In the Beginning Was the Ghetto: Notebooks from Lodz

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From February 1942 to July 1944, Oskar Rosenfeld served in the statistics department of the Lodz ghetto. A Jewish playwright and journalist, he kept his own records - meticulous and harrowing notes on life and conditions in the ghetto - for the fictionalized account he hoped to someday write. Upon the liquidation of the ghetto, he and the nearly eighty thousand remaining inhabitants were deported to Auschwitz, where he perished.Rosenfeld's notebooks offer a wrenching view of life in the ghetto and the day-to-day struggle for survival of what was, initially, a population of more than one hundred thousand. Rosenfeld's keen observations and vivid narration of the stories of his fellow sufferers have the haunting immediacy of eyewitness testimony. Descriptions of ever-present hunger, forced labor, disease, degradation, and deportation are juxtaposed with those of the attempts of the imprisoned to maintain a cultural, social, and religious life and to preserve their dignity. Perplexed by evil of such unprecedented magnitude, Rosenfeld wrestles with the question, What mind could have contrived this universe of horrors, beyond anything known in history? He concludes with bitter irony, "In the beginning God created the ghetto."This English translation of Rosenfeld's notebooks projects his voice to a wider world, as he had hoped; it also marks one of the most important new publications documenting the unspeakable cruelty and inhumanity of the Holocaust and the indomitable spirit of its victims.