Łódź before the war was Poland's largest textile city — the "Manchester of the East" — with a Jewish community of 230,000, approximately 35 per cent of the city's population. Łódź Jews were exceptionally diverse: from orthodox mill workers, through Zionists and Bundists, to assimilated factory owners — the Poznański, Silberberg and Izraelita families — whose palaces on Piotrkowska Street still astonish by their scale. In September 1939 Łódź was incorporated into the Reich as "Litzmannstadt" — not into the General Government but directly into Germany. This meant an even harsher regime: the ghetto, established in February 1940 in the Bałuty suburb, was sealed off completely from the rest of the city. The sole approved intermediary between the ghetto and the German authorities was Chaim Rumkowski, to whom the Germans gave the title of "Eldest of the Jews" (Judenältester). Rumkowski — a widower, community activist and director of Jewish orphanages before the war, a man without formal rabbinical or political education — at the age of sixty faced a task for which there was no precedent.
Rumkowski's quasi-state: currency, police, administration
Rumkowski quickly understood that his only negotiating tool with the Germans was production. A ghetto that could supply the Germans with goods — uniforms, blankets, shoes, furniture — was a ghetto that it was profitable to allow to survive. From this logic grew the strategy of "rescue through labour" (German: Arbeit ist unser einziger Weg — "work is our only road"), which Rumkowski implemented with energy bordering on obsession. By 1944 the Łódź Ghetto possessed 110 factories producing for the Wehrmacht and SS. It employed more than 100,000 people. It had its own currency (ghetto marks, called "rumkes" or "chaimkes" — from Rumkowski's nickname), its own postal system, its own Jewish police force, its own prison and its own court. Rumkowski printed postage stamps bearing his own likeness. At ghetto parades he rode in an open car. He issued decrees beginning "I, the Eldest of the Jews, order...". Historiography assesses this concentration of power variously. Some historians — including Isaiah Trunk in Judenrat — emphasise that Rumkowski acted under conditions of total powerlessness: every decision he made was taken under the direct coercion of death. Others — including Primo Levi, who visited Łódź after the war and wrote an essay on Rumkowski — see in him a symbol of the "grey zone": a man who assimilated the values of the oppressor in order to negotiate with him.
The speech of September 1942: "Give me your children"
The greatest controversy surrounding Rumkowski concerns his behaviour during the September 1942 children's selection. The Germans demanded the deportation from the ghetto of 20,000 people unable to work: children under ten, the elderly over sixty-five, the sick. Rumkowski could have refused — he knew deportation meant death. He chose otherwise. On 4 September 1942 he addressed an assembled crowd in a speech that is one of the most harrowing documents of the Holocaust: "A grievous blow has struck the ghetto. They are asking us to give up the best we possess — the children and the elderly. I was unworthy of having my own children, so I gave the best years of my life to children. I never imagined I would be forced to deliver this sacrifice to the altar with my own hands. In my old age, I must stretch out my hands and beg: Brothers and sisters! Hand them over to me! Fathers and mothers: give me your children!" The deportations lasted a week. The Jewish police and SS removed children from homes. Rumkowski argued that surrendering part would save the rest. Indeed — the Łódź Ghetto survived until 1944, when all other major ghettos had already been liquidated. But those "saved" in 1942 survived only until the next deportations — to Auschwitz in 1944, when the Germans decided to liquidate the ghetto. Rumkowski himself was deported with the last ghetto residents to Auschwitz in August 1944. He died there — the circumstances of his death are unknown; according to some accounts he was killed by fellow prisoners.
The historiographical debate: Trunk, Levi, Gutman — different assessments
The debate about Rumkowski is a model for the broader discussion of the Judenräte and the limits of moral judgement of actions under totalitarian terror. Isaiah Trunk in Judenrat (1972) — the monumental study of Jewish councils in Poland — took a descriptive approach: documenting the decisions of individual Judenräte without unequivocal moral judgement, arguing that assessing their actions by normal ethical criteria is a methodological error. Primo Levi in The Drowned and the Saved (1986) saw in Rumkowski a symbol of the phenomenon he called the "grey zone": the space between victim and perpetrator, in which a person has assimilated the methods of the persecutor in order to survive or to save others. Levi wrote about Rumkowski with cool analytical seriousness, refusing unequivocal condemnation while also refusing exculpation. Israel Gutman (Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust) stressed that the "rescue through labour" strategy did not produce statistically better survival outcomes than in other ghettos: ultimately approximately 80 per cent of Łódź Jews perished. The question of how many of the 8 per cent who survived owed that survival to Rumkowski's strategy, and how many to chance, hiding or other means of rescue — is unanswerable. Contemporary historiography (Michal Unger, Andrea Löw) inclines toward the assessment that Rumkowski was a man of authoritarian personality who under conditions of extreme terror developed a ghetto management system with paranoid features, but whose motivations — at least until 1942 — contained elements genuinely oriented toward community survival. After 1942 that line is difficult to defend.
Podsumowanie
The legacy of the Łódź Ghetto has both material and memorial dimensions. In Łódź's Stare Miasto district, fragments of the Bałuty quarter — the former ghetto area — survive, with memorial plaques at key addresses. Radogoszcz Station — the ramp from which transports departed for Chełmno and Auschwitz — is today a memorial site with an exhibition. The Łódź City Museum maintains an exhibition on the history of the ghetto. The Jewish cemetery on Bracka Street, one of the largest in Poland and one of the few that is almost entirely preserved, is a site where the history of Łódź Jewry can be read from headstones spread across dozens of hectares. A private itinerary from Warsaw or Wrocław through Łódź — with a Mercedes V-Class for the full journey — allows all these sites to be covered in one or two days, with access to the ghetto archives at the Łódź City Museum.
Further reading