“The ghetto has been struck a hard blow. They demand what is most dear to it — children and old people”

Title: Remember the Children

Location: Lodz, Poland

Time: September 1941

When the Lodz Ghetto was sealed off in May 1940, its nearly 200,000 inhabitants had to struggle daily to survive under worsening conditions. The huge ghetto in Lodz was unique in several respects. Second in size only to Warsaw’s, it crowded nearly a third of the city’s inhabitants into a tiny habitable area of less than a square mile. Disease and malnutrition were rampant, leading to the deaths of approximately 43,000 victims within the ghetto itself.

While such conditions were unfortunately common in the more than 1,000 Nazi ghettos in eastern and southern Europe, many of them relied on a sophisticated smuggling network to augment the meager food rations. Not so in Lodz. There, the ghetto was hermetically sealed off from the world by the SS security apparatus. Food, medical supplies, and even news from the outside world were nearly impossible to obtain. The only legal tender in the ghetto was a special currency created by the Nazis that was worthless in the world outside, further frustrating smuggling efforts.

The Lodz Ghetto’s most distinguishing feature, however, was its sheer longevity. One of the first ghettos to be established in Nazi-occupied Poland, it far outlasted all the others. The final deportation of its last 70,000 Jews to the Auschwitz gas chambers took place in August 1944, long after every other ghetto in Poland had been liquidated.

The Lodz Ghetto lasted so long for a variety of reasons, but first and foremost because it served as a valuable source of slave labor for the Nazi war machine. Its tens of thousands of inmates worked about 14 hours a day under malnourishment and horrifying labor conditions. The ghetto’s 117 workshops supplied uniforms and other related textile materials to the Wehrmacht and German private firms. These workers were considered essential to the Nazi war effort and were therefore spared the initial deportations in 1942. Only with the Red Army’s advance in the summer of 1944 did Lodz’s Jews meet the fate of their brethren.

Hans Biebow, the Nazi ghetto administrator, ruled the Jews of Lodz through Judenrat head Chaim Rumkowski, himself appointed by the Nazis. Although most Judenrat members fared poorly in the collective memory of the Jewish People, Rumkowski in particular has been vilified for his autocratic leadership, questionable behavior, and especially for his controversial decisions that facilitated the Nazi deportation of most of Lodz’s Jews to the gas chambers.

The Nazis began deporting Lodz’s Jews to the Chelmno death camp in early 1942. By September, over 50,000 Jews had gone to Chelmno, all exterminated upon arrival. The Nazis demanded that Rumkowski hand over an additional 24,000 Jews from the ghetto for “resettlement,” their common euphemism for mass murder.

Recognizing the ghetto’s economic productivity, the Nazis had decided to liquidate all of its remaining “unproductive” Jews — children, elderly, ill — and only healthy workers would henceforth remain. Rumkowski rationalized that if his Judenrat and Jewish police assisted with the roundup of these so-called “unproductive” Jews, then the rest of the ghetto residents would be saved from certain deportation.

On September 4, 1942, Rumkowski delivered an infamous public speech explaining his decision to ghetto detainees. In the annals of Lodz survivors, this speech would go down in history as the “Give me your children” speech:

The ghetto has been struck a hard blow. They demand what is most dear to it — children and old people. 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...”

[Bitter weeping shakes the assembled public.]

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, G-d forbid... [Terrible wailing.]

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....

Before the 1942 deportations, ghetto residents attempted to live as normally as possible under increasingly adverse conditions. Religious life, cultural activities, family, leisure, and education all persisted under the circumstances, a monument to the ultimate heroism of Lodz Jewry. Although he was a ruthless despot, vengeful and narcissistic, Rumkowski does get credit for facilitating much of the infrastructure for Jewish life to flourish. This was especially true in the realm of education and children’s activities. As Professor Sam Kassow notes:

While Rumkowski did much that was reprehensible, he also tried, as long as he could, to help Jews, especially children. He provided supplementary rations, set up [summer] camps and day care centers, and created a well-organized and comprehensive school system. During the 1940-41 academic year, over 14,000 students were enrolled in the ghetto schools.

Just before Rosh Hashanah 1941, a unique album was presented to Rumkowski as a gift from all of the school children. Ostensibly intended as both flattery and a token of gratitude, it contained the familiar terms used by ghetto inhabitants wanting to stay on Rumkowski’s good side, referring to him as a “father” and “provider.” Written in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Polish, it was signed by 14,587 students and 715 teachers.

Almost all of those children and teachers were ultimately murdered by the Nazis in the Chelmno gas chambers in 1942. Of those who miraculously survived the initial wave of deportations, most were murdered in Auschwitz in the summer of 1944 with the final liquidation of the ghetto. But this book somehow survived and found its way to the offices of YIVO in New York, where it remains until today.

Though the children themselves are gone, cut off when their lives were still of potential, their handwritten childish scrawl remains almost as a matzeivah, a burial they never merited. Each and every one is remembered as an individual, with their own identity, their own name, inscribed in the eternal scroll of Jewish history. May their memory never be forgotten.

What’s in a Name?

The names in the Lodz Ghetto Children’s Album run for many columns across countless pages, but behind each and every name lies an individual story. The few Lodz survivors have pored over the original book to find familiar names of friends, neighbors, relatives, or perhaps even their own.

One of the signatories in the album is David Sierakowiak. Although he himself perished in the Holocaust, he kept a diary from the beginning of the war that survived. In it he describes — from the point of view of a Jewish child who has lost his innocence in the horrors of the Lodz Ghetto — the dire circumstances he was experiencing. In mid-1942, at the peak of the deportations to Chelmno, he describes losing his mother:

My most sacred, beloved, worn-out, blessed, cherished Mother has fallen victim to the bloodthirsty German Nazi beast!!! ...At times such shudders and heart palpitations come over me that it seems that I’m going insane or delirious. Even so, I’m unable to turn my consciousness away from Mother, and suddenly, as though I divide, I find myself in her mind and body. [...] Nothing will fill up the eternal emptiness in the soul, brain, mind, and heart that is created by the loss of one’s most beloved person.

Ghetto Rabbis

Many of Lodz’s Jews fled to Warsaw during the first weeks of the war, perceiving the capital to be safer.

One of those was Rav Nechemia Alter, son of the Sfas Emes and brother of the Gerrer Rebbe, the Imrei Emes. His son-in-law Rav Avraham Mordechai Silman was one of the senior dayanim on the Lodz rabbinate, and he remained in Lodz until his demise. In February 1941, he and several other rabbanim in the ghetto signed a public proclamation permitting the sick to consume non-kosher meat. A kesubah from the Lodz ghetto with his signature survived, attesting to the resilience of Lodz Jewry.

In fact it was Rav Silman’s close relative, Rav Yaakov Silman, rabbi of the nearby town of Grabow, who received the first testimony of gas chambers at the Chelmno extermination site from two escapees. Rav Yaakov Silman immediately alerted surrounding towns, and even succeeded in getting the message through to the impenetrable and hermetically sealed Lodz ghetto, warning them of the coming catastrophe.

Lodz Ghetto Children’s Album is one of the featured chapters in the excellent recently published book entitled 100 Objects from the Collections of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research — a sweeping journey through Jewish life, memory, and survival, told through a carefully curated selection of artifacts. This beautifully illustrated coffee-table volume showcases rare manuscripts, photographs, and ephemera, each accompanied by insightful essays from leading scholars that bring these treasures vividly to life.

Excerpts from Chaim Rumkowski’s speech and from David Sierakowiak’s diary were obtained from the Yad Vashem archive.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1072)