic form of ghetto life for the rest of its existence would take shape by the beginning of 1941. Rumkowksi and the Jewish Council's powerful role over ghetto life is firmly established, the ration system regulating food and labor assignments is introduced, ghetto slave workshops are expanded, and large-scale smuggling and agricultural kibbutzim are successfully suppressed. With other supply sources disappearing and conditions worsening, we see ghetto dwellers turning to the internal private market with increasing desperation, thus raising the profile of the ghetto mark currency, which is the medium of exchange for these transactions. As starvation, death, and turmoil compound, and the first non-Polish Jews enter the ghetto, black market prices become important indicators of the overall situation to the average ghetto resident, as the records and diaries below make clear. Inflation, though rising at rates yet unseen in the ghetto, are relatively stable in 1941 compared to the chaos of later years.
January1941
The Boundaries Are Drawn
This is the first month in which we have consistent black market price data. Because inflation is relative to previous months, no inflation rate can be calculated for January, though prices had been rising already for months. In the ghetto, prices do not change in a uniform manner; rather, items fluctuate differently for various supply-and-demand reasons. As shown in the chart below, throughout January the price of some goods (bread, tobacco) increased, while other goods (potatoes, kasha, coal, wood) became cheaper, and others like matches stayed the same.
| Good | Jan. 12 prices | Jan. 31 prices | |
|---|---|---|---|
6.5GM | 10GM | ↑ | |
2.5GM | 2.3GM | ↓ | |
12GM | 9.5GM | ↓ | |
2GM | 1.1GM | ↓ | |
0.7GM | 0.4GM | ↓ | |
0.2GM | 0.2GM | — | |
2.9GM | 5GM | ↑ |
February1941
Bread and Roses
February opens with rampant food shortages, starvation, and high prices. But this soon changes, as the Ghetto Chronicle observed:
Food Supply
February brought considerable improvement in the food supply. The populace was forced to suffer only at the beginning of the month due to deficiencies in the allocations of kasha and potatoes. On February 7, [...] trains carr[ied] food into the ghetto. In the course of the month the provisioning of the ghetto underwent a gradual improvement, particularly in relation to the supply of flour. [...] there was a noticeable improvement in the ghetto’s coal supply, which, in the earlier parts of the winter, had constituted a calamity of the first order. [...] Moreover, it is worth noting the quality of the coal is significantly higher than it had been previously. Prices dropped significantly in private transactions because the populace was supplied with fuel. Coal, whose price had reached two marks per kilogram this winter, stood at 0.40 marks toward the end of February.
Bread, too, followed this downward price trend owing to an increase in supply.
So why is the Bread Index so high while the CPI is near zero? Because while other food supplies increased quickly as early as Feb. 7, resulting in immediate price declines, bread only did so slowly and late in February, and thus its average monthly price remained high. In May, a similar bread-to-CPI divergence will recur (especially stark given that bread constitutes nearly 15% of the CPI itself).
A Review of the Most Important Events in the Ghetto in February
The number of deaths in the month of February came to 1,069. Births totaled 52. In comparison with January, when the deaths totaled 1,218, this made for quite a significant reduction.[...] [Also] the number of marriages performed by the rabbis since December has been decreasing—301 in December, 223 in January.
March1941
Chaos Begins to Set In
March posts a low inflation rate but this doesn't indicate that ghetto prices were calm. Rather, like February, quite the opposite. A month where prices seesaw can post low inflation rates because, on average, the highs and lows balance each other out from a statistical, month-to-month standpoint. The chaos was consistent.
In March, bread dropped from 8 to 4.5 marks, potatoes dropped from 2.3 marks to 1.4, then rising to 1.8, jumping further to “over 2 marks” within a few days, and two weeks later, down to 1.2 marks. These never-ending price shifts were disorienting for many ghetto residents, to say the least.
| Good | Price | |
|---|---|---|
8GM | ↓ | |
1.8GM | ↓ | |
7GM | ↓ | |
0.4GM | ↓ | |
0.4GM | ↓ | |
15GM | — | |
8.5GM | ↓ | |
7GM | ↑ | |
0.3GM | ↑ | |
6.5GM | — | |
28GM | — | |
22GM | — | |
1.4GM | — | |
1.4GM | — | |
11GM | — |
Jakub Szulman
I don’t wish to be a bad prophet. I’m very curious about life, and I’d like to know what tomorrow will bring. I want to provide for my family—for my wife and for my only son. I want to be able to record for posterity what I have seen […] I know many nuances, many details not known officially. And I deem it my duty to report them, if not in a finished, systematically researched work of history, then at least as source material for the objective historians who will come later.
In advance of Passover, a network of bakeries is put into operation to bake matzos.
The matzo officially cost 2 marks for 2.5 kilo, the portion allotted for one person for the eight days of Passover. Two thousand people were employed in baking it, with daily production of matzos amounting to 12,000 kilograms.
The direction of matzo production is in the hands of Mr. [Mordecai] Lajzerowicz, who, before baking began, briefed the bakers and called on them to do their job honestly and with a sense of responsibility toward the customer.
Dawid Sierakowiak, Cont’d
Of course, we’ll take bread instead, since the budget of a menial laborer doesn’t allow for matzoh. Mother would prefer the matzoh, but we need to sell the bread [on the black market] so that we can buy other food.
April1941
Relative Stability Inspires Rumkowski to Renew His Battle With Private Trade
In the beginning, April inflation rose moderately again, showing relative “stability” in the first months of 1941. The price bump in the first week prompted Rumkowski to renew his battle with private trade, cracking down with the creation of a police unit known as the Section of Price Control.
Jakub Szulman
[Rumkowski] began to believe in his genius, his creativity—that he was sent from Heaven. It impressed him to be the head of everything, to be able to say, and later also to write, my report, my department, my bank, my, my, my—
Then, on April 4, prices on the private market spike, influenced by the publication of the food allocations for Passover—which, in comparison to what had been anticipated, proved extremely meager. Likely in response to this sudden rise in black market prices …
Ghetto Police Raid Pilcer Square, Where Food is Traded.
A Raid at the Market
In the course of half an hour the dealers engaging in usury had their goods taken from them and the food was then brought to the premises of the Section of Price Control. On instructions of the Chairman, the food seized is to be confiscated and handed over for sale to the distribution points which serve the sick. […] A special section, the Sonderkommando, conducts searches aimed at seizing valuables, furs, hidden merchandise, hard currencies, including German marks, and all items which are subject to [mandatory] sale to the Community[.]”
But just as Rumkowski taketh away, he also giveth. After the holiday, surplus matzo turned into a boon—for some.
Since a lot of matzoth was left, Rumkowski decided to give an extra treat to workers and clerks in the administration. He gave each worker a package of matzoth for the nominal price of 3 RM, 25 pf. Father received one package at his workplace, and I received one in mine. We sold one of the packages for 11 RM! This is the kind of trade that can be made in the ghetto!
May1941
False Spring
June1941
Himmler Visits the Ghetto
On June 5, Heinrich Himmler visits the Lodz Ghetto. As Reichsführer of the SS, he was, as the Holocaust Encyclopedia describes, “the key and senior Nazi official responsible for conceiving and overseeing implementation of the Final Solution.” He comes to the and assess whether reports of burgeoning productivity were true. He is impressed. The view became accepted among Nazi high officials that the Lodz Ghetto was uniquely valuable for the German army. This sentiment—cemented by Himmler’s visit—would eventually lead to his later decision to temporarily spare the Lodz Ghetto from liquidation.
Himmler’s Visit
Chairman Rumkowski began awaiting the guest in the morning, but it was 4:30 PM when the German high officials began assembling. Among them were representatives of the Gestapo in Litzmannstadt.
When Herr Himmler arrived at Balut Market with his entourage, he had the following exchange with Chairman Rumkowski:
Himmler’s Visit, Cont’d
‘How are you doing here?’ asked Herr Himmler.
‘We work, and we are building a city of labor here.’
‘And how is the work here going?’
‘Not badly, I think. Hopefully, it will get better. I’m doing everything so that the ghetto will work more and work better. My motto is Work, Peace and Order.’
‘Then go on working for the benefit of your brethren in the ghetto. It will do you good.’ Herr Himmler finished the conversation. Himmler and his group visited the workshops and “they expressed their appreciation to Mr. Rumkowski for his work."
—As recorded by Szmul Rozensztajn (Rumkowski’s secretary)
Himmler, with Rumkowski’s aid, is now determined to squeeze even more labor out of the ghetto.
Soon after Himmler’s visit, Dawid Sierakowiak wrote in his diary: “The ghetto is developing more and more gloriously. A large number of new workshops and factories are being established. Together with those already existing, they form what’s called in jest the ‘Jewish Industrial District.’”
Work, like all aspects of ghetto life, was awful.
Ghetto writer Yisroel Tabaksblat
They kept the workers in a disciplined barracks regime, where for the least transgression (so-called) they imposed the most serious, severe penalty, which they had available: taking away the worker’s soup. The taking away of a worker’s single bowl of factory soup was a daily occurrence. How many tears did workers shed, women as well as men. […] When the workers went on strike, they were dealt with short and sharp: seventeen delegates were summoned to the Gestapo and under threats of hanging they had to commit themselves to be diligent and obedient.
On the monetary front, June inflation remains stable.
Though prices rise in the last days of the month with news of Operation Barbarossa (German invasion of the USSR), the actual increases compared to May are tame. Bread, for instance, is quoted by the Chronicle as having risen to 12 marks in response to the German-Russo war; but the price of bread was 12 at the end of May. This relatively mild fluctuation is in marked contrast to later years, where prices react hysterically to news, an economic indicator of the progressively worsening conditions of ghetto life—and currency.
July1941
About to Get Much Worse
Radishes and Carrots
It was recently discovered in the ghetto that the leaves of radishes and young carrots are edible if cooked. Trade in these items has assumed considerable proportions. The goods supplied to the ghetto are, as a rule, of the lowest quality—discards, shopworn, and so forth.
| Good | Previous Price | Current Price | |
|---|---|---|---|
15GM | 12GM | ↓ | |
3.5GM | 3GM | ↓ | |
10GM | 12GM | ↑ | |
12GM | |||
0.9GM | 0.75GM | ↓ | |
1.7GM | 1.25GM | ↓ | |
0.45GM | 0.3GM | ↓ | |
5GM | |||
30GM | 45GM | ↑ | |
40GM | 65GM | ↑ | |
6.5GM | 12GM | ↑ | |
14GM | 22GM | ↑ |
Despite a relatively mild inflation, ghetto life is still worsening.
People try writing to relatives or friends, especially in America, but the mail is returned with a stamp that says “Zuruck, Kein Postverkehr.” “Send back. There is no postal service.” Because men die at twice the rate as women, and also leave the ghetto to perform manual labors, there is a consistent increase in the number of women in relation to the number of men in the ghetto. And the mentally ill begin being removed from the ghetto.
Injections
In spite of their mental confusion, the patients realized what was in store for them. They understood, for example, why they had been injected with tranquilizers during the night. Injections of scopolamine were used on orders from the German authorities. The patients resisted in many cases.
As bad as things seemed inside the ghetto walls, they were about to get much worse—as high-ranking Nazi officials began preparing for the annihilation of Polish Jewry. Interestingly, one early source shines a light on sparing the Lodz Ghetto in recognition of its unique profitability for the Germans:
Erich Hoepner, Nazi military general
It must be seriously considered whether a liquidation of all Jews not capable of working, with the aid of a fast working means, would not be more humane; in any case it would be more pleasant than to let them die out from hunger. [...] It is likely that the Łódź Regierungsprasident [Friedrich] Uebelhoer would prefer that the Łódź Ghetto not be destroyed because he is presumably earning not too badly from it.
—From a letter to Adolf Eichmann, the SS head of Jewish Affairs
August1941
A New Tactic Is Tried: What If We Grow Our Own Food?
Bread rose from 13 to 20 marks in the morning of Aug. 1. Around midday the prices reversed, with bread dropping between 7 and 13 marks, fluctuating within that range for the next week. The price of the staple food was thus doubling and halving in a dizzying daily roller coaster.
Vegetables, too, drop in price—due to an increase in the available food supply.
Agricultural Work
A HEARTENING DEVELOPMENT is the growth of interest in agricultural work among Jews. Even today new garden plots have been turned over, prepared, and are producing vegetables. Even the smallest scraps of land have been put to use. Balut never had so much greenery as it does now, nor was it ever so carefully tilled. The profits are also extraordinary given today's prices. For example, the intelligent cultivation of one square meter will yield more than six heads of cabbage; figuring 1.5 marks per head, this can bring in more than 9.0 marks; cauliflowers and onions are considerably more profitable.
As starvation and death suffocate them, ghetto inhabitants creatively endeavor to add to their diet through the cultivation of homegrown vegetables. In the face of unbearable suffering, the ghetto does not sink into submissive despair, but clings to any way to improve their situation. Interestingly, notice that the quotation above focuses not on the immediate consumption of the food by their hungry owners but on its potential black market sale and the price each item could fetch.
Desperation Becomes the Mother Of Invention.
In a testament to the inhabitants’ astonishing commitment to survival, the ghetto becomes an , with people trying every which way to solve the problems arising from the lack of everyday necessities. A local “inventor” named Henryk Wosk presented himself to the community authorities with a plan for the creation of a department of ideas, modeled after the former Bureau of Patents.
A List of Ideas
Mr. Wosk’s plan calls for ghetto residents to report any useful ideas to the above-mentioned department, which will remunerate them for the costs involved.[...] The department will award prizes to those persons who find the best solutions to the problems. Moreover, the inventors will have the opportunity to work while implementing their ideas. In this way, a series of benefits employment opportunities for hitherto unemployed but productive individuals, for instance will accrue. It will also encourage ideas whose realization will result in improved living conditions for the inhabitants of the ghetto.
As to Mr. Wosk's current ideas, the following are worth mentioning: (1) the utilization of frozen or spoiled potatoes; (2) the full exploitation of coal dust; (3) the artificial production of ice using an inexpensive method that is possible under current conditions; (4) replacing glass with other suitable materials due to the present shortage. Mr. Wosk's proposals have caused great interest among the ghetto's higher circles.
Things seem to be improving—‘except for the dying and hunger, the never-ending hunger.’
The ghetto is developing grandly. Numerous shops and factories have been organized in addition to the ones already existing. All of it is ‘state property,’ ‘of the Eldest of the Jews.’ Hundreds of people have found jobs and things seem to improve, except for the dying and hunger, the never-ending hunger.
From an inflation perspective, Sierakowiak is right to perceive that things seem to be improving in a way: August marks the first negative inflation rate to date, meaning prices declined in real terms. This price drop would continue further in September.
A Smuggler Escapes
The smuggler Zawadzki who recently escaped from Hospital No. 1, where he had been under guard by the Order Service, was apprehended in the city and placed under arrest. When interrogated, he stated that he had executed his escape with the aid of a Jew and had paid a policeman 500 marks for his help. The Order Service man who had been on duty in the hospital was summoned to Kripo [German criminal police], and in spite of his passionate assurances that he was innocent, was only released two days later.
He is now receiving medical attention. Zawadzki, a fourteen-year-old boy, was the major smuggler both into and out of the ghetto. He supplied saccharine, vaccines, medicines, etc., and earned colossal sums of money. His escape was executed in a highly ingenious manner: Zawadzki stated that he wanted to go to the bathroom, where the stalls were set up so that the user's feet were visible. When, after a rather long time, the patient had not come out and did not respond to knocks, the door was forced open. To their astonishment it was discovered that Zawadzki had left his shoes to deceive the guard while he escaped through a window.
September1941
Ghetto Despair Leads to Wave of Suicides
October1941
An Influx of Refugees Brings Worlds of Problems
Jews from Western Europe—especially Germany, Luxembourg, and Czechoslovakia—begin to reach the ghetto. Over the next three months, around 20,000 will resettle in the Lodz Ghetto. Their arrival will impact, among other things, trading activity and ghetto inflation.
German Jews keep arriving—today from Luxembourg. There are many of them in town. They have only one yellow patch on the left breast with the word ‘Jude.’ They’re dressed very well—you can see that they haven’t lived in Poland. They’re buying out everything in town [on the black market], and prices have doubled. Bread is 12 to 13 RM; socks, which cost 70 pf before, are now 2 RM.
Shlomo Frank
Today before noon, 1050 Jews from Prague arrived in the ghetto. They were all in good spirit and replied with a friendly shalom to the greetings of the Jewish police at the Marysin station. Some comforted us with quotations from the Prophets, predicting an imminent end to the war.
Shlomo Frank
Today a transport [of 1200] Jews arrived from Frankfurt. [...] Almost all held up well. They greeted us with a bright ‘Shalom Yehudim’, joked, patted backs, exhorted us to persevere, not to surrender, not to despair. ‘Courage lost is everything lost.'
Soon, however, this chipper disposition would devolve into antagonizing despair. Inflation on the bread index is an indication that the situation, especially regarding food and inflation, is to take a turn for the worse.
November1941
The Calm Before the Storm
Despite the newcomers’ frantic selling activity, November inflation remains mild, and even trends negative on the bread market. Why? Ghetto diaries explain that price increases in food—what the newcomers were mainly buying—caused the prices of nonfood items (which the newcomers brought in fresh supplies of) to decrease, stabilizing the overall market. Low inflation means price changes vary:
| Good | November Price | |
|---|---|---|
10GM | ↓ | |
12GM | ↑ | |
9GM | ↑ | |
6.5GM | ↑ | |
6GM | ↑ | |
22GM | ↑ | |
20GM | ↑ | |
7GM | ↑ | |
12GM | ↑ | |
25GM | ↑ | |
1.2GM | ↓ | |
0.8GM | ↓ | |
25GM | ↑ | |
1GM | ↓ | |
0.75GM | — | |
0.8GM | ↓ | |
20GM | — | |
10GM | — |
Private Commerce
From the moment they arrived, the newcomers began selling their personal property and, with the cash they received, began to buy up literally everything available on the private food market. In the course of time, this caused a shortage in food supply, and prices rose horrendously with indescribable speed. On the other hand, the availability of all sorts of items which had been lacking in the ghetto for quite a while has caused trade to become brisk, and a few of the ghetto’s stores have shelves filled with goods that have not been seen in the ghetto for a long time. Because of the newcomers, who are popularly known as yekes, stores never really closed their doors in the month of November. They sold clothing, shoes, linen, cosmetics, traveling accessories, and so forth.
For a short while this caused a decline in prices for the most varied items; however, to match the price increase on the food market, the newcomers began to raise prices of the items they were selling. From the point of view of the ghetto’s previous inhabitants, this relatively large increase in private commerce has caused undesired disturbances and difficulties and, what is worse, the newcomers have, in a short span of time, caused a devaluation of the [ghetto] currency. That phenomenon is particularly painful for the mass of working people, the most important segment of ghetto society, who only possess the money they draw from the coffers of the Eldest of the Jews.
But this stability would be short-lived—as would the newcomers’ optimism, which wore off quickly. One of those newcomers, Austrian author Oskar Rosenfeld, recounted the experience of adjusting to ghetto life:
The first ghetto diseases: toenail pains, emaciation, inability to sit down, pain in the coccyx. Colossal row because some woman brought in a scrap of bread when it was not mealtime and is eating cheese with it. After the uproar, talk about family. Wife somewhere, son somewhere else, daughter also everywhere—everything torn apart! They don’t know that we are here [...]
Gradually, the provisions [we brought with us] came to an end. [...] One began to sell clothing and shoes to the natives: to undersell, that is. For the prices of these things [on the black market] lagged far behind those of food. One pair of shoes = one loaf of bread. The physical and social decline set it. Gradually, people pushed themselves to the mid-day soup.
Hunger came on quickly, as Rosenfeld describes it.
One’s belly becomes loose, gradually sinks in. Hesitantly, almost fearfully, one runs one’s hand over the restless body, bumps into bones, ribs, runs over one’s legs and finds oneself. Feels suddenly that one was quite recently fatter, fleshier—and is amazed at how quickly the body deteriorates. [...] With such considerations, the word ‘ghetto’ spread itself above us and laid itself on the brain, forcing one to despair of finding a cure.
December1941
Inflation Spikes
December posts the highest monthly inflation rates measured up to this point, for a number of reasons. First, as a result of the influx of newcomers, this month marks the zenith of the ghetto population. Second, the Nazis had begun to strategically starve the ghetto before the coming deportation action to weaken its resolve and entice the Jews to board the trains, where food allegedly awaited them. Then, when deportations are announced by Rumkowksi, frantic trade activity ensued—particularly among the newcomers, who are especially hysterical. As a result, we have the highest number of increasingly desperate people chasing fewer goods: the classic recipe for inflation.
Prices Rising!
This week the prices of basic foodstuffs rose sharply in private transactions. A loaf of bread rose to 12 marks, a kilo of potatoes to 1.30 marks. The prices of margarine and butter reached record highs. Fifty marks was asked for margarine and 75 marks for one kilogram of butter!
Toward the end of this month, Rumkowski speaks at the House of Culture, addressing rumors of the first deportations out of the ghetto.
The previous day the German leadership summoned Rumkowski and demanded he facilitate the departure of thousands of Jews. Rumkowski would often inform the ghetto populace of major changes via public addresses, sometimes in the main square, or as here, at the popular House of Culture, which hosted concerts and other performances. In this speech, he lashes out against his perennial enemy: the black market, threatening to deport all who trade outside the official channels under his control.
Chaim Rumkowski
While we celebrate Chanukah, black clouds are gathering over the ghetto. It’s no wonder that people are becoming highly agitated in anticipation of a new calamity [...]
I would stress, as strongly as possible, that the solution to the most pressing of the ghetto’s problems—including having peace—lies in the ghetto’s getting work. There are many who laugh at this basic assumption of mine. Legions of shirkers have ridiculed the need to work. ‘Why should we work? Isn’t it simpler to live from black marketeering and profiteering?’ [...]
Chaim Rumkowski, Cont’d
On the basis of my authority and the ghetto’s autonomy, I received permission to have the selection for deportation done by us alone, and at the same time I was able to have the total number reduced by half, from 20,000 to 10,000. [...]
I see no other way than to send this undesirable element out of the ghetto. Only in this way will we eradicate the evil for good. Besides, if I don’t do it, someone else will….I have the courage to admit this is my position. [...]
Chaim Rumkowski, Cont’d
These saboteurs will be shipped out! I will also send out the speculators who are buying up the goods brought in by newcomers [in private trade].
I will do everything possible for the survival of the ghetto, for the well-being of decent people who want to work in peace, and I will give the trouble-makers what they deserve.
Later that day, the news hit: 10,000 People to be Resettled Out of the Ghetto.
Who Is to Leave the Ghetto
[...] the German authorities held a conference with the Chairman in the course of which they demanded that 20,000 people vacate the ghetto. Through persuasion and request, the Chairman succeeded in having the number of ghetto residents to be resettled reduced by half. The Eldest of the Jews also won permission to decide for himself, on the basis of his authority over the internal autonomy of the ghetto, who is to leave the ghetto. Apparently, those to be resettled will be sent to smaller towns in the Protectorate, to centers where food supply is not as difficult a problem as it is in the large cities.
| Good | Dec. 17-19 Price | Dec. 28 Price | |
|---|---|---|---|
12GM | 14GM | ↑ | |
1.3GM | 3.3GM | ↑ | |
9GM | |||
75GM | 100GM | ↑ | |
50GM | 60GM | ↑ | |
0.4GM | 1GM | ↑ | |
0.4GM | 1GM | ↑ |
A Mood of Depression
The news of the coming resettlement has created a mood of depression in the ghetto. As usually occurs when a new blow befalls the ghetto, the news has been maliciously and irresponsibly exaggerated and blown out of proportion.
In fact, the destination would be the gas chambers of Chelmno.
Whether Rumkowski knows the murderous purpose of deportation is unclear, though at this point it seems he may still be unaware. Within a few months, he will certainly know. Yet, he will continue to assist in the Nazi deportation actions, convinced, as we will see, that he has no other choice in his quest to save at least a remnant of Lodz Jewry.
Before that happens, though, the ghetto will live its final moments of, what can only retroactively and with a heavy dose of relativity be called, normalcy. The passing of 1941 marks the end of an era in the ghetto and of a communal pillar of the thousand-year civilization of Polish Jewry. This is before major deportation actions, before mass extermination, and before hyperinflation greets the ghetto. It’s the final time that prewar family life remains intact for much of the ghetto populace.
At the House of Culture
[I]n 1941 the House of Culture performed its one hundredth in a series of concerts[...] Around 70,000 spectators have attended these performances at the House of Culture. The cost of a ticket ranges from 30 pfennings to 1 mark, while shows for factory workers cost from 20 to 30 pfennings.
1942
As we enter 1942, all eyes are on Chairman Rumkowski, who has come to believe that he alone can save the Jews of Lodz. A quiet and honest Jewish communal servant before the war—he was an active Zionist, local Kehillah member, and longtime head of an orphanage—in this role, Rumkowski transforms into a megalomaniac. A heroic savior to some Jews, an evil, corrupt Nazi collaborator to others, and feared by all, Rumkowski in 1942 knows he faces unprecedented moral quandaries with his subjects looking up at him for salvation, history looking back at him for assessment, and the Nazis, if they would deign to look at a Jew, with the expectation of slavish obedience. This year will be particularly painful, with the first deportations to the gas chambers of Chelmno, and some of the highest inflationary spells in ghetto history.
January1942
The Chairman Speaks
Confident in his agenda to centralize all of ghetto life under his one-man rule, Rumkowski brooks no dissent or disobedience, harshly punishing all those who act independently of his orders. With vigor and determination he works to suppress private trade as it, by definition, operates outside his ration-provisioning system and by prices he cannot control. He is sure that if ghetto labor continues to make the Third Reich rich, working Jews will be saved.
I do not mind in the least if someone takes the food out of his own mouth to sell it. But I cannot and will not tolerate the hyenas who serve as middlemen.
—Chaim Rumkowski
With the deportations only weeks away, Rumkowski delivers another public address at the House of Culture—as always, in Yiddish. Much of his speech is dedicated to the importance of economics in the ghetto.
Chaim Rumkowski
The question of food supply is undoubtedly one of the most difficult problems, the most urgent of problems, not only in the ghetto but everywhere in the country. I would like to say a few words about the fuel supply situation. Last year we struggled with very great difficulties in that area. You will recall that when we were facing the winter I was far from optimistic in regard to the question of fuel. I made no assurances then, though I was optimistic in regard to food. Fortunately, I succeeded in supplying the ghetto with fuel. And as to the question of food supply, things could be worse. Nevertheless, prices have risen wildly. Closing stores and increasing penalties have not helped in the struggle against this orgy of inflation. Profiteering is mushrooming. I do not mind in the least if someone takes the food out of his own mouth to sell it. But I cannot and will not tolerate the hyenas who serve as middlemen, just as I will continue to show no tolerance for the unparalleled exploitation practiced by those hyenas on members of the new population who are selling off their possessions.
Chaim Rumkowski, Cont’d
As I have stressed many times before, the newcomers are leading a life that is simply unforgivably frivolous. They still suffer from the mistaken belief that the present situation is already coming to an end and, under the influence of that delusion, are living from hand to mouth, selling off everything that they had brought here with them. Unfortunately, the present situation will go on and on…. Given that, reason would suggest the necessity of spending one’s money as cautiously as possible. [...]
Nevertheless, profiteering is flourishing. Before the transports arrived in the ghetto, I had succeeded in eradicating parasitic trade in food. I would also remind the newcomers that I will ruthlessly apply strict repressive measures against those who attempt to avoid selling their furs, and so on, to the bank….
And now I will turn to the plague known as gossip. Once again a gang of scoundrels are launching stories with the intention of disturbing society’s peace. Perhaps the authors of those panic-producing stories are even lurking about here, in this audience. I would like to murder them.
Nothing bad will happen to people of good will.
The Clasp of Deportation Closes In.
As Nazi proclamations are posted on ghetto walls, the populace nervously waits on edge. In one of its longest entries, the Ghetto Chronicle dedicates several pages to dissecting the critical role of economics in ghetto life and how it operates under such conditions.
First, it notes, inflation is at record highs in the ghetto in the first week of January:
A Horrendous Rise in Price of Necessities on the Market
For the last few days the prices of food in the ghetto's private market have been increasing from one day to the next, and even from one hour to the next. Both the level of the prices and their rate of increase are without precedent in the history of the ghetto.
Second, inflation robs the majority of the ghetto—mired in abject poverty—of the chance to buy on the private market:
A Horrendous Rise in Price of Necessities on the Market, Cont’d
Indeed, the great majority of the ghetto’s residents, even in periods when prices are at a low level, is too poor to be able to shop in the private market and must necessarily be satisfied with obtaining food solely on the basis of ration cards for bread, food, and vegetables.
Third, despite the majority of the population being too poor to buy at its high prices, the free market provides the vital service of assigning ascertainable values to different goods in the ghetto. This helps the average person measure the overall situation, the availability of items, and their ghetto price-value. Like any investor, the price system’s objectivity gives the ghetto man or woman a way to make crucial life-or-death business decisions, allowing a laborer to plan for his immediate future. If he sells his piece of bread today, how many ghetto marks will that score him? With winter coming, is it worth going hungry for a day to save up some cash for a coat? How much are coats selling for? Which way are prices trending? The stakes are high. If he survives a day without bread by selling his loaf, and then prices skyrocket before he can capitalize on his coat-buying plan, the lost gamble could be a death sentence. So even for the ghetto man who is too poor to buy on the private market, he keeps his eyes peeled on the daily price fluctuations, waiting hungrily for the right time to strike and make that sale when prices are (in his estimation) at their peak or that purchase when the price is right. “Psychologically speaking,” the Chronicle writes, “even though many people do not buy bread in the market, satisfying themselves with their rations, they are, nevertheless, subject to depression and to concern about the future in the face of the alarming disproportion between the price of a loaf of bread and a monthly salary. No one can rest easy when he finds that his monthly earnings are equal to the cost of a few loaves of bread.”
The ghetto private market, thereby, as the “regulator of commodities,” offers a degree of personal agency that is absent in most facets of ghetto slave life. On this theme, explains the Chronicle, the private market “plays the extremely important role of regulating commodities in relation to the needs of the broad sphere of ghetto society. [...] it should be realized that this market makes it possible for the public at large to engage in transactions that are advantageous from the point of view of bettering one's own economic situation. Although these are cash transactions, they have all the characteristics of barter. One sort of food obtained on rations is sold to buy another sort. The difference in price makes it possible to obtain a larger quantity of a cheaper item, that is to gain quantity at the expense of quality. This is the attitude of the majority of the population who are not well-off.”
Next, the Chronicle explains how this “regulation of commodities” works in practice by showing the market strategies of the three classes of ghetto inhabitants: (1) the destitute masses, (2) the middle class, and (3) the bureaucratic elite. Starting with the so-called middle class of skilled laborers who receive higher salaries and supplemental rations, they “will frequently sell off completely, or in part, the vegetables they have obtained from the general allocation or from supplements received at their offices in order to acquire bread, sugar, margarine, or other such things.” The destitute, meanwhile, are “glad to buy vegetables with the money obtained from the sale of fat, meat, sausage, and even bread.” In other words, there’s a match:
- the middle class want: more bread / fat
- the middle class sells: vegetables
- the destitute masses want: vegetables (for needed nutrients)
- the destitute masses sell: bread / fat
Herein lies the value of market exchange: It can get items into the hands of those who desire them most desperately. As the Chronicle concludes: “This example clearly illustrates that the private market is a regulator of commodities in transactions that revolve around an exchange of quantity for quality, or quality for quantity.”
In addition to the poor masses and middle class, “there is yet a third class in ghetto society—a relatively small number of people who are especially well-off (representatives of the Community's highest administration, including the world of doctors); naturally that class takes part in transactions on the food market only as buyers. [...] The type of situation in which food is bought and sold has been in existence since the inception of the ghetto.”
After describing the mechanics and segments of the ghetto economy, the Chronicle has one final analysis: How did the ghetto’s market fluctuate? Given the dire, abnormal, and unpredictable circumstances, was there a discernible market forecast or was it sheer chaotic madness? “Prices,” the Chronicle answers, “are determined by the law of supply and demand.” How so? “Every food allocation increases the items for sale on the food market and thereby reduces prices. [...] thus, for example, a greater availability of vegetables when fat was in shorter supply caused their respective prices to stabilize, reflecting the relationship between supply and demand, fats and vegetables.”
In the absence of reliable economic indicators, the ghetto market relies on the “trend in prices for the most important foodstuff, i.e. bread, [which] goes along with the populace’s supply of potatoes and also reflects the general cross section of prices. In that regard, the price of bread can always be considered an authoritative indicator of the situation in the food market.” The other inflation indicator used in the ghetto is the money supply. The Chronicle noted that some restrictions on mail for the German Jews was lifted at the end of 1941, allowing relatives outside the ghetto to stuff envelopes with cash, resulting in a constant avalanche of money orders. In December, “over three quarters of a million [German] marks flowed into the ghetto. A whole new factor has come into existence, one which eludes the control of the Community’s autonomous authorities who, thus far, had been fully able to dominate the economic situation.” This German Jewish population, now “funded with money from outside the ghetto, is, in addition to selling its own possessions, buying up whatever is available on the food market, regardless of price.” The Chronicle is concerned that the increase in the money supply and the rapidly rising inflation makes forecasting or “fixing precise prices” on the black market nearly impossible: “Last week that new element had turned the market into a hotbed of speculation, where even the possibility of fixing precise prices was disappearing.”
As we’ll continue to see throughout this story, the ability of the ghetto to unconsciously create a wise, adapting, and complex underground market apparatus is a testament to the ingenuity and mettle of the people of the Lodz Ghetto.
Newspaper Costs Rise
Even the newspaper has gone up in price! Recently, a negligible number of copies of the [German Litzmannstädter] Zeitung, the newspaper published in the city, has been reaching the ghetto by illegal means. At the same time the price of a copy increased from what it had been, 2.50–3 marks, to 5 marks, and the Sunday edition went from 8 marks to 10.
‘Wedding Invitations’: Deportation Orders for the First 10,000 Jews Begin.
The Resettlement Commission began its work on Jan. 5. In the period between Jan. 6 and Jan. 19, new blood was drawn each day. Fourteen transports left the ghetto—each day a transport of almost a thousand living people who did not know where, why or for what sins. And the food shortage kept up with the deportations.
Josef Zelkowicz observed that with the issuance of the first “wedding invitations” [euphemism for deportation order], the ghetto went into a frenzy, resulting in rising prices. Outside the ghetto, their ghetto marks—often called by the slang term “rumki” (short for Rumkowski, as his signature appeared on every bill)—would be worthless, so the desperate deportees sought to spend everything they had on the private market, principally for food for the journey to the unknown. “Those receiving the summonses,” Zelkowicz writes, “began liquidating their pitiful households, selling their last belongings, and spending their ‘rumkies’ on food and first of all on bread, for which they paid exorbitant prices. Taking the ‘rumkies’ with them did not make sense.” With a “hunger psychosis and the fear of dying from starvation [that] was so great” and “nothing more to lose but the ghetto money,” the evacuees drove prices up tremendously, with bread jumping from 20 marks to 22, then 30, 32, and past 35 marks within the span of a couple weeks, a 75% increase.
The ghetto came off its rails. The ghetto lost its ‘normalcy.’ Nobody worked, rested, ate, or thought in a ‘normal’ way.
—Josef Zelkowicz
Neither the Chronicle staff nor the populace seemed aware that the deportees were headed for only one place: The Chelmno death camp.
Unlike other death camps, which also contained labor camps, Chelmno only functioned to exterminate Jews—and to do so immediately. A few men were spared from instant death because they were chosen to pull the bodies from the gas vans, cavity-search them for valuables, bury the bodies in mass graves, and sort the possessions. After a short period—sometimes just a single day—these Jewish slaves were shot, and replaced with new arrivals.
One of the only escapees from Chelmno was Szlama Winer, whose account of the extermination center became known, due to his nom de guerre, as the Grojanowski Report, which made its way to the Oyneg Shabbos archive of the Warsaw Ghetto. About a week after he began working in the Chelmno body disposal process, he wrote of his first encounter with the extermination of Jews from the Lodz Ghetto:
Szlama Winer in Chelmno
At about ten, the first lorry [of the day’s gassing victims] arrived. By one o’clock we had buried four consignments. All the victims were from Łódź. Their emaciated state and the sores and ulcers covering their bodies pointed clearly to starvation in Łódź. We pitied them and said how terrible it was that they had suffered for so long in the ghetto and starved hoping to survive until better times, only to now die such a dreadful death. They weighed so little when they died. [...]
From that day on, the graves were saturated with chlorine because of the stench of decomposing bodies.
Szlama Winer
Before going to work we said a prayer—the pre-death confession [in anticipation of being executed at day’s end]. That day we buried seven lorry loads packed tightly with victims from Łódź. [...] At five, just before finishing work, a car arrived with orders that sixteen people [of the workers] be shot. [...] Sixteen people were selected, they were ordered to lie down in two layers of eight, facing the corpses, then they were machine gunned in the head.
—In Chelmno
For his part, Rumkowski still remains unsure as to the purpose of deportation. Historians can’t pinpoint when exactly Rumkowski learned about the nature of Chelmno. Some have pointed out that the tone of Rumkowski’s speeches changed at the turn of February and March 1942 when he started emphasizing the need to extend the obligation to work to larger groups of people and at the same time promised that he would intervene on every person’s behalf. Most likely, he already had adopted the tactics of sacrificing some to save the others. Historians are confident that by mid-May 1942 Rumkowski must have known that the transports from the ghetto were not sent to work.
The efficient gassing operation of Lodz’s Jews in Chelmno acted as the backdrop for the Nazis’ pledge to commit to the Final Solution at the Wannsee Conference, held this upcoming Tuesday, Jan. 20. At this event, the Nazis would officially dedicate themselves to round up and murder every Jew on the planet.
The deportees’ fate will not be as tragic as is expected in the ghetto. They will not be behind wire, and they will work on farms.
—Chaim Rumkowski, Jan. 17, 1942, in a speech titled ‘Only Work Can Save Us’
A few months of this misery have transformed us more than did many years in the past. Not that hidden instincts of an evil nature were immediately exposed and unleashed, but we learned that in order to live, a few spoonsful of thick soup were worth more than all our ideologies and philanthropic feelings and prayers. But there was one thing we did not yet know: calming our nerves is as important as eating.
February1942
The Transports Stop, Inexplicably
The mood lightens up a little at the start of February, as the transports stopped. Josef Zelkowicz notes in his diary: “People, who just a short while ago were mourning their deported relatives, were now going back to their ‘normal’ occupations. But the price of bread did not normalize. It fell a little to 25 marks.”
At the beginning of winter, the price of a loaf of bread on the bread exchange, on the black market, is already 20 marks. From autumn to the beginning of winter it rose from 8 to 20. But the selling prices for textiles, clothing, shoes, leather bags, did not keep up with bread prices, so the owners of the wares they had brought along sank daily into greater poverty. There were no controls. No authority could put a stop to it.
Those who are particularly prudent divide the loaf of bread into seven parts, one part per day.[...] Woe to him who eats more. [...] Those who consume more than their ration of bread get hungry sooner. Those who don’t apportion well are the first victims of famine edema. He wanders around the hallways, between cots, trying to exchange some item for bread. He is rarely successful.
As inflation rises, resentment grows against black marketeers who are suspected of forcing up prices. Others defend market activity, believing it offers freedom of choice and a necessary distribution of goods that operates outside the corrupt bureaucracy.
Oskar Rosenfeld describes this hunger-market trap in his diary:
This question gave rise to daily, heated debates, discussions in the camps and the ‘private apartments’ where some of the evacuees had been housed.
‘Outrageous prices, that this should be allowed in the ghetto where almost everybody is a beggar.’
‘Why are you buying?’ the critic is being asked.
‘And he, the man from Łódź, sells on his part because he is hungry. [...] So what you have is hunger versus hunger.’
‘But he shouldn’t be allowed to demand such high prices.’
Oskar Rosenfeld, Cont’d
‘You are doing the vendor an injustice. [...] Those who sell their bread have to go hungry for a few days. After all, he doesn’t buy the bread in the market in order to sell it again for usurious prices. He sells what he has saved, going hungry himself, rather than leftovers from the table. He sells bread that was part of his ration, for which he pays the regular [official] price of 80 pennies. This then is a matter of bread that he has taken from his own mouth. And how much he charges for his frugality, for his abstinence, his heroism, that’s his own business. He puts a price on his hunger.’
Oskar Rosenfeld, Cont’d
‘That may very well be so. But don’t forget that the proceeds allow him to buy the official ration of food quite comfortably. For a few marks he gets sugar, vegetables, preserves, detergent, flour […] even if only in small quantities […] so he pays the official allotment and has some money left in his pocket.’ [...]
‘That may be. But would you sell your ration of bread, and, if so, for what price?’
The critic fell silent. He simply mumbled, ‘Hunger.’ He didn’t know what to say. This kind of debate was taking place everywhere.
Later this month, a harrowing scene takes place.
On Feb. 20, ghetto Jews are told to assemble in the market square, where a gallows has been set up. A man about 50 years old is led into the square, which is surrounded by soldiers with machine guns. The man cries out: “‘Let me live, I didn’t do anything wrong …’”
The Jewish policeman places the rope around his neck. The crowd trembles. A field-gray Kripo asks: Maybe the rope is too tight? The drama lasts fifteen minutes. But the crowd must remain there for ten to twelve (Shabbat!). Many get sick, their knees shake. The scene is being photographed and filmed. The whole thing as ‘deterrence’ [the man—Herz—was caught escaping]. The dead man remained hanging there until five in the afternoon, life in the ghetto continued, then he was tossed into an open pit. About all this no indignation, only shock. For a few hours it was the main topic of conversation, by evening all was forgotten. […] Talk turned to the price of bread, of margarine, sugar.
The children know.
And this talk was not limited to adults. In a diary found in July 1945 in the former ghetto, an anonymous girl living in the Lodz Ghetto depicts the harrowing effects of her conditions—betraying a tragic understanding of what’s happening around her:
Anonymous Girl Living in the Lodz Ghetto
Life is horrible, conditions tragic, no food at all. Our [Jewish] officials are to blame for this. They stole from the provisions everywhere, they left everything to rot so that no one could take an inventory. And we are all at the mercy of fate, waiting to die of starvation. To buy something is simply impossible, we can only watch as death takes away new victims each day. Prices are terribly high; bread costs 70 RM in the street; it’s the fault of the deportees from Germany [whose rampant activity on the black market she blames for increased prices].
The deportations resume—this time with even greater severity.
According to Zelkowicz, when rumors began circulating the second half of February about impending new deportations, “the price [of bread] immediately jumped [from 25] to 35 marks.” Those who “depended on the kitchen’s one daily soup,” he explained, had nothing to sell or exchange. Though the ghetto is clueless as to the gas chambers, some glimpses of the truth have somehow filtered in. As seen below, rumors already circulate that the deportees are sent to “Kolo county”—which encompasses Chelmno.
The Resettlement Action
Among other things, a person’s right to take the sum of 10 [German] marks with him was rescinded. As background to this restriction, there was a rumor in the ghetto to the effect that in February people were being deported to the Generalgouvernement where, as is known, German marks are not the currency in circulation. Many widely varied stories appeared in the ghetto concerning the fate of the deportees. It was said, for example, that the deportees were set free in Koluszki; those who spread this unverified information claimed that this news had come from many deportees in Warsaw. Another rumor had it that the deportees were in Kolo county [...] We mention these stories only for the sake of accuracy in chronicling events, for in reality the ghetto has not received any precise information on which to base an idea as to the fate or even the whereabouts of the deportees. The mystery is depriving all the ghetto dwellers of sleep [... and the deportees’] journey into the unknown.
We are all at the mercy of fate, waiting to die of starvation. To buy something is simply impossible, we can only watch as death takes away new victims each day.
—Anonymous girl living in the Lodz Ghetto, 1942
March1942
Eggs Return to the Ghetto: A Good Sign?
In March a slight improvement in provisions could be noticed. Despite this increase in supply, prices continued to rise:
Today I saw three eggs [in street trade], about 50 marks [...] No one wants to believe it. Nobody has seen a chicken egg since entering the ghetto. Tales, fiction, fantasy.
Those who cooked meals at home received the following ration: 60 dkg. of flour, 25 dkg. of farfel, 50 dkg. of sugar and 15 dkg. of margarine. Beginning on March 7, workshop workers and office employees regularly received a separate food supplement. Despite all this, the price of bread was such that it was absolutely impossible to keep up with it. Having gone from 35 to 40 marks, it now began rising every hour.
Menachem Oppenheim
Two years have passed since the Jews were incarcerated in the ghetto. A loaf of bread costs sixty marks. […] Once again, deportation notices have been sent.
Even family relations are strained in the struggle for food:
Anonymous girl
Today I had a fight with my father. I swore at him, even cursed him. […] Yesterday I weighed twenty decagrams of zacierki [croutons] and then sneaked a spoonful. When my father came back, he immediately noticed that some zacierki were missing. He started yelling at me and he was right. What have I done? I regret it so much, but it can't be undone. My father is never going to forgive me. How will I ever look him in the eyes? He stood by the window and cried like a baby. Not even a stranger has ever insulted him before. [...] I have no heart or pity, I eat everything I can lay my hands on.
On March 16, the bread ration was cut. The same ration now had to suffice for a seven-day period, instead of for six days. Zelkowicz describes the difficulty of managing confusing and conflicting information about provisions and costs:
People could not accept the cutback as something natural, and it was explained in various ways. There were optimists who believed and kept assuring others that the reduction was temporary, ‘that the ghetto was, God forbid, not yet in such bad shape that it needed to skimp on bread rations, it just happened that, with everyone preoccupied with real problems, with the deportations and so on, somebody cut a slice off the bread ration.’ Others went further, explaining the reduction as a result of the deportations: ‘Because the deportees were buying out all the bread and the price had jumped so high, the ration was reduced so that there would be no surplus bread to sell [...] but the minute the deportations stop, the ration will return to its old level.’ The pessimists foresaw further reductions in the ration, which, they predicted, would soon have to last eight, and maybe even ten days.
The reduced bread ration was not the only reason the price rose, of course. The main one was the deportations. Amazingly, market prices were usually uniform in different parts of the ghetto, a symbol of the proper functioning of the ghetto market, where accurate information and price data successfully traveled throughout the ghetto. Cheaper bread on one street would be an arbitrage opportunity, and price-conscious ghetto traders would exploit these discounts immediately, thus eliminating them. As is true of advanced economies, the prices of goods therefore generally reflected their true value in the ghetto, not the errors or miscalculations of certain sellers. As the Chronicle wrote: “throughout the ghetto's existence, those prices had displayed an admirable uniformity (both in time and in relation to the ghetto's various far-flung districts).”
But the chaos of deportation fundamentally disrupted the market. Instead of the typically calculated, measured, and data-driven approach of ghetto dealers, now the price of bread on the same day was different in different parts of the ghetto—because people who received “wedding invitations,” or deportation orders, became wildly desperate to buy bread at any price.
And the deportations affected not only the price of bread, but of so much else.
Today was horrible, we received deportation cards for my late father, my mother and brother—everyone except me and Mirka [my sister], since we are registered as workshop workers. [...] We spent the entire day and night in dread and uncertainty, fearing they would come at night and drag us from our beds
Sold Dirt Cheap
At every turn these unfortunates could be seen selling their household articles, a sight which has been deeply engraved in the memories of ghetto dwellers. Naturally, everything was sold dirt cheap, often just to be rid of those things that, although useless now, had belonged to the same family for several generations, just to get a little money to buy food for the road. The possibility that he might succeed in bringing that food with him was the hope of every deportee on the day before his departure.
April1942
Bitter Tears at Passover
We received a reply [from the Deportation Commission] and it was wonderful: We are exempt. Our joy was limitless!!! Well, finally things start moving forward!!! A 2-kg ration of potatoes and 1kg of vegetables per person for 1 [G]M. So the hunger is less severe now!!!
Heniek Fogel, Cont’d
When I came back home, I was worried since I couldn’t find Szlamek [my brother] anywhere – he had left without even saying goodbye, still sick, to turn up for the deportation. Now it’s just the three of us. God help us and let us meet together in better times — all of us healthy, happy and in well-being!!!
We grew even more worried in the evening though the other inhabitants of the ghetto were cheering and celebrating because the deportations had ceased. Those who had gone to ‘Marysin’ came back as well. Yet, Szlamek was unlucky to go with the last transport. We were on the lookout for him the entire day, we thought he’d come back.
Naturally, Mother was crying all day
The following Seder, led by the beloved, blind Rabbi Krakauer, had a Zionist overtone. Zionist sentiment intensified throughout the ghetto given the circumstances, and became especially evocative at Passover, the holiday of freedom. In the summer, Rosenfeld would express a growing ghetto consensus: “Fear of not surviving. ‘On our bones Palestine must be built, the only hope still left.’” Rosenfeld describes one Seder speech by prominent Jewish community leader Dr. Josef Wilczek as a “Zion speech” in which he quoted the Valley of the Dry Bones in Ezekiel 37, a haftarah portion read on Passover and the inspiration for the Zionist anthem “Hatikvah.” This would be Rabbi Krakauer’s last Passover; he will be deported and gassed with his wife at Chelmno on Sept. 9, 1942.
[Seder] Preparations are being made. Finally. The Eldest sends wine, four bottles, while the ghetto drinks grape wine. The rabbi leads the Seder, gives a sermon. Festive mood. Ato bochartonu [You have chosen us] and Secher l’tzias Mizrajim [remember the exodus from Egypt]. Wonderful is the strength to believe in the coming of the Messiah amidst this misery. He will lead us out […]’ This is the bread of affliction, which we eat’ [...] matzos made of dark flour, so stiff it’s hard to chew and won’t even soften when dipped in a hot liquid. [...] Sermon about Erez Israel where we will all end up […]. The next day a few boys are pulling a cart with junk. A few older Jews are looking on. One of the boys says, without moving a face muscle, so to speak, in remembrance of the reading of the Haggada the night before: ‘Not one rose against us, but in every generation they rose to destroy us, and he, the Blessed One, saved us each time with an outstretched arm.’
Oskar Rosenfeld, Cont’d
One of the Jews, a redhead, says: ‘Had he left us in Mizrayim, we would now be sitting in a hotel in Cairo drinking Turkish coffee.’
He laughs. So does the man next to him. Then that one, a gray-haired man, says: ‘Moshe knew what he was doing. Had we stayed in Mizrayim, we shouldn’t have been blessed with receiving the Torah […]’ ‘And what did the Torah get us? Nothing but unpleasantness. Suffering. Persecution.’ ‘But also a pleasant time. The most beautiful time. Without Torah, no life. I never cared for the fleshpots of Egypt and so I don’t miss them as much as so many here. Hunger? So one goes hungry. Getting beaten? So one gets beaten. We are, like it or not, the am s’gulo [chosen nation], nothing can be done about it. We are chosen […] we took the task upon ourselves. And when we are called up to fight, we will fight. For the time being, it is not possible.
Oskar Rosenfeld, Cont’d
For the time being, we have not received the call’ [...] ‘What are we to fight with? With our knapsacks? With our weak arms? And where is the strong arm, the strong hand, that leads us? I don’t see it’ [...] ‘Just look at the boys, how patiently they are pulling the cart. Not one of them is willing to give up what he received at birth. Tell any of them to go and change, to merge with another people, and he will answer: No! He holds fast to the bris! For the Eternal made the bris [covenant] not only with our fathers’ fathers, he made it with us, too, and will make it with the next generation, and so on, into all eternity. Do you want to exclude yourself? Should we want to be smarter than our ancestors? They went into the fire. For us, for us who are alive today. And our children here won’t want to be smarter than us, their fathers […] This is how it will go from generation to generation.’
A hopeful air filled the ghetto on Seder night as evacuees who were gathered at the railway station were sent back home because of a pause in deportations on April 2, the first day of the holiday. Some incorrectly interpreted this pause as a permanent and final halt to all deportations. This belief, in conjunction with jubilant returnees from the cattle cars, an increased food supply, and the auspicious spirit of Passover, led to a happy holiday and a considerable drop in market prices. On April 2, Zelkowicz writes: “There was a brief respite [in black market prices] with the arrival of Passover. The deportations stopped on April 2, and at the same time the ghetto was suddenly flooded with potatoes. People had not seen a potato since January but now received 2.5 kg. of potatoes and one kg. of red beet leaves. This, in turn, caused the price of bread to slide to 70 marks.” Two days later, “it cost only 50 marks, with the demand quite weak.”
Oskar Rosenfeld
The hapless people were caught in the greatest misery since they had already sold their few belongings to buy foodstuff at the highest price for the new home (and now returned to empty dwellings). At that time, bread was 150 marks a loaf, margarine 130 marks.[...] The deportation was temporarily concluded. The price of bread fell from 160 marks to 80 marks. This was the only benefit of the halt of the deportations […] for a few days. However, nobody trusted in the future.
This year, I ate chametz for the first time.
Menachem Oppenheim
Passover 5702. In the Ghetto there is great hunger. Only rye matzah, watery soup, and beetroot. […] Because of the nagging hunger, many people ate bread and so did I. The Passover Seder was prepared with only matzah and black coffee. […] This is my third Passover without my family. And in Passover 1942 I ate chametz for the first time.
Throughout April, the ghetto dwellers, while acknowledging that “there is still no authoritative information as to the whereabouts of the deportees,” have zeroed in on “the most persistent story that they have been assigned to a camp in Kolo county,” the location of Chelmno, where the 44,056 Lodz Ghetto deportees were murdered. But as to the true nature of what was happening at the camp in Kolo county, the ghetto inhabitants are misled and clueless.
At Balut Market
On April 12, a high officer of the [Gestapo] secret police, who is serving as the commander of the camp where the people deported from this ghetto are now located, was briefly at Balut Market. This is the first definite source of information concerning the deportees; for the record, it is worth adding that the story of their whereabouts that circulated with the most persistence has, this time, been confirmed. It has now been irrefutably established that the camp [is in Kolo county and] houses about 100,000 Jews [and the former gentile inhabitants who] left the barracks in perfectly decent order, and even left their furniture for the Jews to use. The food supply at the camp is, apparently, exemplary.
Josef Zelkowicz
On April 17 the distribution of ‘May’ potatoes began, and with these potatoes safely in their hands, everyone felt more secure, which caused bread to lose a bit of its spell and its price to fall by 30 marks a loaf.
A new resettlement is announced.
New deportations begin, this time targeting Western European Jews—who frantically begin selling off their , in a desperate attempt to get themselves food.
A Tragedy!
A good suit goes for half a loaf of bread, a pair of shoes, for 2 kilograms of potatoes, half a kilogram of flour or some other such item. A tragedy! On the other hand, they have to get rid of those things because they cannot take them with them, but, on the other hand, they might have been able to exchange them elsewhere for enough food for the long weeks ahead! The ghetto is full of activity and tension, and no one is talking about anything else.
May1942
‘Possessed’ By Furious Commerce
The announcement is made that all German and Czech Jews in the ghetto will be deported.
In the streets trading has begun in clothing that the German and Czech Jews are getting rid of in all haste. They don’t want money, but food. A splendid new suit costs 6 kilos of potatoes; a pair of shoes, ¾ kilo of bread; trousers, 5 dkg of sausage. I wouldn’t, however, give away a dekagram of food for even the best clothing because, like everyone else, I feel myself getting weaker at a terrifying rate.
| Good | Fogel’s Price | Chronicle Price | |
|---|---|---|---|
250GM | 300GM | ||
200GM | |||
700GM | 600GM |
When the deportees first arrived in the ghetto, they were permitted to bring 50 kilograms of baggage with them. Now, when leaving, they were told they could take 12.5 kilograms.
Possessed by Furious Commerce
[O]n the eve of resettlement they began to sell everything they could not take along with them. The ghetto has simply been possessed by furious commerce. In front of the gateways to the collectives, on the squares, in the streets, and inside the gateways, all people are doing is selling, trading, and examining goods. For the most part, it is clothing, linen, and shoes that are being sold. For the somewhat better things, including clothing and boots, the deportees are demanding their equivalent in food. In this chaos, it is difficult to determine any standards of value, whether measured in marks or in food.
One hundred thousand people in the ghetto are asking each other: ‘Did you have a thick soup? Maybe with potatoes in it?’
On May 4, those awaiting deportation were taken to the train station, where they were met by the German Kripo—who made clear that all of their frantic trading was for naught.
The Kripo took away people’s backpacks and bread sacks. Whatever food they had was taken away. Blankets, cushions, warm things. Indecision. What to do? Hopeless. At the same time those who could not move fast enough trashed with whip. Threats of shooting! Hands up! No one is to carry anything. Give over wedding rings. Watches. So, complete beggars.
And the effect spread like wildfire throughout the ghetto. As those who hadn’t been deported saw wagons of the deportees’ baggage being driven back inside the ghetto, people began panicking. Wild trade breaks out in the alleyways, in the courtyards. Food prices skyrocket.
This tragedy is devoid of heroes. And why tragedy? Because the pain does not reach out to something human, to a strange heart, but is something incomprehensible, colliding with the cosmos, a natural phenomenon like the creation of the world. Creation would have to start anew, with ‘beraishit.’ In the beginning God created the ghetto …
—Oskar Rosenfeld
More Western Jews flow, this time into the ghetto.
Prices Rising Hourly
Prices shot up from one hour to the next, and in a short time the price of a loaf of bread had risen 25 marks, whereas in previous conditions a price of 10 marks would have seemed sky high. [...]
After succumbing to the privations of ghetto life, [t]he rutabagas and beets they had at first disdained, they now bought at high prices, and the soups they had scorned became the height of their dreams.[...] the price of such soup had reached 15 marks[.]
Thousands volunteer for deportation, “telling themselves it cannot get any worse.” Despite some prices falling slightly on May 7–9, prices continue their upward spiral. Keep an eye on soup and bread, which began the month at 15 and 250 marks, respectively.
People are collapsing in the streets from exhaustion; the emergency services can’t make it on time and they find dead bodies. To make matters worse, the chairman went as far as to withhold the sugar and domestic rations for five more days as punishment for buying from the deportees in exchange for provisions.
This brutal punishment fails to deter ghetto trade. Such complete chaos reigns on the food market that setting of prices even within broad ranges is impossible.
All the prices, both of food and of everything, are mushrooming. Depreciation of money is in full swing.
Though street trade is illegal, the Jewish authorities decide to temporarily allow it to give the deportees a chance to buy food for the journey. The Jews are so blind to the purpose of deportation and so convinced that they are being resettled as farmers in the countryside that the exchange rate between the ghetto mark and Reichsmark climbs to 10:1, up from from 4:1 in April and 8:1 in the first week of May. At the end of the second week of May the rate would jump higher to 12:1 and then 15:1. The Nazis exploit these currency concerns to trick the ghetto, sometimes offering Reichsmark stipends and then canceling the payment by announcing that certain cattle cars are going into regions of Poland where the zloty, not the Reichsmark, is legal tender, as we saw in the Feb. 28 Chronicle entry. “There continues to be a great rush in furtive transactions for the German mark[,]” the Chronicle observes, a waste of these Jews’ final hours.
Prices went up again: a kilo of potatoes: 100 RM. A loaf of bread: 900 to 1,000 RM. Soon you will be able to become a millionaire in the ghetto and die of hunger on your bed of money.
— Dawid Sierakowiak, May 12, 1942
Deportations halt. Prices decline.
After May 17, when the deportations stop, signs begin to emerge that the economic situation in the ghetto is calming down. The sudden drop in the prices of necessities is the first harbinger of “a return to normalcy”: Bread fell from close to 600 marks to 450 and then lower, margarine went from over 1,000 to below 400. Other items followed suit.
Price Drops
Saccharine displayed a somewhat weaker tendency to fall, its price dropping only to 50 pfennigs per tablet. The cigarettes placed on the market by the Community have, for the time being, satisfied demand entirely, as is eloquently demonstrated by the fact that those wishing to speculate in resale were forced to content themselves with barely 25 pfennigs per cigarette. The best German cigarettes have appeared for sale at 1.75 marks a pack. The German mark, whose exchange rate has acted as a barometer of tension during the deportation action, fell to below 7 [ghetto marks] on the eve of the action's conclusion, with no buyers whatsoever. These signs have made the population of the ghetto a bit optimistic after having recently been in a state of complete depression and exhaustion. With increasing frequency, one hears the opinion that the Community authorities' forceful measures will achieve their goal and bring the situation back under control. Just so long as there is no new calamity to shatter the equilibrium, which has been patched up once again—this is the devout wish of the ghetto's inhabitants.
Where does inflation come from? How is it created and how to stop it? With prices soaring in 1942, reaching a peak in May, Rumkowski, in line with monetarist economists such as the late Milton Friedman, zeroes in on what he believes to be the source of inflation: excess money supply. To reduce the money supply, he announces a plan to sell cheap cigarettes to the populace (for 1 mark, compared to 2.5 on the black market, a 150% discount), which would get money out of circulation and back into his administration's coffers where it would idly sit, resulting in fewer available ghetto marks. See the following entry in which Fogel uses “Chaimek” from Chaim [Rumkowski] as slang for the ghetto mark.
Since Chairman Rumkowksi wants to increase the value of the ‘Chaimek,’ he decided to introduce the unrestricted sale of cigarettes, 1 mark per cigarette. The word on the street is that he’s going to take all the money, and the price of products will double: unrestricted sale of bread at 100 marks per loaf, etc. No prices have gone up yet, though. Whatever the reason, it is the ‘Chaimek’ that is worth more at the moment, it’s easier to buy something with it.
The quest for potato peels becomes a symbol of ghetto life.
Potato Peels
[T]he desirability of this item which, in normal times, is completely useless for consumption, is attested to by the recent price orgy—people willingly paid 15 marks for 1 kilogram of potato peels. People make soup from the potato peels or make them into flat cakes.
Other items, too. On March 17, the Ghetto Chronicle reports, “The vogue for vitamin injections has, to a great degree, captured the minds of ghetto dwellers.” Rumors filter into the ghetto that the Jews from Pabianice would be deported.
Heniek Fogel
Try to imagine the joy of those who met their loved ones and the despair of those who didn’t know where their children and husbands were. Their cries and moans would move the heart of a stone — mothers asking to be shot, screaming that they have nothing to live for without their children. [...] I am not sure if anyone who might read this in the future will believe all of this. That’s how they torment us, the innocent and the helpless. And it’s just because we bear this name: ‘JEW.’ ‘Jew the eternal wanderer,’ ‘Jew, the eternally damned.’ And yet, not all Jews will perish, some of them will stay alive no matter the torment. The Jews have always existed and will exist no matter the time and place!!! This is how we’ll win in the end!!!
Supplemental Food
[T]he Chairman has ruled that supplemental food be issued them [workers] in special kitchens, under the supervision of a so-called workshop guardian. This was also done to ensure that the young people did, in fact, consume their food on the spot and not take it with them to barter with later [on the black market].
| Good | Recent High | Current Price | |
|---|---|---|---|
1000GM | 140GM | ↓ | |
300GM | 5GM | ↓ | |
150GM | 100GM | ↓ | |
1000GM | 150GM | ↓ | |
71.4GM | 30GM | ↓ | |
100GM | 30GM | ↓ | |
400GM | 80GM | ↓ |
A shortage of small change becomes a plague of its own.
The Lodz ghetto mark was the only Holocaust currency to have coinage. Made of metals, deportees would take coins out of the ghetto with the expectation of using them as “hard currency” or having something of worth (as the metal had scrap value) with which to trade on the outside. With thousands keeping their coins but leaving their bills, the resulting shortage of small change created problems on the black market since sellers couldn’t offer change. Further complicating monetary matters, Rumkowksi’s ghetto bank offered to buy evacuees’ possessions in an effort to compete with black market sellers, shelling out a whopping 1.5 million ghetto marks. To replace the missing coins and pay deportees, the ghetto monetary authorities minted lots of money.
As the Chronicle writes: “The currency in circulation, which had formerly amounted to only 1.2-1.5 million marks, rose to 5.5 million marks in May[.]” As we saw earlier, the Jewish ghetto bank realized that the money put into circulation “did not return to the Community’s coffers; so there is nothing surprising in the fact that those coffers were soon emptied.” Expecting much of the money it printed to come back to the ghetto bank and thus clean it out of circulation, the bank, surprised, now understood that the money supply was way too high. Fearing the onslaught of inflation and trying to keep more money from getting into ghetto hands, the Chronicle notes that “[f]or the first time in quite a long while the payment of salaries was delayed, and the last ten day period in May was pushed ahead to June.” The frantic ghetto monetary authorities had one goal toward the end of May: Reduce the money supply. The two ways they sought to accomplish this were: 1) slow the money printing; 2) get the excess ghetto marks out of people’s hands and out of circulation. As we’ll see at month’s end and in June, these policies worked as intended.
Excess Ghetto Marks in Circulation
In order to counteract this abnormal situation, the ghetto authorities undertook a series of different measures. The shortage of small change was brought under partial control with coupons issued by the Post Office, the Meat Department, and several cooperatives. To prevent the larger families from amassing too much bread, and to avoid creating temptations to barter, the system for distributing bread was changed (to three times a week, instead of two).
To counter inflation, the Community authorities raised the [official] prices of all foods by 50 to 100 percent, and in the case of cigarettes, over 1,000 percent (from 8 pfennings to 1 mark). They put a few hundred thousand cigarettes on the market and, in this way, brought the greater part of the money in circulation into the Community’s coffers. […]
A great deal of clothing and footwear has been brought to the Department of Clothing at 30 Franciszkanska Street, and the populace rushed there to buy up articles that were relatively cheap in ghetto terms. Money has again begun to return to the Community’s coffers, because food rations, even rather plentiful ones, have also been announced. Money had started to become more valuable, while prices had been falling due to a lack of buyers.
Not all Jews will perish, some of them will stay alive no matter the torment. The Jews have always existed and will exist no matter the time and place!!! This is how we’ll win in the end!!!
—Heniek Fogel
June1942
Low Inflation Creates ‘Stabilization and Peace of Mind’
June’s monthly rate is deflationary because prices declined from May, which was one of the most inflationary months in ghetto history. The ghetto bank’s efforts to cool inflation worked, to which ghetto dwellers responded ecstatically, as this month’s entries will show. Inflation had greatly troubled them. But June prices are still high compared to 1941 when bread, for instance, was 12 marks at year’s end. Now, it’s 100 marks. Things in the ghetto, even when they seem to be improving, are actually getting progressively worse.
Have to work ten months for one loaf of bread.
—Oskar Rosenfeld
As the ghetto diaries note, prices dropped in June for several reasons: There were no deportations; the food supply improved; there was “a special food allocation for working people”; and because of Rumkowski’s efforts to reduce the money supply.
Fogel interprets high prices to be good for workers, and exults, “The news in politics is very good! The war will end any day now!” By month’s end, however, stagnation sets in at the food market.
That’s what the Jews in the ghetto are saying!!! Everything got cheaper at the market! 1 kg of sugar for 35 marks, a loaf of bread for 100 marks, 1 kg of potatoes for 18 marks. Still, what does that change when the poor worker can’t buy a thing, no matter if the prices are low or high! Only people with a lot of money can afford to buy anything, so the poor workers were better off when the prices were high, since they could sell things to get the money for the ration, but it is not worth selling when the prices are low and that’s when the poor must struggle! The people at the workshops earn very little! The people don’t have any money for the rations! But they’ll get the money as soon as the rations appear! [...] where did the people deported from Litzmannstadt [Lodz] Ghetto go? No one knows. Let’s hope they’re alive and well! Right now this is a mystery!!! A sad one, unfortunately! How many people would give away thousands of marks to learn about the whereabouts of their relatives! Unfortunately, this is still unknown!
Price Controls Take Effect
The fury for buying goods that seized the ghetto a few weeks ago is also a thing of the past. It is possible that summer is reducing people's search for clothing. These circumstances make it senseless to sell off one's food. Pieprzowa Street, the center of the food exchange, has been completely deserted of late. This is clearly not unrelated to the campaign against unlicensed trade conducted by the Price Control section of the Order Service. Such being the state of affairs, it would be pointless to mention prices, for prices, even in the most insignificant transactions, have lost the ability to provide any general indications.
The soon-to-be gassed victims of Chelmno were forced to send back postcards to their relatives assuring them of their safety—an obscene, effective trick.
We get letters from the people sent away to Poznan. They say they’re well and they have work! The people are saying that they received postcards from the deported people; they’re working somewhere near Krakow and in the towns.
On June 2, 1942, the BBC broadcast a speech by former Lodz resident Szmul Zygielbojm reporting on the murder of Polish Jews. Radios were forbidden on pain of death in the ghetto, but a few people kept clandestine radios, listened to Western broadcasts, and spread news throughout the ghetto. In despair of the inability to save his fellow Polish Jews, and in protest against perceived world inaction to stop the Holocaust, Zygielbojm committed suicide in May 1943 as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising raged.
Popular sayings: The best lie is the ‘Emess’ [truth]. The best ‘chochme’ [wisdom] is ‘shtil’ [silence]. A piece of wood cannot burn by itself; one person cannot resist.
—Oskar Rosenfeld
Young children—alone, without work and starving— hoping to sell morsels of food and merchandise they manage to collect. These kids are spared no mercy by the Jewish authorities: For engaging in private trade they are often arrested and suffer prison sentences (as an entry in next month’s module shows) and those with peddling sentences on their record are usually singled out (together with their families) for inclusion on the lists for deportation.
Face of the Ghetto
At the street corners, barefoot boys and girls, almost children, offered Sacharina original for sale, six pieces for 1 mark. […] They had their own melody, their singsong, their nigun not only for saccharine but for other wares as well, like candy […] not candy in the European sense. These were sugar cubes molded in the kitchen by inventive minds from coffee or the juice of turnips wrapped in a bright little piece of paper with holes, and there were plenty of passerby who would spend half a mark for such candy.
July1942
Prices Spike Yet Again
It’s impossible to get any greens: 1 kg of young beet leaves for 13 marks, 1 kg of lettuce for 12 marks, a bunch of radishes (that is 4 radishes) for 1 mark. The hunger is terrible! And it goes hand in hand with the high prices! What will come of it? No one knows!
Someday the question will be asked: Did Chaim Mordche [Rumkowski] do right in face of the ‘sakune’ [danger]? Will he be held responsible by somebody? Was he the smart one? The true ‘shofet’?
—Oskar Rosenfeld, July 4, 1942
As explained in last month’s module, Rumkowski’s policy is to stamp out child street peddlers as part of his war against the black market. These kids, notwithstanding the punishments and without alternatives, continue to putter around the alleyways hawking their wares. Over the last several months, Rumkowski’s battle against these children took a backseat to the more pressing task of facilitating deportations and so for a brief interval the law was not enforced. Now, however, with the cattle cars on pause, Rumkowski resumes his arrests of these juvenile “criminals” and incarcerates them in the ghetto’s Central Prison.
In Central Prison
These children are placed in cells, where they sleep on plank beds. They were sentenced to short-term imprisonment for systematically engaging in street sale of saccharine, cigarettes, or petty thefts.
Of the one hundred four thousand inhabitants of the ghetto as of July 1942, about hundred thousand are of equal rank. The remaining four thousand are living under somewhat more favorable conditions due to more generous food rations and more hygienic surroundings. That is all. The ghetto as such, its highs and lows, can be experienced/enjoyed by all in equal measure. There is no channel through which victuals flow from different reserve. That’s why the only trade is that of rations that people save from their own mouths; earlier, still gifts (delicacies) from abroad and contraband. Since May 1942, modest home production of vegetables—without assignment for the open market, furthermore, with secret traders who somehow got these goods.
It cannot be documented when exactly the first reports of mass murder by poison gas reach the ghetto. Until now, the most concrete pieces of information entered the ghetto through the workshops. Ghetto laborers who sorted used articles of clothing started to realize that the inventory was from people recently deported. Ghetto marks and other items fell out of the pockets, clearly identifying them as having been sent out of the Lodz Ghetto.
As a May Chronicle entry noted: “People are considerably disturbed in view of passports, tefillin, and other personal objects that are found in the clothing.” Obvious to them was that “the bundles had not been packed by their owners.” We noted how Szlama Winer escaped from Chelmno, traveled to the Warsaw Ghetto and wrote a report on the gassing operations. A letter describing Winer’s testimony, dated Jan. 19, 1942, from the Rabbi of Grabow, a town northwest of Lodz, finally reached the ghetto around this time. The original letter is lost but its content has been preserved: “An eyewitness, who managed to flee the hell, came to me. [...] From him I heard everything. The place where all are being killed is named Chelmno. [...] People are being killed in one of two ways, either by being shot or by poison gas.”
Rosenfeld would write in September that “clothing [of deportees is] brought back here as used material. Apparently all gassed as ‘unusable,’ that is, no longer alive. Of course, unable to learn anything positive.” It is likely that the following Fogel diary entry, perhaps the earliest ghetto reference to gassing, reflects the arrival of the Grabow letter:
As far as deportations are concerned, some say that bloodstained clothes were found on a road somewhere in the woods. According to others, the Jews from Kalisz saw from the train how their children were being led into trucks and barracks equipped with gas chambers. Then again, there are some who claim that these people are alive and that they were sent to work.
Dr. Oskar Singer
We have witnessed war and know that life takes on a different face when cannons speak. The basic forms, though—the elements of daily life—stay the same. Morality cracks, but ethics remain. The rules of social life are not abolished; at most, they are altered. The family, the pillar of domestic life, does not collapse.
According to the Chronicle, in the first seven months of 1942 alone, 13,000 died in the ghetto. This is in comparison to 11,500 in the entire year of 1941, and 8,200 in 1940.
I write this because if anyone ever reads this, they’ll have an outline of what’s happening here, just 1 percent out of the full 100! What I mean is that I write only about 1% of the things taking place here! I write this so that anyone reading this will believe rather than treat it as the writing of a madman or some fantasy! [...] May God preserve us all in health, so that we have the strength to work, so that we can live to see the end of this war and see each other![...] May the ones who are still alive survive all of this! There’s been enough death already, 1,000,000 times over! Enough of this war and the misery! We won’t last in the ghetto any longer! Hundreds of people perish every day!
The category capital and work is unknown in the ghetto. Neither the capitalist nor the worker is to be seen; neither anonymous capital nor individual private capital; neither the exploiter nor the proletarian. We are living in a commune.
—Oskar Rosenfeld
August1942
‘Strange are the ways of life in the ghetto’
Inflation ticks up moderately in August, impacted by the reduction in the food quotas. The food situation worsens when temperatures surpass 45°C (113°F) and this “heat wave has had a disastrous effect on agriculture in the ghetto,” scorching people’s windowsill vegetation and the nefarious emergence of “an enormous mass of caterpillars throughout nearly the entire ghetto,” the Chronicle recounts, “which has literally devoured” what was “green and growing, [but] today, there are only the skeletons of leaves and stalks.” These vital, additional food sources, “a real credit to intense, unflagging labor, are now desolate, abandoned.” These private sources of food supply always affected the market prices in a big way, and their near-overnight destruction drove vegetable, especially cabbage, prices up.
Life in the ghetto passes in a monotonous, gray, sad and uniform manner.
[... Lack of food means] we are left with only water! And there’s no way around it! That’s the way things are in the ghetto! Every man for himself! But vegetables are still expensive because they are not included in the rations.
With an eerie prescience of what is to be announced two days hence, the Chronicle writes on Aug. 30: “Strange are the ways of life in the ghetto, abounding in surprises of every sort. Nothing is logically predictable, and people often wrack their brains over one or another turn of events that had seemed completely clear but underwent a change at the last minute.” On Aug. 29, Rations are announced that increase the amount of food by 50%. But the Chronicle, always wise, is nervous. “Why do omens of improvement so often end with things becoming worse and vice versa?” “These are questions,” the entry closes, “that disturb the entire population and for which no answers can be found, answers that may not even be found before the war is over! It could be whim, and it could be necessity!”
99% of the ghetto population is swollen and can barely walk on their own two feet! Whoever survives will stay crippled anyway!
—Heniek Fogel, Aug. 11, 1942
September1942
Eight Days of Hell
The Chronicle’s foreboding came true. Sept. 1 brought terrible news: All of the ghetto hospitals were being emptied by the Germans. In the morning, the areas around the hospitals were surrounded by guards and all the patients, without exception, were loaded on trucks and driven out of the ghetto.
There was a terrible panic, because it’s no secret, thanks to people who’ve recently come from the provinces, how the Germans ‘take care’ of such evacuees. Hellish scenes occurred during the moving of the sick. People knew that they were going to their death! They fought the Germans, and were thrown onto the trucks by force.
When somebody says ‘Only a miracle can save us,’ others present will shake their heads and make a gesture that means: ‘Nothing! Long live the devil. We no longer believe in redemption. We no longer believe in miracles.’
Those chosen for deportation were placed in “collection points” under guard by the Order Service to prevent escape. These —armed only with batons—stood between these deportees and death. The brutal task of separating families and forcibly rounding up fellow Jews pained many of these men. To encourage compliance, “Jewish policemen receive” as Zelkowicz disapproves, “extra rations [...] for this roundup ‘work.’” Their families are also spared. While at death’s door, evacuees offer these policemen valuables such as watches, diamonds, and rings to look the other way as they escape the collection points back into the ghetto. But “[t]he most proven and effective means is money; of course, not any rumkes. But even rumkes, when one has a whole lot of them, are currency.”
Rumkowski announces that he will speak to the public.
The logical thinkers and optimists misled us. The deportation is a fact. The people gathered have come to hear their sentence—whether they are to live or, God forbid, they are to die. Mothers and fathers have come to hear the judgment on their children’s heads. [...] The 1500 people gathered here in the square are like a great tribe that has been condemned to death and is now in its last minutes. They stand, they wait, they fry in the sun.
That day, September 4, Rumkowski gives his most infamous speech, titled ‘Give Me Your Children.’
Chaim Rumkowski
The ghetto has been struck a hard blow. They demand what is most dear to it—children and the elderly. I was not privileged to have a child of my own and therefore devoted my best years to children. I lived and breathed together with children. I never imagined that my own hands would be forced to make this sacrifice on the altar. In my old age I am forced to stretch out my hands and to beg: ‘Brothers and sisters, give them to me! Fathers and mothers, give me your children!’
Chaim Rumkowski, Cont’d
Yesterday, in the course of the day, I was given the order to send away more than 20,000 Jews from the ghetto, and if I did not – ‘we will do it ourselves.’ The question arose: ‘Should we have accepted this and carried it out ourselves, or left it to others?’ But as we were guided not by the thought: ‘how many will be lost?’ but ‘how many can be saved?’ we arrived at the conclusion—those closest to me at work, that is, and myself—that however difficult it was going to be, we must take upon ourselves the carrying out of this decree. I must carry out this difficult and bloody operation, I must cut off limbs in order to save the body! I must take away children, and if I do not, others too will be taken, God forbid... [terrible wailing].
Chaim Rumkowski, Cont’d
I cannot give you comfort today. Nor did I come to calm you today, but to reveal all your pain and all your sorrow. I have come like a robber, to take from you what is dearest to your heart. I tried everything I knew to get the bitter sentence canceled. When it could not be canceled, I tried to lessen the sentence. Only yesterday I ordered the registration of nine-year-old children. I wanted to save at least one year—children from nine to ten. But they would not yield. I succeeded in one thing—to save the children over ten. Let that be our consolation in our great sorrow. There are many people in this ghetto who suffer from tuberculosis, whose days or perhaps weeks are numbered. I do not know, perhaps this is a satanic plan, and perhaps not, but I cannot stop myself from proposing it: ‘Give me these sick people, and perhaps it will be possible to save the healthy in their place.’ I know how precious each one of the sick is in his home, and particularly among Jews. But at a time of such decrees one must weigh up and measure who should be saved, who can be saved and who may be saved. Common sense requires us to know that those must be saved who can be saved and who have a chance of being saved and not those whom there is no chance to save in any case. (Horrible weeping).
—‘Give Me Your Children’
The meaning of the speech was clear to ghetto residents. As of 5 p.m., notices were posted laying down a curfew: No one would be allowed to leave their dwellings without a pass from the police. This curfew—or “shperre” in Yiddish—began the eight “nightmarish days,” to use Zelkowicz’s phrase, during which the ghetto’s children, elderly, and sickly were taken from their families. Children were ripped from their parents’ arms, dozens were killed during the roundups. All in all, during these eight days alone, 15,681 Jews were removed from the ghetto and sent to their deaths at the gassing operation at Chelmno.
Among those taken was Sierakowiak’s own mother.
I swear on this human life that's holy to me that if I only knew that my mother wouldn't have to die, that she'd survive the war despite the deportation, I could accept what has happened. Dear Mother, my tiny, emaciated mother who has gone through so many misfortunes in her life, whose entire life was one of sacrifice for others, relatives and strangers, who might not have been taken away because of her exhaustion had it not been for Father and Nadzia robbing her of food here in the ghetto. My poor mother, who always feared everything, yet invariably continued to believe in God, showed them, in spite of extreme nervousness, complete presence of mind. With a fatalism and with heartbreaking, maddening logic, she spoke to us about her fate. She kind of admitted that I was right when I told her that she had given her life by lending and giving away provisions, but she admitted it with such a bitter smile that I could see she didn't regret her conduct at all, and, although she loved her life so greatly, for her there are values even more important than life, like God, family, etc. She kissed each one of us good-bye, took a bag with her bread and a few potatoes that I forced on her, and left quickly to her horrible fate. I couldn't muster the willpower to look through the window after her or to cry. I walked around, talked, and finally sat as though I had turned to stone. Every other moment, nervous spasms took hold of my heart, hands, mouth, and throat, so that I thought my heart was breaking. It didn't break, though, and it let me eat, think, speak, and go to sleep.
A Gestapo in a field-gray uniform tears a child from a young woman. Rosenfeld describes the gruesome scene: “‘Leave me my child or shoot me.’ The field gray pulls his revolver. ‘I’ll ask you three times whether you want me to shoot.’ He asks three times, each time she answers ‘yes’—shoots the woman point-blank. A few people come up and take the corpse away.”
The detailed and careful of the Ghetto Chronicle, exemplified by the upcoming entry, is astounding. As ghetto survivor and editor of its postwar English edition, Lucjan Dobroszycki, highlights, “[t]he wealth of information it contains, the accuracy of its record, and the systematic manner in which it was compiled makes the Chronicle a source unparalleled among the writings on the destruction of European Jews during the Second World War.” I attribute this to five major factors.
First, the Lodz Ghetto survived for so long, allowing for the prolificity and survival of the manuscripts. Second, they were well-informed: The dozen or so male and female contributors to the Chronicle were officially employees of the Jewish ghetto administration’s Archive Department, which granted them access to the innermost circles of ghetto political life and to all available documentation. Third, the immunity they possessed as Rumkowksi’s bureaucrats bestowed the ability to observe horrifying events without personal danger; they could record, for instance, from amid the deportations without fear of being swept away. Fourth, the Chronicle’s contributors were prewar professors, journalists, scholars, economists, authors, and other occupations that brought talent, skills, and quality to the work produced. Fifth, the staff was passionate and dedicated to the Chronicle. In a speech to his colleagues, Henryk Neftalin laid out their guiding principle to create a basis of source materials “for future scholars studying the life of a Jewish society in one of its most difficult periods.” The chroniclers feared German discovery of their secret work but in the interest of preserving the experience of the Jewish people, they persevered.
Nightmarish Days
The operation proceeded as follows—block after block was surrounded by the Jewish police and then each building surrounded by a host of police and Jewish firemen and entered by a representative of the authorities (the Gestapo). A shot was fired as the signal to assemble, and then all the residents of a given building were assembled in the courtyard, arranged in two rows, and subjected to inspection by representatives of the authorities. In the meantime, the Jewish police were searching the apartments and bringing out anyone who had been hiding or people who were ill. In the smaller buildings, this operation often took only a few minutes.[...] To encourage the Jewish police and the fireman to conduct the operation conscientiously, promises that their closest relations would be spared had been made. Thus, their children were placed in a hospital and isolated from the rest of the population. [...]
Dramatic scenes were played out in the hospitals. Escape attempts came to a bloody end. [...] Because the operation proceeded so rapidly, the authorities gave no thought to the motives or causes for any particular act. At 38 Zgierska Street, an elderly woman from Sieradz did not understand if she had been ordered to go to the left or the right and, instead of going to a wagon, she walked over to a group of ‘remainders.’ This the authorities interpreted as an escape attempt. The woman was shot to death on the spot. At 3 Zgierska Street, Rozenblum, a 13-year-old boy, attempted to hide in a dustbin; he was seen and shot dead. [...]
Nightmarish Days, Cont’d
Incidentally, the populace's strange reaction to the recent events is noteworthy.
There is not the slightest doubt that this was a profound and terrible shock, and yet one must wonder at the indifference shown by those apart from the ones who were not directly affected and who returned to normal life at once from whom loved ones had been taken. It would seem that the events of recent days would have immersed the entire population of the ghetto in mourning for a long time to come, and yet, right after the incidents, and even during the resettlement action, the populace was obsessed with everyday concerns—getting bread, rations, and so forth—and often went from immediate personal tragedy right back into daily life. Is this some sort of numbing of the nerves, an indifference, or a symptom of an illness that manifests itself in atrophied emotional reactions? After losing those nearest to them, people talk constantly about rations, potatoes, soup, etc. It is beyond comprehension.
As of the end of this month, after the last resettlement, there is almost no one in the ghetto over the age of 65 or under 10.
Killing so many Jews inadvertently starts to hinder the German war effort.
German General von Ginant sends a memorandum to the General Staff of the Wehrmacht in reaction to the removal of the Jews from industrial production. That the Jews were being murdered does not register with the general, who is only concerned that extermination caused supply delays for the German army.
Considering the recent deportations from the Lodz Ghetto, which comprised—per SS-chief Greiser’s postwar testimony—one of the Reich’s largest war enterprises, it’s likely that von Ginant was referring especially to the recent, partial depopulation of the Lodz Ghetto. He wanted to ensure that the German high command believed the chief concern was “the full exploitation of Jewish labor for the war effort, purely Jewish enterprises and Jewish sections of enterprises will be established.
"The evacuation of the Jews without advance notice to most sections of the Wehrmacht has caused great difficulties in the replacement of labor and delay in correct production for military purposes. [...] The evacuation of the Jews makes it impossible for these orders to be completed in time.”
“It is requested,” von Ginant concludes, “that the evacuation of Jews employed in industrial enterprises may be postpone[d].”
| Good | Price on Eve of Shperre | Current Price | |
|---|---|---|---|
120GM | 50GM | ↓ | |
17GM | 6GM | ↓ | |
16GM | 5GM | ↓ |
An important factor that determines the structure, the mood in the ghetto, curiosity, melancholy is: deafness of the soul, ingratitude, alienation from the time, more refined Jews do not exist, not on the surface. Total morphological transformation.
—Oskar Rosenfeld, Sept. 21-22, 1942
October1942
Hope at Simchat Torah
Prices continue to drop for most of October, rising in the final week or so.
Soup
Today, instead of soup, tsholent was served in all the soup kitchens, which was, of course, to the great satisfaction of all the workers. Let us hope that this will be repeated once a week.
Yesterday Simchas Toire as a guest at Praszkier’s. Beautiful service with a chasen [cantor], called up to the Tojre, with three Sefer Toires, with three Sefer Tojres around the table as back home, rolled together, hagbe and [g]ali[l]e. Then a meal: schnapps, cholent (barley, peas, potatoes, meat), aspic, chopped red cabbage, coffee with honey cakes, Yiddish and Polish songs; Zionist [speech] about Simchas Toire. Judaism and Jews won’t vanish, in the end there is always immediately a beginning, thus eternity, no enemy can destroy us. […] Beautiful atmosphere, time spent wonderfully Jewish.
On Oct. 9, Himmler replies to General von Ginant’s Sept. 18, 1942, memorandum requesting the primacy of the German war effort over the extermination of the Jews. Himmler’s scathing letter blasts those who profess “the alleged interest of armaments needs, but who in reality only seek to support the Jews and their own businesses. Jews in real war industries, i.e., armament workshops, vehicle workshops, etc., are to be withdrawn step by step.”
Himmler agrees that the extermination of the Jews should be done in a way to squeeze the most labor out of them but concludes forcefully that “in accordance with the wish of the Führer, the Jews are some day to disappear.”
No Negroes in the Ghetto
Precinct VI of the German Police has inquired of the Chairman whether there are any Negroes or mulattoes in the ghetto. The Chairman was able to report that there are no Negroes in the ghetto.
Prices
For quite a while now, prices on the open market have been soaring. Bread now costs 100 marks, potatoes, 8, sugar is unavailable even at 100 marks, and butter is hard to find even at 400 marks; the best way to obtain food is through barter. Vegetables—legally priced at 2 marks for the current ration—now cost 6 marks. The price of briquettes has suddenly risen to 3.50, wood is over 2 marks, matches are up to 1 mark, saccharine 8 tablets for 1 mark. Soup kitchen tickets have risen to 3.50. This increase in prices is due to strict supervision by the Special Unit. Since no illegal bread is reaching the market, the other prices are rising accordingly.
November1942
Workshop Soup
Prices
Because of the large deliveries of cabbage that must be used up, the Department of Soup Kitchens has ordered a reduction in the soup’s potato and starch content. They are to be replaced with cabbage. And thus, since Thursday, the afternoon soup has been replaced with cabbage. The soup is tastier now but its nutritional value is lower. The ‘black market in soup’ reacted to this with an immediate drop in price. A [bowl of] soup now costs 3.50 marks as opposed to [the earlier price of] 4.0 to 4.50.
There must finally be an end to private trading, trading in one’s own blood! The watchword of my workers should be: ‘Here in the ghetto we are all workers, we are all equal!’
—Rumkowski
December1942
Winter Means Cold, and Cold Means a Run on Fuel
Shall I once more compare our situation with the famine situation, which we have heard about in India and China and the famine-ridden areas of the world war! Our hunger defies any comparison because it entails other factors; these are factors that don’t come into play there, specific ghetto factors, psychic symptoms. […] The end result of a process that began with expulsion from our homeland, degradation, deprivation of all rights. All is lost if hunger is joined to homesickness, fear, despair, or even weariness of life. An organism depleted by hunger cannot withstand such psychological assaults.
Because of the great shortage of fuel, the price of wood rises sharply—from 3 to 4 marks per kilogram.
Recall, in late May and June the Jewish authorities, concerned that excess money supply was causing inflation, stopped the flow of ghetto marks by refusing to pay people’s wages and engaged in a currency buyback program through the sale of cigarettes. Also recall the shortage-of-coins dilemma, as deportees took the metal pieces with them. At this point in our journey, that such concerns mattered in the ghetto should make sense. On Dec. 8th, the Chronicle blares: “NEW COINS. Today, new 10-pfennig pieces went into circulation in the ghetto.”
Now, after nearly six months of low inflation, “100,000 coins were put into circulation” in one day, “and more are being produced by the metal factory every day. [...] The were manufactured from electrum, a light metal. [...] Most of the marks are now in the Community’s coffers. Because of the frequent food rations, the population cannot hold on to the money.”
These final two sentences demonstrate that the ghetto's Main Treasury felt comfortable rapidly increasing the money supply because it forecasted that the effective circulation would be limited. The inflation statistics indicate this was a mistake. Inflation ratchets upward at the end of December and then skyrockets in January. December and January are stable months without major deportations, crashes in food supply or other shocks, and yet January posts one of the highest monthly and annual inflation rates in ghetto history, strongly suggestive of money supply as its root cause. To quote from my study (p.32): “the second-most inflationary period using the Bread and Basket Indices’ annual rates was the end of December 1942 through the beginning of January 1943, when the annual inflation rate of the Bread Index hit 4,400% on January 1st-4th, and the annual basket rate hit its second-highest level a few days earlier on December 27, 1942, at 1,882%.”
Quite unexpectedly, and unprecedented by rumor, it was announced today that every inhabitant of the ghetto will receive one half kilogram of flour in exchange for ration card coupon 81.
This is a Hanukah present.
Rations Update
Children will receive 200 grams of candy from the Eldest of the Jews, as they have on holidays in previous years.
The extra flour ration has caused immediate price drops of about 30 percent on the open market; bread has dropped from 120 to 85 marks, flour from 80 to 55 marks, potatoes from 12 to 10 marks. Butter remains constant at 450, oil, 250, sugar, 100, matches, 1.50, briquettes, 3, and wood, 2.50.
On Dec. 13, three Jewish girls—suspected of having escaped labor camps and caught crossing the outskirts of the ghetto—were executed. The Chronicle shared the news, but one can see how the years of deprivation and torture were taking their toll on the inhabitants’ ability to dwell on tragedy.
[The girls] were taken out of a room and shot like dogs in the hallway. Meanwhile, a ration of 10 dkg of fish and ½ kg of carrots per person has been issued. The ‘fish’ are several centimeters-long, salted gudgeon that stink for a mile. Too bad there is so little of it.
1943
1943 represents the most stable year in ghetto history. No major deportations into or out of the ghetto occur, and after January, inflation is remarkably subdued. This “stability” is due to the fact that the Nazis convert the ghetto into more of a slave labor camp than ever. By 1943, almost all nonworking people had been exterminated and in this pivotal year the Germans, while liquidating every other Eastern European ghetto, make the economically motivated decision to spare the Lodz Ghetto from immediate destruction. The Nazis, concerned about Jewish armed rebellion and maintaining ghetto manufacturing output, increase their direct involvement in ghetto affairs, delegating less authority to Rumkowski. The distribution of food, once Rumkowksi’s chief role and tool of power, is taken from him in November and becomes directly regulated by the German ghetto administration. Therefore, Rumkowkski features less prominently in the ghetto’s story in 1943.
January1943
Rumors of Armed Resistance Reach Lodz
We ended last year with ghetto sources ringing the alarms about the rapid increase of the money supply. Sure enough, prices this month soar—resulting in the second-highest set of annual inflation rates measured in ghetto history.
| Good | Current Price | |
|---|---|---|
18GM | ↑ | |
150GM | ↑ | |
500GM | ↑ | |
130GM | ↑ | |
15GM | ↑ | |
7.5GM | ↑ | |
120GM | ↑ | |
100GM |
On Jan. 18, word reached Lodz of armed resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto. This was not the full legendary uprising, which would occur three months later, but the first clashes by the Jewish fighting organizations, in which they successfully halted a deportation action by killing a dozen Nazis and wounding dozens more.
By Jan. 24, the Chronicle noted that “the Warsaw ghetto’s overall situation” has worsened. The Nazis, as their private correspondence shows, were made uneasy by the threat of Jewish armed resistance—an unease that extended to Lodz. The Nazis sought to assess whether any Jews in Lodz were in a similarly rebellious spirit, could mount armed resistance, or were in contact with Warsaw’s Jewish underground.
Yesterday I had a longer conversation with the head of the factory, Bajgelman. He is of the opinion that our ghetto will undoubtedly serve future economists as a ‘model’ of a state with socialized capital.
—Poznanski, Jan. 17, 1943
Cleverly, the Nazis thus offered Lodz Ghetto Jews transfer and transit to the Warsaw Ghetto for 1,000-6,000 marks—a move that sheds light on the Chronicle’s Jan. 28 entry:
Beatings
Unpleasant incidents have been occurring in the ghetto lately. Random passersby are being stopped [by Germans], asked for their opinions [on various matters], and, according to their answers, beaten up. These incidents have occurred in markedly deserted areas.
Thaw. First inkling of spring. Heart in emotional upheaval. Prices are rising. Bread 160 sugar 130.
February1943
Working Hours Increased: ‘People Are So Exhausted’
March1943
Gallows Humor Sets In
Unsurprisingly, the famine took its toll everywhere—including people’s gait.
In Jest
A ghetto Jew will remark in jest: ‘Before the war we ate ducks and walked like horses, now we eat horses and waddle like ducks.’ Of course, this witticism is not altogether accurate, since people ‘waddle’ only because they are allotted barely 200 grams of horsemeat per ten-day ration period. If there were more horsemeat the joke itself wouldn't have a leg to stand on.
Twenty freight cars are actually made ready for [deporting] the approximately one thousand people, many with lung ailments. Unknown whereto. Horrifying scene in Czarnieckiego [prison]. A group of younger people loaded onto the wagon and taken to the collection camp, Kiddush HaShem, singing Hatikvah […] They were singing in greatest anguish a little piece of hope out of their soul. Auto-da-fe [of the Spanish Inquisition] was child’s play compared to this ordeal.
This depression can be felt acutely in the words of ghetto diarists like Rosenfeld, who this month noted darkly: “Tallith and tefillin the most important symbols of the Jewish religion. How far hunger has gone, when Jews sell tallith and tefillin for a few chaimki to buy rations.”
April1943
Only Hasidim Get Matzo
On April 12, the Chronicle exclaims that “during last 14 days all prices rose equally by 15%”:
| Good | Recent March Price | Current Price | |
|---|---|---|---|
112GM | 320GM | ↑ | |
180GM | 250GM | ↑ | |
150GM | 250GM | ↑ | |
200GM | 250GM | ↑ | |
12GM | 15GM | ↑ | |
20GM | 27GM | ↑ | |
10GM | 18GM | ↑ | |
1300GM | 1500GM | ↑ | |
600GM | 700GM | ↑ | |
700GM | |||
170GM | 250GM | ↑ | |
30GM | 50GM | ↑ |
On April 17, Rosenfeld notes that 85,000 people lined up outside the grocery distribution center to get matzo. But there’s only 10,000 kg of the ritual bread—not nearly enough. Rumkowksi drove by, jumped out of his car and began chasing people away violently. Apparently, he wanted only the Hasidim to receive matzo. He immediately orders an end to distribution.
People are yearning for a little piece of yontiff. A crumb of matze has the magic of evoking Pesach. Great is the longing for a bit of festiveness. For a little spark of hope. For preserving tradition. Matzes: in the ghetto. A little piece of freedom, a little piece of being a Jew!
Money lost all its value. No craftsman accepts a payment with […] money. Yesterday I asked a shoemaker to attach a pair of rubber soles and two sets of heels, as well as sew in a patch. Instead of payment, he asked for 2kg of beetroots or 3 kg of rutabaga. How much effort it cost me to make him accept money. Finally he agreed to 25 marks.
Oskar Rosenfeld
Crematorium. Ozorkow near Łód ź. Place where the thousand human bodies are said to have been taken [in late March]. Crematorium.
On April 19, an hour and a half away from Lodz, the largest single revolt by Jews during World War II began. Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto refused to surrender to the police commander SS-Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop, who ordered the destruction of the ghetto, block by block—intended to transport the Warsaw Ghetto’s remaining inhabitants to the gas chambers in Majdanek and Treblinka.
Three days into the fighting, word of the uprising reached Lodz.
Jakub Poznanski
There is talk, lately, of an uprising in Warsaw. Apparently, armed Jews and Poles resisted a plan to transfer people out. A factory was set on fire. To subdue the revolt, the Germans had to use machine guns, tanks, and even bombers. Only after the war will we find out how much truth there is to this.
Oskar Rosenfeld
Hands against weapons, rifles, and tanks—exchange of fire, siege. Will help arrive? All call out: Save our souls […] The city is in flames!—How will it end? (Image of Czarist Russia). People hide in the cellars, attics, toilets, cemeteries, etc. From above, firebombs. Wild screaming and whimpering—Shma Israel! Does the world not want to hear? It doesn’t hear.
All Waiting With Dread: When Will It Be Our Turn?
While the ghettos of Eastern Europe were being liquidated in 1943, several—Warsaw, Bialystok, Czestochowa, and Bedzin most prominent among them—launched armed rebellions in defiance. Why didn’t the Lodz Ghetto fight? The major factor suppressing military organization in Lodz was the ghetto’s isolation from the outside world. Cut off from authoritative information about the ongoing Holocaust that the other ghettos possessed by at least early 1942, the Jews of Lodz lacked the impetus to fight to the death. They were also cut off from the Jewish underground network in Poland, robbing them of valuable military assistance and technique. For instance, the great commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Mordechai Anielewicz, helped spawn and organize other ghetto uprisings through clandestine contacts and weapons smuggling; from Warsaw, to cite an example, he helped launch the uprising in the Bedzin Ghetto through his former comrade-in-arms Frumka Plotnicka. But as we’ll see in a May 1944 document, Jewish partisan groups were unable to penetrate the walls of the Lodz Ghetto.
All waiting with dread: When will it be our turn? Does it make sense to be concerned about everyday things? The question: ‘Where to get the instruments of the hoplites, weapons?’ preoccupies the young and the bold, all must be prepared for the moment of the danger and the enemy’s attacks against us. Therefore it is necessary to call the public opinion and not allow that the people further visit amusement and performances, on the contrary: that the whole population of the Ghetto may be prepared for the defense of life and honor.
May1943
Rebellion In the Air
Price increases continue in May:
| Good | Previous Price | Current Price | |
|---|---|---|---|
450GM | 500GM | ↑ | |
160GM | 180GM | ↑ | |
230GM | 300GM | ↑ | |
250GM | 250GM | — | |
600GM | 800GM | ↑ | |
800GM | 900GM | ↑ | |
15GM | 20GM | ↑ |
As the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising rages 80 miles away, Lodz inhabitants fret about their own self-defense—but not enough to worry the authorities. A Nazi top-secret document notes that Major General von Stein, the post senior officer in Lodz, had been reassured that “events similar to the ones in Warsaw were totally impossible in the Lodz Ghetto.”
The Nazis were relieved by their view of the ghetto’s isolation and of the submissive demeanor of Lodz’s Jews. Perhaps they also felt confident in the compliance of Rumkowski and their Jewish underlings, who would never have turned a blind eye to resistance activity. We must note—and pay homage—to the only person known to have organized a resistance in the Lodz Ghetto: Dr. Daniel Weiskopf. He made several futile attempts to form contacts on the “Aryan” side for that purpose and created a secret underground fighting force in the ghetto. Unable to procure arms, nothing came of it. Dr. Weiskopf’s heroism remained virile to the end; he went into hiding in the ghetto to escape deportation at the end of August 1944 and unleashed the only bona fide violent resistance in Lodz Ghetto history. A German document from Nov. 6, 1944, records that two Nazis, Hans Biebow (high-ranking head of the former ghetto) and a Mr. Schwind, found Jews hiding below a cellar trap door. Biebow heard someone yell that Schwind was being killed: “Biebow ran outside immediately, saw Mr. Schwind streaming with blood, and jumped on the main perpetrator, a certain Dr. Weiskopf (Doctor of Medicine) who possessed colossal physical power. There ensued a difficult struggle on the ground [...] Finally, the Jews who had hidden themselves were overpowered.
“The ringleader, Weiskopf, took 5 [gun]shots. It is to be assumed that his wounds killed him quickly.” Jakub Poznanski, also in hiding, added in his diary that “[i]n spite of a broken leg, Dr. Weiskopf went out to meet them and heroically protected the entrance to the cellar. His sisters and nephews joined him. As a result, Biebow, Schwind, [and two Jewish collaborators] Bruder, and Krajn were badly beaten up.” Lacking guns, the Nazis retreated and ran to get pistols. Dr. Weiskopf, it seems, waited for them barehanded, clamoring for the fight. “Obviously,” Poznanski laments, “the final victory belonged to the ‘courageous’ Germans and Judases. They were able, eventually, to get Dr. Weiskopf, but his desperate defense allowed some members of his family to escape.” In his dying breath, he shouted “Germans, your end is near.”
Hope for Soup
PEOPLE ARE SAYING that the amount of potatoes coming into the ghetto will be large enough to allow potato rations for the next few weeks. An authoritative source is supposed to have said that due to the available and expected quantities of potatoes, the price of black market soup will fall to 0.50 marks and the people of the ghetto will have to move their furniture out into the courtyards to make room for such vast quantities of potatoes.
This grand-sounding declaration has brought hope to the hearts of 80,000 hungry people; that, henceforth, the Chairman will hold his receptions directly in the workshops and departments; and that, in compensation for the soup lost in the last three weeks, 3 kilograms of potatoes per capita will be distributed.
As predicted, the price of soup does drop significantly, by 70%, though to 6 marks not 0.5.
Incredibly, life goes on—because it must.
Toothbrushes, ladies fine-mesh stockings, soap powder—and razors. Razors are in great demand.
Other News
As we know, there is no normal trade in the ghetto. The shops of the Eldest merely handle the distribution of foodstuffs. There are, however, shops in the ghetto that offer a variety of goods. Their windows display a real jumble—books, marmalade, old combs, cosmetic powders. Rations are the source of almost all the foods on sale there. People who are forced to divest themselves of part of their rations sell them to stores of precisely this type. The difference between the legal and the private market price is so great that, for example, someone selling a single sausage ration can, with the money obtained, buy two or more rations [in the Community stores]. But what is most interesting is the trade in merchandise that transpires both in the shops and through middlemen, professional traders, or agents who work on commission. For example, the briefcase of such a trader might contain a toothbrush that had formerly been the property of someone resettled in this ghetto. That toothbrush can cost from 25 to 30 marks. A pair of ladies' fine-mesh stockings costs 50 marks, and genuine silk stockings sell for 80 to 100 marks.
Other News, Cont’d
A decent suit (made to measure), also the former property of a recent arrival, can, if new, cost 400 marks. At the time of resettlement, a suit of this sort would have cost about 50 marks.
Used shoes with good soles cost from 200 to 250 marks; new shoes run as high as 500 marks. Thus, an elegant suit can be traded for 3 kilograms of bread.
Razor blades, in great demand, now bring 1 mark each. Shaving soap has disappeared from the market altogether. Instead, people use the soap powder that is brought into the ghetto surreptitiously. Cosmetics for women are practically unobtainable. A man's tie in decent condition sells for up to 25 marks. Despite all their problems, the more worldly sorts attempt to maintain appearances. It is surprising that one can still see many well-dressed people who are evidently able to pay those high prices, but they may also be new arrivals or persons who have not yet sold everything they own.
During the celebration of the [ghetto’s] third anniversary, a toothless Jew in wooden shoes says: ‘He won’t destroy the Jewish people completely. What nobody has accomplished, he won’t succeed at, we shall live on … somewhere … we’ll know what to do …’
—Oskar Rosenfeld, May 23, 1943
June1943
Money Disappears
The Chronicle lists black market prices, noting tremendous declines and a general lack of money in the ghetto.
| Good | Previous Price | Current Price | |
|---|---|---|---|
500GM | 160GM | ↓ | |
40GM | 15GM | ↓ | |
250GM | 160GM | ↓ | |
900GM | 300GM | ↓ | |
800GM | 400GM | ↓ | |
1200GM | 800GM | ↓ | |
16GM | 3.5GM | ↓ |
I’m sure that scientists, mainly economists and doctors, will make use of our experiences in the future. And then maybe they’ll lower their heads over the sacrifices the Jewish nation pays in this war.
July1943
Food Supply Increases, Inflation Drops
August1943
Heat Sets In, and Hunger Inflames All Passions
Terrible atmosphere, even despair—no new deliveries at the centers, neither potatoes nor vegetables. Fantastic prices. [...] rumor that Jews are being gassed.
Delays in the ration distribution meant that food owners could “not bring themselves to part with anything. [...] And money, money for food, was no inducement …
Oskar Rosenfeld
People stood in the streets, on the lookout for wagons carrying the potatoes they longed for. All markets were empty! An occasional handcart with a few hundred kilograms of potatoes or cabbage for the soup kitchens was to be seen. A bleak sight. Anyone carrying a bundle of botwinki leaves under his arm was accosted by dozens of would-be buyers and inundated with offers of extremely high sums of money. [...]
There was only demand, no supply. Meanwhile, of course, catastrophe had overtaken those who had already fallen ill as a result of undernourishment. Until now, decalcification of the bones had been treated by a few fortunate persons with Vigantol. But no more Vigantol was to be found, nor any similar remedy. Pure fat or oil, such as physicians prescribe in normal times and normal places, was not coming into the ghetto. Fish oil could be purchased on the black market for 20 marks per 10 grams. Thus, a worker would have to spend two months' salary for 50 grams of oil.
Oskar Rosenfeld, Cont’d
Hunger inflamed all passions. Fruit trees at the edges of fenced-in gardens suffered greatly at the hands of thieves. Vegetable beds had to be guarded day and night. Hunger drove people outdoors like hyenas, into the open, where something to eat might be found.
At the same time, the sun blazed from morning until evening. Brief gusts of wind brought dust instead of cool relief. People asked each other: ‘Have any potatoes come in?’ Potatoes, three kilograms of potatoes, meant salvation to a person, redemption from the torment of hunger.
On Aug. 19, potato shipments began rolling in, and lasted for 24 hours. The Chronicle reports, "People accepted their rations like gifts from heaven—silently, wordlessly, neither grateful nor grumbling. Hunger had left them incapable of any powerful emotion."
‘Stave off hunger, fill your stomach, let God take care of the morrow! That was the motto, the unspoken motto of August 19 of the year 1943.’
Sketches of Ghetto Life: A Man With an Onion
In every street of the ghetto the same scene is played: a visibly ill old man or a frail boy crouches in a doorway holding two or three onion plants in his hand. The young plants, as consumptive as their vendors, have had to give their lives prematurely. A tiny onion, a tender little plant with a narrow root- one cannot really call it an onion; a narrow stalk, wilting in the hand of its hawker, 1.50 [marks] for a tiny onion. It could have lived, that tiny onion! But even money has become scarce in the ghetto, and onions are a rare item. The short, emaciated man, the delicate boy in the doorway will not have brilliant careers like the little newsboy in New York, who, perhaps, started with one copy of the newspaper and ended up owning a publishing concern.
At the end of this month, a different, more serious problem emerges: lack of money in the Municipal Treasury. As we’ve seen, money supply and inflation are linked in the ghetto. Too much money = high inflation; less money = low inflation. Ghetto sources report that the money in circulation had been low for several months. And, lo and behold, monthly inflation since May has either been negative or near zero. This trend will continue for the next two months as well. Concerned that the money supply was too deflated, the ghetto treasury issues “old, used-up banknotes pulled from use long time ago.” Ghetto dwellers, always focused on inflation and aware of the impact of money supply upon it, try to estimate how many ghetto marks are in circulation.
“Some claim,” Poznanski relates, “that because of the reduced food rations some of the money does not flow back to the treasuries.” According to this view, without people paying the administration for their rations, money stays in the streets, resulting in a higher circulating money supply. “Based on quick calculations one can conclude that around 1.5 million marks remain in the hands of the people every month.” These forecasters bet that such a situation will force the ghetto central bank to act. Will it print more money to make up for its deficit or try to claw money from the people through perhaps another cigarette sale as was done in May 1942? These are the kind of decisions upon which ghetto market investors will base their decisions. Those that think the treasury will issue additional cash, thereby inflating the money supply, will go on a black market buying spree immediately, before inflation comes and devalues their savings. As Poznanski quotes these ghetto mark bears as arguing, “Of course, over time, the stock of cash in Municipal Treasury has to run out.” But, he continues, “Some doubt this theory” that the circulating money supply is high “because one cannot notice ‘excessive wealth’ in the ghetto. Quite the contrary. Almost everyone has empty pockets.”
What will be the name by which this war and our Jewish martyrdom will be remembered by history?
—Jakub Poznanski, Aug. 30, 1943
September1943
A Record Low Mortality Rate, but Why?
On Aug. 31, for the first time since the establishment of the ghetto, a day went by with only one death registered. But the Chronicle is quick to reassure that “[t]his is not symptomatic of any essential improvement in the general state of health[.]” This stroke of luck—except for the one who did perish—is a product of the reality that the ghetto is composed almost entirely of young, fit-for-work individuals. All others have already been murdered. “At any rate,” the Chronicle concludes, “this day was remarkable.”
The peace was short-lived: That night, the Germans organized a “minor” roundup. Three hundred twenty-five people, mostly from the hospitals, were taken and deported from the ghetto.
Bread Distribution Rumors
a rumor persists that as of next week, bread is to be distributed every seven days [instead of eight]. [...] It is interesting that, when the rumor first arose, the price of bread sank from the range of 220-240 marks to 200-220. After the [later] announcement of the above-mentioned plan for bread distribution [that it would remain at eight days, not seven], the price immediately rose to 250-260 marks.
In the face of fuel shortages, a Jewish ghetto official, Szoel Terkeltaub, gave a speech threatening workers not to sneak wood from their workshops. As a result of the threat, “Daily prices of firewood have risen from 1 mark to 1 mark, 50 in the center of the ghetto and near the wood workshops. In more remote parts of the ghetto, wood already costs as much as 2 marks per kilogram. Briquettes have risen from 3 marks, 50 per kilogram to 4 marks.”
The crisis reaches another climax.
The price of fish oil, which began in October 1941 at 60 marks, and rose to 120 marks in July of 1942, and 300 by January 1943—is now, on Sept. 23, 1943, an astonishing 1500 marks.
Food Supply
The populace has not been in so desperate a situation in a long time. There has always been scarcity before each ration, but the way things are now, one can only speak of utterly catastrophic starvation. [...] Naturally, the free-market prices are shooting up. Potatoes now cost in the range of 38-40 marks per kilogram, beets 20 marks, kohlrabi 7-8 marks. In the cooperatives, ersatz coffee is being sold in free trade. People are buying it in order to soak it in water and eat it as mush.
Vegetables are an unreachable goal for an average man [...] At the end of last week:
1 kg of beetroots without leaves - 24 marks
1 kg beetroot leaves - 4-5 marks.
These are horrendous prices compared to average earnings of a ghetto worker [...]
Jakub Poznanski, Cont’d
There are constant rumors in the ghetto concerning the liquidation of ghettos in all kinds of towns in Poland. I think people are exaggerating, as usual. Even if there were such excesses, in certain towns, it’s impossible to believe that a mass murder of Jews will take place. I personally, at any rate, exclude the possibility.
October1943
A New Year Begins, Ominously
| Good | Black Market Price | Official Price | Black Market Premium |
|---|---|---|---|
150GM | 0.7GM | 21,329% | |
180GM | 1.8GM | 9,900% | |
500GM | 8GM | 6,150% | |
4GM | 0.4GM | 900% | |
18GM | 0.5GM | 3,500% |
Kol Nidre
Today, for the Kol Nidre service, the ghetto is in a more solemn and ceremonial mood than it has been in years. All minds are occupied with the thought that tomorrow, Yom Kippur, will be a real holiday. The Chairman has ordered the early closing of all departments and factories. [...] Even though the ghetto has been fasting excessively for years, most of the populace will fast [voluntarily] on Yom Kippur. Indeed, the ghetto as a whole looks much the same as it usually does. […] But the Yom Kippur atmosphere has magically evoked a bit of the Jewish beauty that is still alive somewhere outside, among our brothers and sisters.
In the past, there was always the hustle and bustle typical of a Jewish town on the high holidays, especially on Kol Nidre evening. Happy people ran up to each other, hurried from home to home to wish each other a ‘Happy New Year’ or a ‘Gmar khasime toyve.’ Now they do the same, but the greeting is a bit wearier, quieter, and perhaps for that reason, all the more intimate.
—Chronicle, October 1943
Incredibly, Rosenfeld notes that 140 minyans, in addition to whatever private ones there might have been, completed High Holiday services. Sefer Torahs were across the street.
In return, all have to work 110% on Sunday, Oct. 10.
The Municipal Treasury is still empty.
They say authorities of the Municipality took the easiest path and are currently printing a new issue of money, this time in the amount of 5 million marks. Because circulation to date amounted to 8 million, rumki are reaching the ill-fated thirteen. These are, obviously, half measures. Only after three months a cash shortage will begin all over again.
In line with October 1943’s declining inflation, there were general price declines compared to the last few weeks—with some exceptions.
| Good | Previous Price | Current Price | |
|---|---|---|---|
240GM | 175GM | ↓ | |
150GM | 120GM | ↓ | |
18GM | 12GM | ↓ | |
3GM | 3GM | — | |
22GM | 8GM | ↓ | |
180GM | 175GM | ↓ | |
11GM | 5GM | ↓ | |
4GM | 5.5GM | ↑ |
November1943
‘Who’s Going To Die First: The Third Reich or Us?’
Adam Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’ at work in the ghetto.
Against all odds, the ghetto’s underground prices, under the strain, starvation, and suffering of ghetto life, exhibit coherence and logic. Echoing economists’ Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” and Friedrich Hayek’s “spontaneous order,” the Chronicle found in one of its “Sketches of Ghetto Life: From the Soup Market" that “no one, not even the most conscientious observer, can fathom how individual markets communicate with one another about the prices. But the fact is that these prices are regulated automatically.”
Black market prices were arrived at through sober, information-backed analyses: “in order to get the most out of such dealings, though, it is important to understand and to follow the market. The person who wishes to be successful in the soup trade must be informed about the overall situation: the quality of the goods and the gap between demand and supply.” Enterprisers run from kitchen to kitchen, storehouse to storehouse analyzing the provisions and passing the information along.
A match is a precious item in the ghetto. One has to be careful with it. A clumsy housewife can squander a mark in the blink of an eye.
—Ghetto Chronicle, Nov. 5, 1943
“The experienced soup-card buyer knows precisely which kitchen offers soup containing a good deal of grain; or soup with a good deal of cabbage; or as they say [in Yiddish]—a gedakhte [thick] soup. These are the factors that determine market trends.” Ghetto market fundamentals, in other words, were accurately calculated and efficiently utilized. When a reduction in the soup ration was announced in early November, the soup exchange did not panic. The price of soup rose by only 1 mark, which ghetto observers noted approvingly. “The price of soup—the most reliable barometer next to the price of bread—indicates that the ghetto will not be easily intimidated. The ghetto seems to know why the price of soup does not yet reflect the catastrophic food situation.”
Market Adjustment
The market is adjusting itself to the current situation. It has converted from wholesale to retail; individual matches are offered instead of entire boxes. One match is 10 pfennings; a bundle of 10, 1 mark. This corresponds to the price levels in free trade on the black market
Jakub Poznanski
Currently our factory has been guaranteed work for twelve months. Will we have enough food for so long? Who’s going to die first: the Third Reich or us?
| Good | Nov. 6 | Nov. 10 | |
|---|---|---|---|
320GM | 380GM | ↑ | |
600GM | 700GM | ↑ | |
40GM | 50GM | ↑ | |
8GM | 15GM | ↑ | |
270GM | 300GM | ↑ |
As prices climb, the Chronicle records an increase in money printing by the Judenrat, especially low denominations such as the 50 pfennig, 1 mark, and 2 mark.
A German commission comes to visit.
On Nov. 17, a large group of high-ranking Wehrmacht and SS officers, led by a general, visited several ghetto factories.
On Productivity
It is certain that, above all, the [Nazi] party officers have had to revise their opinions about the productivity of Jews. They could not get over their surprise and astonishment. Their comments and the expressions on their faces were clearly saying the same thing: ‘And this really was done by Jews?’
Three young men, hospital-autumn outsettlement, are caught, taken to Ozorkow. There, forced first to dig a ditch, kicked in with the foot from behind […] ‘Come here… open your mouth.’ Shoots into it.
December1943
The Last Hanukkah in the Ghetto, Though No One Knew It
A general price decrease begins this month. One contributing factor may have been the decline in the money supply, as the Chronicle noted a “cash shortage” on Dec. 1.
Hunger. Hunger. Sounds heard: A boy yells in the street, ‘A razie is du!” [Yid.: “A ration has arrived!”]. Immediately people stream from their houses; despite the cold temperatures they don’t put on their overcoats and scarves until they reach the street, running to the grocery shops […] Hunger! Hunger! The ration is for two weeks: 2 kg potatoes, 2½ kg rutabaga, 70 dkg of flour, 50 dkg of sugar, 50 preserves, 10 oil, 10 peas, 12 some kind of food. Fear of winter.
The Jewish ghetto central bank realizes the money supply has dropped, and decides to mint new 10-mark coins, as most paper money is in bad condition. Seeking to solve the perceived money shortage, the Jewish communal financial officers believe they must rapidly increase the ghetto money supply.
Also this month, Rosenfeld discusses plans to write an encyclopedia of the ghetto. “In a future period,” he writes, “when the ghetto will be researched, such a collection, such an encyclopedia, will add to an understanding, where a mere description of the condition is inadequate.”
The word, the language, is the history of mankind. [...] language is a more reliable witness and source of truth than other, material artifacts.
—Oskar Rosenfeld
At the end of this month is Hanukkah—the last one in the Lodz Ghetto, though no one knew it yet. Rosenfeld’s description is breathtakingly poignant.
‘The living faith disappeared […] what is left then is only the poetry?’
This is how a superficial observer of ghetto life might summarize the way in which the holidays are celebrated here. The fervor of prayer—so it seems—has given way to ritual technique that feigns sanctity, traces of which are left only in the old and the pious. But—and every unbiased Jew has to acknowledge this—neither hunger nor cold can take away anything from the symbols of the festivals that are embedded unscathed in the tradition.
The difficulty of surrendering oneself completely to the magic of religious observance is primarily due to the lack of a suitable space. The Beth Midrashim have been closed down. There are only a few minyanim, which hold religious services in some hidden shul.
However, Chanukah doesn't require such houses of worship. Chanukah in the ghetto, as it was before in the entire East, is a family festival. It requires no official staging. The Jew who cares about remembering the Maccabees in a traditional way stages the festival at home.
Oskar Rosenfeld, Cont’d
In the streets, next to broken doors and on dirty doorsteps, sits some mummified creature. Through scarves and rags, the face is barely visible. This creature offers candles for sale. ‘Lecht! Lecht!’ The call is heard. Lecht—that’s usually Shabbat candles that are being sold every week on the eve of Shabbat. This time it’s about something different: the candles for the menorah!
Not everybody can afford to give his menorah a full gleam. Eight menorah branches means, if every day a candle is added, thirty-six candles, with the shammes, thirty-seven candles, or, expressed in monetary terms, at least 18 marks, if a candle is calculated at 50 pennies. However, some families are able to afford candles for 1 mark apiece so that the ‘lighting alone’ costs 37 marks.
And yet, despite space and financial difficulties, Chanukah is being celebrated this year in the ghetto with great dignity.
Many families have been lighting candles. Just as he had brought the sforim, makhsorim [Holiday prayer books] and siddurim, tallith, and tefillin from the town, the master of the house brought with him, rescued, smuggled in, the menorah. On display are simple brass or wrought-iron menorahs, but also copper- and silver-plated ones, old pieces, new pieces, mass-produced and handcrafted, standup or wall menorahs.
Friends and acquaintances are invited. Over dark stairs, through damp yards and corridors, people are making their way to the apartments, which mostly consist of one room that doubles as living room and party room.
Oskar Rosenfeld, Cont’d
Many are festively dressed, all are in a festive mood. Some favored person, usually the daughter of the house, chants the introductory blessing as she lights the candles. It happens frequently that Jews from the countryside and German Jews from the West are suddenly brought together in one room and are participating in the festival. The lights are gleaming. Remembrances of Chanukahs past flash through the minds. Remembrances of youth, remembrances of student days, of happy years spent in freedom, of images that somehow had a connection with the Maccabees.
People are meeting ‘privately.’ Without the official ritual. As long as the menorah lights are burning [...] Children too celebrate Chanukah. People meet in the more spacious lodgings. Everybody brings a suitable present: some toy, a piece of babka, a hair ribbon, a few empty colorful cigarette boxes, a flowery plate, a pair of stockings, a warm bonnet. [...] All this is auctioned off. Coincidence decides. The lighting of the candles is followed by gift giving. Ghetto gifts aren’t valuable but are received with fervent gratitude.
In the end, songs are sung, Yiddish, Hebrew, also Polish songs. At any rate, songs that contribute to heightening of the festive mood. A few hours of celebration, a few hours of forgetting, a few hours of being immersed […]
Chanukah 1943 was to be the last war—the last ghetto—Chanukah. So everybody is hoping. The participants exchange good wishes as they part—without words, mute, with pressing of the hands. The menorah lights go out. It's dark again. The people go out into the street. Ghetto life begins anew.
Oil prices decline at the end of the holiday, but it is the only item to do so. The new 10 mark coins are put into circulation. This money supply expansion fuels runaway inflation, as prices begin rising rapidly—ominously—at year’s end.
| Good | Dec. 2 Price | Dec. 29 Price | |
|---|---|---|---|
350GM | 360GM | ↑ | |
260GM | 280GM | ↑ | |
260GM | 430GM | ↑ | |
500GM | |||
1300GM | |||
800GM | 650GM | ↓ | |
35GM | 60GM | ↑ | |
250GM | 250GM | — | |
12GM | |||
12GM | |||
4GM | 4.5GM | ↑ | |
14GM | 14GM | — |
1944
The final calendar year of the ghetto's existence features the same maladies we've seen up till now. Uniquely, 1944 has one of two hyperinflations that occurred in the Lodz Ghetto, two of the 64 such phenomena in world history. As the Nazis decide to liquidate the ghetto, the remaining 70,000 Jews remain totally unaware of this impending doom and still do not comprehend the murderous meaning of deportation. In an eerie “calm before the storm,” the ghetto enjoys a stable period of increased food supplies and declining inflation. This calm of the last few weeks before the ghetto's destruction ends abruptly with the populace sent to Auschwitz.
January1944
The Final Year Begins
As the final year of the Lodz Ghetto opens, 92.6% of the ghetto population—which now stands at nearly 80,000—are actively working. “We are kept alive by the hope that this war might end some day,” notes Fogel.
Money supply is increasing at a fast clip, as the Chronicle notes: “5000 new 10 mk coins join the circulation every day; a big batch of 20 mk bills joined the circulation too.” Two days later, it exclaims, predictably: “All the prices go up!”
Recently the goods smuggled into the ghetto have been getting remarkably more expensive (injections, medicine, butter etc.). It remains in connection with a systematic increase of the German mark’s exchange rate. The price reaches up to 5 rumki per 1 mark. With the price of the mark, the prices of the goods of primary need increased (sugar, flour, margarine). It only takes to remind that 1 dag (!) of sugar currently costs 5 rumki on the free market.
At the end of the month, prices continue soaring.
| Good | Jan. 7 Price | Jan. 28 Price | |
|---|---|---|---|
450GM | 640GM | ↑ | |
350GM | 450GM | ↑ | |
450GM | |||
1000GM | 1400GM | ↑ | |
600GM | 700GM | ↑ | |
80GM | 120GM | ↑ | |
17GM | 45GM | ↑ | |
35GM | |||
350GM | 500GM | ↑ | |
350GM | 600GM | ↑ | |
900GM | 900GM | — | |
800GM | 800GM | — | |
1300GM | 1800GM | ↑ | |
8GM | |||
25GM | |||
10GM | 18GM | ↑ | |
8GM | N/A | ||
4GM | N/A |
February1944
New Work Quotas Are Imposed, but the Men Do Not Comply
Sketches of Ghetto Life: Don’t Waste a Drop!
The pail of soup is carried up the two flights to the Loan Fund Office at 17 Zgierska Street. The women carrying it jostle against the edge of a step, and a bit of soup with diced potato is spilled on the staircase. The carriers ignore this minor accident and continue on their way. Behind them, a man is dragging himself up the stairs. He is here to pick up a loan at the office. His tired bones can scarcely support him, he trudges from one step to the next. And then he notices the spilled soup. His eyes fill with tears: soup on the stairs!
The man doesn't even stop to think. He pulls out his spoon—the essential tool that every ghetto dweller always has with him—he sits down on a step and [...] spoons the soup off the filthy stone staircase. The serendipitous ‘additional soup’ is more important to him at this moment than the measly few ghetto marks he is calling for at the office. The few drops of soup won't satisfy his hunger, but he can't help himself. Nor does he care to think that the stairs are filthy and that he might become ill. It's not a problem, he's already immune to typhoid fever.
If a novelist had written this scene for a book about famine in India or China, no one would believe it. But the ghetto can easily compete with India and China.
As the Chronicle reports on Feb. 2, 1944: “Groups of people carrying bags and pots stand patiently outside a kitchen, waiting for potato peels.” After being told to come back later, the assembled throng eventually wait most of the day only to be told that “‘no distribution will take place today because the Department of Transportation has a prior claim on the potato peels: it needs them for the horses.’ The people stand there apathetically, waiting. ‘Maybe the horses will change their minds?’”
Ghetto inhabitants appreciate that the private market avoids the laborious and often in-vain process of official food distribution. As above, people would often wait in line all day at official collection points, sometimes coming away empty-handed. As a Chronicle entry put it: “[t]he amount of energy expended in this process is hardly covered by the ration itself. Picking up rations, when they are available, often takes seven hours.”
Potato peels now cost 60 marks a kilogram. A week ago, they sold for 25 marks—a 140% increase.
Until this point, one of our diarists, Poznanski, had consistently maintained that mass murder of Jews was not and could not take place. This month, reality begins to set in for him.
From a camp in Poniatowa, near Lublin, 6 freight cars arrived with machine tooling equipment. An oppressive question arises: What happened to the Jews who worked in that camp?
On Feb. 13, the Germans demanded 1,500 healthy Jews for labor outside the ghetto. In Rumkowski’s speech imploring compliance, he notes that many of those designated for the assignment are missing: “I cannot say who has acted more sensibly: those who have reported as ordered or those who have gone into hiding. But in any case, the [German] authorities ask me, ‘What’s the meaning of this? Why haven’t these people responded to your order? We’ll find ways of flushing them out!’”
Likely as a result of this news, bread and flour skyrocket 45%.
| Good | Feb. 12 Price | Feb. 13 Price | |
|---|---|---|---|
760GM | 1100GM | ↑ | |
550GM | 800GM | ↑ |
Everyone can tell something is changing, though they can’t figure out exactly what.
Oskar Singer
I do not mention the fact because it is a historic day in the ghetto or because I am delighted to celebrate another birthday after witnessing so many days of death [...] In any case, my wife managed to get hold of some potato peels, and God only knows what strings she had to pull; or perhaps she bought them at seventy marks a kilogram—the person celebrating his birthday can’t ask. The babka was baked so thoroughly in the tsholnt bakery that it actually consisted of sheer crust. This is a great advantage: the teeth have something to dig into [...]
Can you, who are reading this at some future time, can you calculate how many hours it took her to pick over the potato peels for the babka, my birthday cake?
A week after the last unheeded labor demand, the number is raised to 1,600. Men go into hiding and quotas cannot be filled. “The endurance of the men hiding from conscription for outside labor is as great as their fear of being dispatched from the ghetto.”
Coffee mixture. During the days when—as the chronicle reports—sixteen hundred people had to be rounded up for work outside of the ghetto, many hundreds of the candidates left their lodgings in order to escape the posse […] To coax them out of their hiding places, they were cut off, as under a siege, from all access to food supply. Their food and bread cards were blocked and, to prevent any ‘illegal’ nourishment from reaching them, so were those of their family. The refugees were able to for a few days on their old stock of provisions.
But when that began to dwindle and money, due to the fantastic rise in prices, was no longer sufficient, the persecuted reached for something that was as simple as it was natural: they asked their relatives and friends for coffee mixture, which on the free market in the grocery shop was available for 3 marks per kg. So they lived on ersatz coffee. But this source too was being plugged up. A proclamation to all shops prohibited the free trade of coffee mixture. This was the death sentence by starvation for the workers in hiding. Most of them—so the story is being told in the ghetto—came out of their hiding places. Deprivation of the last means of information, the coffee mixture, forced them to capitulate.
On Monday, Feb. 14, 1944, the ghetto suddenly developed a “night life.” This night life was not in bars or cafes with happy, well-dressed people, but rather in the distribution centers and streets of the ghetto.
Alicja de Bunom
You have a choice. You can line up for your rations between 5 and 9 [p.m.], then come home and, if the stove heats up nicely and everything goes well, have your evening soup by around 11 o’clock; in the best circumstances, maybe also a black pancake, the so-called Lofix—a ‘something’ made of ersatz coffee that epitomizes the bitterness of ghetto life. Or else you follow the reverse sequence: you cook and eat first, and then you run for your rations when the ghetto’s ‘night life’ begins.
The money supply story continues. At the end of January 1944, the Nazis liquidated and seized all remaining assets of the ghetto central bank at a time when much of the money expected to return to its coffers had remained in circulation—presumably because the money is spent on the black market, where it stays in private hands. Lacking the physical “reserves” necessary to back its spending, yet needing to pay workers, the bank’s goes into overdrive.
On Feb. 4, the Chronicle notes in astonishment that millions worth of ghetto marks, particularly coins, are being minted. Usually cognizant of the relation between money supply and inflation, the pressure makes the Jewish monetary authorities abandon all economic discipline. Concerned that this will cause inflation, people approach the Treasury’s director demanding answers. The Chronicle says that “it is not yet certain how many coins will be minted. Asked about the value of ten-mark coins to be minted, the head of the Central Treasury, Salomon Ser, gave us a reply hitherto unheard of in the field of financial management: ‘it depends on how much metal Chimowicz (Metalwork Department) can give us.’ His response summarizes the situation.”
According to the technical definition of the term, the ghetto mark experienced hyperinflation in February 1944 (and in March 1942)—two of only 64 cases recorded in economic history.
Charity and morality in the ghetto.
February experiencing a hyperinflation helps us understand the meaning of events in the ghetto. Likely in response to worsening starvation as prices climb, on Feb. 9 the “workers of the Electrical Engineering Department have joined together in a sort of self-help program. After soup has been distributed, they gather around a collective pot, and each contributes two spoonfuls of soup and a piece of potato from his own bowl. The ten bowls of soup thus accumulated are then donated to their weak and ailing fellow workers.” This incredible Chronicle entry highlights the unshakable moral fiber and Jewish solidarity of Old World Ashkenazi life, a taste of the goodness that left the world with the souls of the 6 million. “We were pressed to the limit of human endurance and beyond,” ghetto survivor Dobroszycki recalled, “and the society did not break down.”
March1944
Ghetto Life Starts To Bring Out ‘Peculiar Bravery’
Most prices have receded from February’s heights but remain elevated. Alarm, though, is as high as ever.
Outside Central Prison
A woman is standing in the crowd of people waiting outside Central Prison. Her husband is inside waiting to be shipped out of the ghetto. He appears at the second-story window of the building in which his group is quartered. Apparently, he has arranged with her that he will contrive to make himself unfit for labor. He is about to leap out the window; he hesitates. But his wife shouts to him [in Yiddish]: ‘Hob nisht keyn moyre!’ [Don't be afraid!]. She herself goads him to jump. And he actually does jump; he sustains minor injuries and is, in fact, exempted from conscription. The adventure could also have ended more unpleasantly.
‘Things can’t be worse on the outside.’
The Chronicle notes a horrendous new development among ghetto inhabitants: paying people to take one’s place on the deportation roster. The price? Two loaves of bread and 1 kilogram of sugar, or other food of equal value. “Jews went forth into bondage, into uncertainty, and perhaps death,” it noted. “When terror, hunger, and misery exceed all bounds, two loaves of bread and one kilogram of sugar can buy a human life. The ghetto dweller’s psychology confronts science with problems never before known.”
After prices receded from February’s heights, they rise rapidly in late March—surpassing even February in some cases. At the top end (1,300 GM), March 27 holds the highest bread price on record in ghetto history:
| Good | Mar. 5 Price | Mar. 27 Price | |
|---|---|---|---|
700GM | 1300GM | ↑ | |
500GM | 900GM | ↑ | |
900GM | 900GM | — | |
500GM | 850GM | ↑ | |
900GM | 700GM | ↓ | |
30GM | 45GM | ↑ |
Ghetto mark as a Nazi collectible.
Now that the Nazis have resolved to destroy the ghetto, German ghetto chief Biebow together with two other Nazis want a piece of ghetto merchandise. What better signifies ghetto life than the “chaimki,“ the ghetto mark? Biebow barges into Rumkowksi’s office and “demands series ‘chaimki’ with signature of the Eldest. Collectors’ value.”
April1944
The Last Passover Brings a Misguided Sense of Security
The ghetto bursts into cheers; it arrived: 1 kg potatoes, ½ kg red beets, ½ kg red preserved beets, 30 dkg of sauerkraut, ½ kg mixture of coffee! In addition to this a bit of sun and people are happy.
By mid-month, prices are receding, as a misguided sense of calm begins to set in.
| Good | April Price | |
|---|---|---|
800GM | ↓ | |
600GM | ↓ | |
550GM | ↓ | |
900GM | — | |
1500GM | — | |
1000GM | ||
1900GM | ||
32GM | ↓ |
The desire to survive as a moral obligation, as something that has been placed on the people of Israel because of Amalek. Therefore hurry and fear; fear of not fulfilling this injunction. Surviving becomes a religious duty.
—Oskar Rosenfeld, April 16, 1944
It is a terrible irony that a population that longs to live is a population easy to trick into believing it will live—a vulnerability the Nazis understood, and exploited.
As for the ones who are leaving [for deportation], they are definitely going as [countryside] laborers, because they are required to be able to read and write, they receive clothes, coveralls, shoes.
These deportees were sent to Auschwitz.
On April 29, the 6th of Iyar of 1944, a scene took place that no student of history should overlook.
As Rosenfeld describes it, there was a thought by some to gather for a quiet assembly. “Shayek [speaks] about the idea that had carried him along through four years in the ghetto this day […] Everybody had the sense of historical hours, of a historical place. [...] On the horizon a soft rosy band… this is how it appears to my friends, and faith in a speedy yeshiye, mehero beyomenu [salvation, speedily in our day].”
The idea that carried these Jews through the previous four years would, exactly four years later, carry Jews to their next stop in history: On this same day in the Hebrew calendar in 1948, the State of Israel would be born.
May1944
A Run on Vigantol
We’ve painted a picture of the ghetto economy of one in which desperate, starving people sell a piece of food (or other item) in a risky effort to acquire something else they need. And this was true in virtually in all cases. But there were also black market businessmen who amassed considerable inventory and became relatively wealthy. In one of its “Sketches of Ghetto Life: On the Black Market,” the Chronicle tells the tale of : “‘From Mojsze Minz you can get anything your heart and stomach desire,’ I was told by an expert in ghetto affairs; I had asked him whether ten grams of garlic were available anywhere. I already knew the name Mojsze Minz as that of a firm. He had originally become popular in the ghetto by selling food, whose existence was now beyond the imagination of a modest ghetto brain; things like pickles, Maggi bouillon cubes, hard cheese and the like; not to mention items included in the rations, such as sugar, flour, kasha, peas, powdered soup, or seasonal vegetables.”
Four years into this horror, how could Minz have all this? While some in the ghetto elite rife with corruption became well-off because of their access to stores of provisions meant for the people, the Chronicle believes Minz did not embezzle but was just a great black market entrepreneur, buying and selling like everybody else. And Minz had competition—especially the firms of Glücksfeld and Tajtelbaum—“but [compared to him] they were definitely second-rate businessmen.” The Chronicle salutes Minz and his ilk for braving imprisonment for illegal trading, thereby making goods available to the public at great personal danger. What is likely—and even more praiseworthy—is that Minz and other traders had connections with smugglers on the outside, which allowed them to acquire goods and add to the much-needed stock in the ghetto. Even German ghetto staff recognized that these dealers had desirable merchandise and would issue fines or confiscate the goods outright. “The shopkeeper would be ruined but he would be back on his feet soon enough.”
Of course, not everyone agreed about the value-add of these black market kingpins. “People with ‘lofty’ ethical principles have been up in arms about these ‘profiteers,’ ‘usurers,’ ‘parasites.’ But the realities of life have prevailed. People with something to sell or who wanted to buy preferred the neutral territory of a dealer who both bought and sold. In the ghetto, the curse of the black market became a blessing to those who needed or desired goods; and in the process, of course, the illicit merchant made his illicit profit. The ghetto simply has its own particular laws and its own particular morality.”
Mojsze Minz survived the war with his family by hiding in a bunker for four and a half months after the ghetto’s liquidation.
A wave of strikes sweeps the ghetto’s factories in protest of working conditions and their mean treatment by Jewish management in various workshops. The protesters demand improvements to the quality of soup and the rehiring of their dismissed colleagues. The strikers do not dare cease working or slow production. They know the Nazis would shoot anybody interfering with output. Rather, this is a hunger strike, where laborers refuse the midday workshop soup. Hoping to keep this quiet and not attract the attention of the Germans, Rumkowski is conciliatory and does not crack down, calling himself “just a servant of the authorities” who has to bow his head and “do as I'm told.”
No strike of yours can force me to make thicker soup, for I have nothing. Do you intend to strike against the [German] Ghetto Administration? Do you believe that they will be intimidated by you?
—Chaim Rumkowski, in the ‘Chronicle,’ May 15, 1944
Even at this late stage, during another round of outsettlement, the Jews of the ghetto either can’t, or won’t, accept the fatal nature of deportations.
Resettlement, or ...?
My neighbor says: [...] ‘you can’t really call it a resettlement, it’s just work outside the ghetto’ [...] The ghetto is virtually paralyzed. Now, after five years of war, just before the end, Jews are being ‘deported’ for labor outside the ghetto. ‘Deported?’ Dragged off somewhere [...] ‘They’re going for only ten days … not far from the city … farm work …’
Since there was no reasonable way of combating hunger, ghetto inhabitants attempted to alleviate its consequences—that is, the diseases resulting from it. But every new possible treatment inevitably created a panicked market effect.
Vigantol!
Spring 1943: there has been widespread occurrence of softening, or decalcification, of the bones due to vitamin deficiency. Physicians prescribe Vigantol, a synthetic D vitamin. It is available in pharmacies, and it works. Many patients say that, after a dose of ten cubic centimeters, the pain in their bones (the clearest symptom of the disease) has subsided. Some even maintain: ‘I feel like a new man!’Vigantol has been effective, and now that its value is recognized, it has become a craze. Pharmacies no longer have enough to go around. The Special Department of the Order Service establishes a medicine distribution office to dispense certain rare medications upon [presentation of a] physician's prescription. Speculators obtain Vigantol and sell it on the black market. In the spring of 1943, a vial of Vigantol already brings thirty-five marks. The high price of the medication stimulates a demand for it even when it is not needed.
Vigantol becomes a miracle drug, a remedy for any and all the consequences of hunger: weakness, fatigue, swelling of the legs [...] The price goes up. Thousands of ghetto dwellers seize upon Vigantol, as though it were their last and only means of salvation. They sell shoes, bread, oil; they sell the most valuable parts of their rations in order to buy Vigantol, the miracle elixir. They stint on food for the table in order to save their loved ones with Vigantol. The price goes up.
By May, Vigantol is entirely unavailable in Lodz. Even the black market has dried up.
Unbeknownst to them, the Lodz ghetto inhabitants are nearly alone.
At the end of May, documents from the Polish Jewish Underground partisans note that there are still 80,000 Jews in Lodz. “The Lodz Ghetto is hermetically sealed,” they note. “Despite our many efforts to make contact with the Lodz Jews […] we have failed to make our way into the ghetto. It is an island, totally cut off from the rest of the world. [...] All other cities in this country are already Judenrein.”
Inside the ghetto, life remains eerily the same.
Fallen Ill
One day someone's son feels so ill that he has to stay in bed. For some time now, his mother says, the twenty-year-old has had pains in his chest. His legs were swollen, his face had an unusual color, and he was often unable to walk. I’ll be all right, the boy said, and he dragged himself along for a few more weeks. Then he collapsed.
The doctor comes: ‘He'll have to be x-rayed. Otherwise I can't make a valid diagnosis.’ The x-rays show a spot on the lung […] tuberculosis due to malnutrition. Not much can be done.
The doctor says: ‘The best thing would be a few weeks of hospital care, then bring him home and feed him well-fat, meat, bread, sugar [...] best of all, cod-liver oil.’
The parents give up some of their rations. The mother becomes weak, bedridden. The elder sister stints on food and works at night in order to draw the L allotment (for long shift workers). The son's health does not improve. He is not getting enough food, despite the family's sacrifices. They sell off clothing, shoes, portions of their ration, in exchange for more nutritious food.
Fallen Ill, Cont’d
But now the sister falls ill. Swollen legs—water up to her lungs. The situation Is desperate.
The doctor comes. They tell him of their illness and suffering. First the son, and then after the rest of the family has tried to save him by giving up its precious food—the others have fallen ill. The doctor shakes his head: ‘The hospital? Too late. The hospital won't accept him in this condition.’ [...]
Nevertheless, they attempt the impossible. They try to save the dying man. In the process, the still halfway healthy members of the family travel down the same road. The doctor looks around: ‘Nothing can be done. Always the same story in the ghetto.
One family after another is destroyed. Son, father, mother, sister. Always the same story [...] only the sequence varies.’
June1944
D-Day
On June 6, 1944, Allied forces land in Normandy for what would become the largest seaborne invasion in history. The news arrives in Lodz immediately: “On the whole, the ghetto is nervous today, probably because of the various bits of news that have been coming in through the barbed-wire fence.”
For the ghetto’s entire existence, well-concealed, clandestine radio listeners carefully distributed bits of outside news throughout the ghetto. But such information was always strictly and discreetly word of mouth, transcripts a rarity. But on June 6, 1944, the joy of the news of the Allied landing at Normandy was so great that for a moment people seemed to forget themselves, distributing transcripts of radio reports and publicly announcing the news, behaving, as Chronicle editor and Lodz Ghetto survivor Lucjan Dobroszycki put it, “as if the Americans would be in Lodz in a very short while.” They would pay for this lack of caution. As the Chronicle wrote: “Further news of those arrested [for radio possession] is awaited with fear and anguish.”
Today the news of the … penetrated into the Ghetto. Who knows?
—June 6, 1944, diary entry of anonymous ghetto male polyglot, writing in English in the margins of a French book
Indeed, because of jubilance in the ghetto, the Germans realize that the Jews could only know of such war information if they possessed secret radios. They began tracking down the radios and arresting their owners. One of the well-known radio owners, Chaim Widawksi, is hiding. Those who know him are sure he would never turn himself in to the German authorities. They were right: “NEWS OF THE DAY: CHAIM WIDAWKSI’S SUICIDE.”
A new rule secretly marks the beginning of the action to liquidate the ghetto.
On June 16, Rumkowski announces Proclamation No. 416, declaring voluntary registration for labor outside the ghetto. It remains unknown whether Rumkowski was aware of the ghetto’s impending total termination. Many ghetto dwellers remain blind to the true nature of deportation.
French book diarist
I write and I don’t know if tomorrow I shall be able to read this, because our disgustingly untiring oppressors ‘want’ a thousand unhappy Ghettonians to be sent for ‘work.’ How one must understand ‘work’ in its Teutonic interpretation we already know! Oh heaven! How much longer will this senseless cruelty be continued? What am I guilty or accused of?
Luck
A few thousand Jews are to enjoy the blessing of laboring outside the ghetto, the Jewish residential area, through the barbed wire into golden freedom! What a marvelous prospect! After four hard, torturous years filled with anxiety and distress, they can go out into the world again and see a patch of land that is not surrounded by barbed wire, they can receive food other than ghetto rations. In other words, they can be human beings again. And yet, few people, very few, regard this prospect as a stroke of luck.
The Chronicle noted that the chief of the German Nazi administration of the Lodz Ghetto set aside 500,000 marks for the resettlement. The public was told that every worker would receive 10 marks upon departure. An appropriate sum will be allocated to the (Jewish-run) Main Purchasing Agency, which will pay in Reichsmarks for anything it buys from such workers—up to a maximum of 50 marks. “The idea is to enable the departing workers to convert some of their property into Reichsmarks,” noted the Chronicle, naively. “This is the first time in the history of the ghetto that the German authorities have made arrangements for workers to take German currency with them. In earlier resettlements people could sell objects to the Main Purchasing Agency but received only ghetto money. The current procedure is, understandably, producing positive comment.”
This was of course, as the historian and ghetto survivor Dobroszycki noted, just another ruse—“a means of lulling people’s vigilance and was supposed to remove all suspicion from ghetto dwellers’ minds as to the true nature of the present deportation.”
The next day, even the Chronicle writers seemed less sure of themselves.
No one knows whether it is better at this juncture to be inside the ghetto or outside the barbed wire.
—The ‘Chronicle,’ June 20, 1944
The ghetto experiences its first serious daytime air-raid alarm.
Air Raid!
At 11:25 A.M. the sirens began to wail and the air-raid wardens’ organization sprang into action [...] The ghetto populace remained absolutely calm; in any case, there was no possibility of effective protection, so most people stayed where they were […] From somewhere in the vicinity, a few shots fired by anti-aircraft guns could be heard.
Despite being nonoperational and mostly dismantled, the SS renews gassing operations at Chelmno, in order to complete the annihilation of the Lodz Ghetto Jews.
June’s price decline reverses with prices skyrocketing on the month’s final day. Most of these prices represent the highest ever recorded for that food item—before or after—in the ghetto, for: sugar, butter, peas, kasha, lettuce, spinach, beet leaves, sausage, and meat.
| Good | June Price | |
|---|---|---|
800GM | ||
1200GM | ||
1800GM | ↑ | |
1600GM | ↑ | |
3200GM | ↑ | |
900GM | ↑ | |
70GM | ||
1100GM | ↑ | |
1100GM | ↑ | |
47GM | ↑ |
July1944
The Ghetto Elite Declare There Is No Cause for Alarm
French book diarist
There is joy because all ghetto inhabitants have received 1½ kg vegetables. If [a future historian] of the ghetto deliberates over what moved the ghetto inmates to feel happy, he will surely say: woe to them, to these human beings that such a thing moved them. Woe to them, to these people that this was their joy.
This French book diarist offers a fascinating window into how ghetto conditions could transform life at the most individual level. One day, he was suicidal—“If I could in some painless manner cease to exist, if I could do it—I surely would not hesitate”—the next he awakens a new passion to survive.
French book diarist
I am sitting and dreaming—dreaming and floating in the clouds. I am overtaken by an indescribable longing for life, life as I conceive it, full of beautiful things, of intellectual pursuits, a passion for books, theater, movies, radio, oh! (it is not fair to sigh)—and yet I am trapped in such a swamp.
As a self-described “socialist cosmopolist,” the French book diarist harbored “terrible wrath against nationalism” and rejected Jewish nationalism (Zionism) on principle throughout his diary. But after years in the ghetto, he changed his tune.
“I long for a Jewish life in a Jewish state,” he wrote. “I think that if the Jewish people had no history but that of the last five years, it would be enough to justify a special entity, one which would not be mixed, since I doubt that even Jews will be able to understand all that has happened to us, let alone other nations. The hunt for our brethren grows stronger and stronger.” Switching from Hebrew to Yiddish, he concludes:
If being Jewish is so strong, so ‘personal’ and specific, if its difference from everyone else is so special, enough to provoke so much hate, hostility, sympathy, antipathy, then it must be a strong power in and of itself.
—French book diarist
On July 15, Rumkowski unexpectedly announces a halt in the resettlement. The chairman himself ordered a reinstatement of all ration cards: “People embraced in the streets, kissed in the workshops and departments: ‘The resettlement is over!’”
Of course, it wasn’t over. The reason for the interruption was the sudden dissolution of the Chelmno death camp the previous day, done out of fear that the camp might fall into the hands of the Red Army, revealing Nazi atrocities.
Inside the ghetto, the halting of the resettlement action—while welcome for other reasons—predictably upsets prices in illicit trade.
Transports End
The termination of the transports has changed everything with a single stroke. Bread is now offered for sale at 700 marks; soup costs 15 marks and less, botwinki go for 45 to 50 marks a kilogram. The reason for this plunge in prices is obvious: those scheduled for resettlement are no longer forced to dispose of their last belongings at any price, which, in any case, they could take with them; and people whose ration cards were suspended are no longer forced to sell the shirts off their backs in order to save their skins. The shepherds have once again shorn the lambs, and many wallets are hidden away, swollen with ghetto marks.
Around this time, rumors reach the ghetto that the Jews of Hungary have been brought to Poland—and annihilated. As usual, many in the ghetto are skeptical of such tales.
This rumor, however, was true: The deportations of 424,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz began in May 1944 and lasted eight weeks—to just around this time.
On July 21, Rumkowski announces that new coins in the denomination of 20 marks are being put into circulation. This decision was among several actions taken in late July 1944—days before the ghetto’s final liquidation—that could be interpreted as signs that Rumkowski and his clique believed the ghetto had stabilized and would not be liquidated. “The ghetto elite again declared that there was no cause for alarm,” the historian Trunk notes.
‘Now, when the war is supposed to end shortly, how will we chase after our debtors?’
The next day, Jewish police chief and patron of the Free Loan Fund Leon Rozenblat halted the issuance of ghetto mark loans, claiming that once the war was over it would soon be impossible to reach debtors. The usually cautious Ghetto Chronicle could not restrain itself from a sarcastic riposte: Rozenblat “feared that the ghetto fences will fall and he will, heaven forbid, be left without rumkes.”
But Rumkowski in fact ordered the suspension of loans so that workers would have to continue laboring for their picayune wages. The end of July 1944 featured a strong currency deflation, with the ghetto mark gaining value in the ghetto’s final moments. A contributing factor to this deflation seems to be the cancellation of the loan program, which stalled a large portion of the money usually put into circulation, thereby heavily reducing the money supply. Soup and other goods drop in price.
A mood arises that can’t be put into words.
Psychological Factors
The ghetto reeked of cabbage. Eventually, people grew sick of cabbage. [...] Naturally, everyone was sick of cabbage; even the little man began selling his cabbage rations [on the black market]. And then, all at once, a mood arose that cannot be put into words because it cannot be traced back to any tangible event. Be that as it may, the last week of July, 1944, proves that psychological factors can override any physical ill. The last week of July in the ghetto year, 1944, was dominated by the hope that the Eternal, Praised be His Name, would liberate the ghetto from cabbage soup, mehayro veyomaynu [soon, in our days].
Glad Tidings for the Ghetto: Postcards From Leipzig
The ghetto has received its first messages from people who left to perform manual labor outside the ghetto in the recent resettlement. Thirty-one postcards have arrived, all of them postmarked July 19, 1944. Fortunately, it is apparent from these cards that people are faring well and, what is more, that families have stayed together. Here and there, a card mentions good rations. One card addressed to a kitchen manager says in plain Yiddish: "Mir lakhn fun ayre zupn!" [We laugh at your soups!] The ghetto is elated and hopes that similar reports will soon be arriving from all the other resettled workers. It appears to be confirmed that labor brigades are truly required in the Old Reich.
It should be recalled that before the departure of Transport I there was mention of Munich as its destination. One group may well have gone there too. It is also worth noting that the postcards indicate that our people are housed in comfortable barracks.
These postcards were either coerced or outright fakes.
The Chronicle reports that in order to manage the ghetto mark during the rapid deflation at the end of July, Rumkowski orders the Tobacco Department to sell tobacco at the low free-market price of 25 marks per 10 g. By the 28th, market price tobacco had dropped to 15 marks, soup to 2, as the Chronicle highlights the increasing value of the ghetto mark, “radical deflation,” and the “lack of money” in the ghetto.
On July 24, a stillbirth is recorded in the ghetto—highlighting that even in the end of despair, with but a week remaining before the final liquidation actions, ghetto Jews are still planning, hoping, and trying to create the Jewish future.
On July 28, Rosenfeld records his final diary entry:
A price dive as even the London Stock Exchange has never seen. Money is gaining in value so shortly before the end. Soup 2½ marks [...] What a crazy world.
French book diarist
Beyond any doubt, the nations of the world which give us their condolences and encourage us to our faces, will forget what was done to us—and there may even be some of them who will be pleased. This ‘do not forget,’ we can find full solace only in a Hebrew state.
On July 30, the Chronicle records its final entry. An eerie, peaceful gloss hovers over the ghetto.
Total Population
68,561
News of the Day
Today, Sunday, also passed very calmly.
The Chairman held various meetings. But all in all, the ghetto is peaceful and orderly.
Lagiewnicka Street now has a different look. Traffic is extraordinarily lively. One can see the war gradually approaching Litzmannstadt. The ghetto dweller peers curiously at the motor vehicles of various [German] service branches as they speed through; for him, though, the crucial question remains: ‘What is there to eat?’
Food Supply
Today, Sunday, only 7,160 kilograms of potatoes, 46,210 kilograms of white cabbage, and 13,790 kilograms of kohlrabi arrived in the ghetto. No other food was delivered. If no flour arrives tomorrow, Monday, then the situation will be extremely critical. It is claimed that flour supplies in the ghetto will suffice for barely two or three more days.
Potato Ration
As of today, one kilogram of early potatoes will be distributed at the food distribution points.
August1944
The End
On Aug. 2, Rumkowski publishes announcement No. 417: The ghetto will be evacuated, with the first transports to leave the following day.
Biebow, Nazi ruler of the ghetto, speaks repeatedly to ghetto inhabitants, trying to convince them to report for deportation and not to hide. This was done through lying and manipulation, to assuage any concerns the Jews had about the true nature of deportation. To lure them to the cattle cars, this sadistic Nazi in an uncharacteristically “sweet” tone beckons to “Miene Juden” (My Jews) that “the evacuation was for the good of the ghetto population” and that the Nazis were “motivated by their honest desire to save the Jews from ‘certain annihilation.’”
The roundups and deportations would be complete by month’s end, with about 69,000 remaining residents—including Rumkowski—boarding trains to Auschwitz. Several hundred are kept behind to clean and sort the empty apartments, packing goods for German use. Another few hundred go into hiding.
None of the remaining diaries include any August price data. We do, however, have four references to the ghetto currency that allow us to surmise what happened to the ghetto mark and inflation during the ghetto’s last days. The first, by Poznanski on Aug. 1, a day before the final liquidation is announced, describes rapid price increases.
The second, by Y. Hiler on Aug. 4—two days after the liquidation announcement was made—reveals the inflationary chaos it caused: “Not the least thing was to be had, as ghetto money ceased to have any value.”
The third, by Poznanski on Aug. 18, notes that Jews continued to trade with the currency, likely only now on the black market, but that even there it was fast losing value.
There are horrible rumors, namely that all the transports supposedly going to Vienna or to inside the Third Reich are actually going to a horrible camp in Auschwitz. Even the once-omnipotent Rumkowski was sent out with one of the latest transports.
—Jakub Poznanski
The fourth and final entry, from Poznanski in hiding on Sept. 2, records that the ghetto mark no longer retained any value whatsoever and was no longer legal tender. Instead of money, the 500 or so Jewish slave laborers left were now “paid” directly with food—an irony not lost on the diarist: “Had they used this system from the beginning, many injustices and much harm would have been avoided.”
And thus marks the final mention of the Lodz ghetto mark, a mention that highlights the pain by which it became identified. The ghetto’s currency, like its people, would meet its end in the ashes of Auschwitz. Primo Levi found a ghetto mark coin in the ground in late 1944, and curious as to its origin, kept it with him throughout his time in the camp. That it was all that remained of that coin’s owner—who expected to use it, not to be gassed—symbolizes the ultimate fulfillment of the ghetto mark’s intended purpose to deceive and destroy the Jews of the ghetto.
On Jan. 19, 1945, when the Soviet army entered Lodz, only 877 Jews were still alive—12 of whom were children. Of the 210,000 Jews who flowed through the ghetto throughout its four years, only around 7,000–10,000 survived.
“When the future historian notes what the food in the ghetto was, he will certainly think: Oh how wretched they were, if 5 kg of vegetables could stir them to such a joy.”
When I first read these words, written on July 7, 1944, they buzzed me into action, flipping through my spreadsheet of black market data. Five kgs of vegetables (beetroot) would’ve cost him 350 GM, I find. Based on prevailing wage and ration rates, it would likely have taken him over 40 hours of brutal slave labor to save enough to buy those vegetables. I imagined him aching over a machine for hours on end, all with the hope of getting those vegetables. And I shared in the jubilation he must’ve felt when I noticed that prices dropped within a week of his diary entry, cutting vegetable prices in half.
Ghetto diarists often addressed those reading their words in the future, assuming correctly that there might be someone who would try to grasp the particular circumstances they endured. I tried to be one of these people. When ghetto writers fret about rising prices, I fretted along with them, hoping nervously that the next page of the diary will report inflation has dropped.
With this project, I tried to help readers join me in what I have come to see as holy work. Unlike the worst of Nazi crimes, prices and economics are something people today can grasp, and it is our overwhelming duty to do so. Throwing around numbers in the millions sometimes obscures more than it helps, but focusing on one ghetto man and his unique predicament concretizes and instills a lasting imprint. Utilizing the data this way, one understands how much more we can honor their words and their sacrifices—by, quite literally, quantifying them.
As this project shows, those languishing in the Lodz Ghetto saw their experience as a particular Jewish story. They asserted that their work, written contributions, and very survival was motivated by their solidarity with the other Jews of the ghetto and by their particularly Jewish consciousness. “Surviving becomes a religious duty,” as Oskar Rosenfeld put it—to win the war between “the people of Israel” and “Amalek.”
They also knew that people would turn their sufferings into bromides and ignore the essential Jewish meaning of the Holocaust. “Beyond any doubt,” one anonymous ghetto diarist wrote, “the nations of the world which give us their condolences and encourage us to our faces, will forget what was done to us.”
Indeed, the modern tendency to focus on generalities in order to ask “what it means to me” has not perpetuated the memory of the 6 million and the destruction of European Jewry. Which is why, on this project, we asked the opposite: What did it mean to them? And at what cost?