Notes

Introduction

1 Hanno Loewy, Andrzej Bodek, and François Coppée, “Les Vrais Riches,” Notizen am Rand: ein Tagebuch aus dem Ghetto Łódź (Mai bis August 1944) (Leipzig: Reclam, 1997) p. 105. The quote was originally written in English in the boy’s diary.

2 For more on Nazi food policies, see Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde: Die Deutsche Wirtschafts – und Vernichtungspolitik in Weissrussland 1941 bis 1944, 2nd ed. (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2000); Gesine Gerhard, Nazi Hunger Politics: A History of Food in the Third Reich (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017); Christian Hartmann, Operation Barbarossa: Nazi Germany’s War in the East, 1941–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Elizabeth M. Collingham, The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (New York: Penguin, 2013); Alex J. Kay, Exploitation, Resettlement, Mass Murder: Political and Economic Planning for German Occupation Policy in the Soviet Union, 1940–1941 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006); Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, Vordenker der Vernichtung: Auschwitz und die deutschen Pläne für eine neue europäische Ordnung, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1993); Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (London: Vintage, 2015).

3 Michael Watts, “Entitlements or Empowerment? Famine and Starvation in Africa,” Review of African Political Economy 18, no. 51 (1991): 9–26.

4 Some scholarship has begun to look at how Jews survived the Holocaust, but this has come from fields outside of history. The most significant works include Evgeny Finkel, Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017); Peter Tammes, “Associating Locality-Level Characteristics with Surviving the Holocaust: A Multilevel Approach to the Odds of Being Deported and to Risk of Death among Jews Living in Dutch Municipalities,” American Journal of Epidemiology 188, no. 5 (2019): 896–906; Peter Tammes, “Survival of Jews during the Holocaust: The Importance of Different Types of Social Resources,” International Journal of Epidemiology 36, no. 2 (2007): 330–35.

5 Christian Gerlach notes that 6 million Jews perished but a mere 1.3 million survived, making survival the exceptional experience during the Holocaust. Gerlach, The Extermination of the European Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 404.

6 There has been some scholarship on the aesthetics of hunger in the ghetto. Notable examples include Oskar Rosenfeld, “The Łódź Ghetto and the Chronotope of Hunger,” in The Aesthetics and Politics of Global Hunger, eds. Anastasia Ulanowicz and Manisha Basu (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 27–56; Sven-Erik Rose, “Writing Hunger in a Modernist Key in the Warsaw Ghetto: Leyb Goldin’s ‘Chronicle of a Single Day,’” Jewish Social Studies 23, no. 1 (2017): 29–63.

7 See Mark L. Smith, The Yiddish Historians and the Struggle for a Jewish History of the Holocaust (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2019); Laura Jockusch, “Historiography in Transit: Survivor Historians and the Writing of Holocaust History in the Late 1940s,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 58 (2013): 75–94.

8 For works on Jewish experience in the ghettos, see: Philip Friedman, “The Jewish Ghettos of the Nazi Era,” Jewish Social Studies 16, no. 1 (1954): 61–88; Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation (New York: Macmillan, 1972); Zvi Arad, Rinah Klinov, and Yehudah Maimon, he-Haluts ha-lochem: Bit’on ha-no`ar haYehudi ha-halutsi be-mahteret Krakov, Ogust–Oktober 1943 (The fighting pioneer: Organ of the Chalutz underground movement in occupied Cracow, August–October 1943) (Tel Aviv: Ghetto Fighters’ House and the United Kibbutz Movement, 1984); Yisrael Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, 1939–1943: Ghetto, Underground, Revolt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). Gunnar S. Paulsson. Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).

9 For works that examine ghettos to understand Nazi genocidal plans, see Christopher R. Browning, “Nazi Ghettoization Policy in Poland: 1939–41,” Central European History 19, no. 4 (1986): 343–68; Dan Mikhman, The Emergence of Jewish Ghettos during the Holocaust (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Tim Cole, Holocaust City: The Making of a Jewish Ghetto (Florence, KY: Taylor and Francis, 2013). For examples of this recent focus on diversity of Jewish experiences and expressions of Jewish agency in ghettos, see: Anna Hajkova, The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); Anika Walke, “Jewish Youth in the Minsk Ghetto: How Age and Gender Mattered,” Kritika 15, no. 3 (2014): 535–62; Finkel, Ordinary Jews; Gali Tibon, “Am I My Brother’s Keeper? The Jewish Committees in the Ghettos of Mogilev Province and the Romanian Regime in Transnistria during the Holocaust, 1941–1944,” Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 30, no. 2 (2016): 93–116; Andrea Löw, Juden im Getto Litzmannstadt: Lebensbedingungen, Selbstwahrnehmung, Verhalten (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2013); Katarzyna Person, Warsaw Ghetto: Everyday Life (Warsaw: Jewish Historical Institute, 2017); Svenja Bethke and Sharon Howe, Dance on the Razor’s Edge: Crime and Punishment in the Nazi Ghettos (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021).

10 For more on the Hunger Plan, see Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde; Gerhard, Nazi Hunger Politics; Hartmann, Operation Barbarossa; Collingham, The Taste of War; Kay, Exploitation, Resettlement, Mass Murder; Aly and Heim, Vordenker der Vernichtung.

11 Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).

12 Alex de Waal, Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine (Cambridge: Polity Books, 2018). See also Jenny Edkins, “Legality with a Vengeance: Famines and Humanitarian Relief in ‘Complex Emergencies,’” Millennium 25, no. 3 (1996): 547–75.

13 Frank E. Sysyn and Henry C. Theriault, “Editors’ Introduction: Starvation and Genocide,” Genocide Studies International 11, no. 1 (2017): 1–7.

14 There has been some work examining the influence of German authorities and in particular individual Nazis who were responsible for food distribution to ghettos, with a focus on variations in German policy as it operated on a local level. The most important example is Browning, “Nazi Ghettoization Policy in Poland.”

15 In fact, for some famine scholars, mortality is not even a requirement for famine. See Alex de Waal, Famine That Kills : Darfur, Sudan, 1984–1985 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

16 Peter Walker, Famine Early Warning Systems: Victims and Destitution (New York: Routledge, 2013), 33.

17 Belinda J. Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

18 On Leningrad, see Cynthia Simmons, “Lifting the Siege: Women’s Voices on Leningrad (1941–1944),” Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes 40, no. 1/2 (1998): 43–65; J. K. Hass, “Anchors, Habitus, and Practices Besieged by War: Women and Gender in the Blockade of Leningrad,” Social Forum 32, no. 2 (2017): 253–76.

19 Ali Mehtabunisa, “Woman in Famine: The Paradox of Status in India,” in Famine, ed. Bruce Currey and Graeme Hugo (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1984), 113–33.

20 Walker, Famine Early Warning Systems, 44.

21 See Sen, Poverty and Famines; Walker, Famine Early Warning Systems; Svetlana P. Morozovskaya, “Staying Alive in Besieged Leningrad: Motivational Factors for Survival” (MA thesis, Sam Houston State University, 2017); Mehtabunisa, “Woman in Famine”; Wendy Z. Goldman and Donald A. Filtzer, eds., Hunger and War: Food Provisioning in the Soviet Union during World War II (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015); Cormac Ó Gráda, Eating People Is Wrong, and Other Essays on Famine, Its Past, and Its Future (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).

22 Sen, Poverty and Famines.

23 Arjun Appadurai, “How Moral Is South Asia’s Economy? A Review Article,” Journal of Asian Studies 43, no. 3 (1984): 481–97.

24 Hass, “Anchors, Habitus, and Practices Besieged by War”; and see Alexis Peri, “Queues, Canteens, and the Politics of Location in Diaries of the Leningrad Blockade, 1941–1942,” in Goldman and Filtzer, Hunger and War, 158–205.

25 Morozovskaya, “Staying Alive in Besieged Leningrad,” 19

26 Ó Gráda, Eating People Is Wrong, 2.

27 Helene Sinnreich, “Victim and Perpetrator Perspectives of World War II–Era Ghettos,” in The Routledge History of the Holocaust, ed. Jonathan C. Friedman (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 115–24; Dan Michman, The Emergence of Jewish Ghettos during the Holocaust, trans. Lenn J. Schramm (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

28 Notable examples include Isaiah Trunk, Lódz Ghetto: A History, trans. Robert Moses Shapiro, intro. Israel Gutman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Löw, Juden im Getto Litzmannstadt; Person, Warsaw Ghetto; Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City, trans. Emma Harris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw. Peter Klein. Die Gettoverwaltung Litzmannstadt 1940 Bis 1944: Eine Dienststelle Im Spannungsfeld Von Kommunalbürokratie Und Staatlicher Verfolgungspolitik. (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2009)

29 With very few exceptions, documentation from the ghetto period did not survive the war, but a few works have dealt with various aspects of the Kraków ghetto, with research areas including children in German-occupied Kraków (see Joanna Sliwa Jewish Childhood in Krakow: A microhistory of the Holocaust, (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2021), Jewish women in Kraków (see Martyna Grądzka-Rejak, Kobieta żydowska w okupowanym Krakowie, 1939–1945 (Kraków: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, Wydawnictwo “Wysoki Zamek,” 2016); ghetto administration see Andrea Löw and Agnieszka Zajaczkowska-Drozdz, “Leadership in the Jewish Councils as a Social Process: The Example of Cracow,” in The Holocaust and European Societies: Social Processes and Social Dynamics, ed. Frank Bajohr and Andrea Löw (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and the resistance movement in the Kraków ghetto. On this last, see: Arieh L. Bauminger, The Fighters of the Cracow Ghetto (Jerusalem: Keter Press, 1986).

30 Sean Martin, Jewish Life in Cracow, 1918–1939 (Chicago: Vallentine Mitchell, 2004), 32.

31 Abraham Melezin, Przyczynek do Znajomosci Stosunkow Demograicznych Wsrod Ludnosci Żydowskiej w Łódźi, Krakowie i Lublinie Podczas Okupacji Niemieckij (Łódź: Centralnej Żydowskiej Komisji Historycznej, 1946), 66; M. Epstein, The Statesman’s Year-Book: Statistical and Historical Annual of the States of the World for the Year 1940 (London: Macmillan, 1940), 1218.

32 Martin, Jewish Life in Cracow, 43–44.

33 Aron Grynwald, testimony, RG 50.002*0058, US Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives (USHMMA), Washington, DC.

34 Jan Najder, testimony, May 29, 1945, RG‐15.084M, Relacje Ocalalych z Holocaustu, Sygn. 301, 1945–1946, USHMMA.

35 Ben Friedman, interview 37025, segment 39, October 14, 1997, Visual History Archive, University of Southern California (USC) Shoah Foundation, Los Angeles, CA.

36 Martin, Jewish Life in Cracow, 16.

37 Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw.

38 Katarzyna Person, ed., The Ringelblum Archive: Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto (Warsaw: Jewish Historical Institute, 2017), 33.

39 Jacob Lestchinsky, “The Jews in the Cities of the Republic of Poland,” in East European Jews in Two World Wars: Studies from the YIVO Annual, ed. Deborah Dash Moore (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990), 117.

40 Lestchinsky, “The Jews in the Cities of the Republic of Poland,” 112.

41 Wiesław Pus, “The Development of the City of Łódź (1820–1939),” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 6 (2005): 6.

42 Lestchinsky, “The Jews in the Cities of the Republic of Poland,” 108.

43 François Guesnet, “Khevres and Akhdes: The Change in Jewish Self-Organization in the Kingdom of Poland before 1900 and the Bund,” in Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100, ed. Jack Jacobs (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 7–8.

44 Simon Segal, The New Poland and the Jews (New York: Lee Furman), 179.

45 Robert Moses Shapiro, The Polish Kehile Elections of 1936: A Revolution Re-Examined (New York: Holocaust Studies Program, Yeshiva University, 1988), 11.

46 Julian K. Janczak, “The National Structure of the Population in Łódź in the Years 1820–1939,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 6 (2005): 26.

47 Lestchinsky, “The Jews in the Cities of the Republic of Poland,” 116; Michal Unger, “The Status and Plight of Women in the Łódź Ghetto,” in Women in the Holocaust, ed. Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 123.

48 Thank you to Daniel Magilow for his insights and recommended resources on publishing perpetrator photographs. For more on reprinting perpetrator photographs, see Susie Linfield. The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Marianne Hirsch, “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory,” Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (2001): 5–37.

49 For scholarship that has deeply influenced my critical lens of Holocaust testimony, see: Zoë Vania Waxman, Writing the Holocaust: Identity, Testimony, Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Noah Shenker, Reframing Holocaust Testimony (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). For my theoretical framework on my approach to gender in this volume see, Helene Sinnreich “Gender and Jewish Experience during the Holocaust,” ed. Natalia Aleksiun and Marion Kaplan. Cambridge History of the Holocaust. Vol. 3 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2022).

1 The Nazi Invasion

1 Elizabeth Mullener, War Stories: Remembering World War II (New York: Berkley Books, 2004), 1.

2 Shimon Huberband et al., Kiddush Hashem: Jewish Religious and Cultural Life in Poland during the Holocaust (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1987), 10.

3 Leon Leyson, The Boy on the Wooden Box (New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2013), 46.

4 David Sierakowiak, The Diary of David Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Łódź Ghetto, ed. Alan Adelson, trans. Kamil Turowski (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 31.

5 Chaim A. Kaplan, Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan, trans. and ed. Abraham Isaac Katsch (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 24.

6 Gusta Rubinfeld, interview 36610, segment 27, September 16, 1997, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

7 Anna Grun, manuscript, 2007.474.1, USHMMA.

8 Lucie Brent, interview 396, segment 19, December 4, 1994, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

9 Ziuta Grunhut, interview, RG 50.120*0260, USHMMA. Multiple testimonies mention this same radio announcement.

10 Aron Grynwald, testimony, RG 50.002*0058, USHMMA.

11 Hersz Fogel, A Hidden Diary from the Łódź Ghetto, 1942–1944, ed. Helene Sinnreich (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2015).

12 Rachel Garfunkel, interview, RG 50.601*001, USHMMA.

13 Mary Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg: Growing up in the Warsaw Ghetto, ed. S. L. Shneiderman (Oxford: One World, 2007), 3. Mary Berg is a pseudonym for Miriam Wattenberg.

14 Roman Polanski, Roman (New York: William Morrow, 1984), 19–20. Ryszard Polanski was originally named Mojżesz Liebling. He changed his name after the war.

15 Samuel Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? (Bloomington: First Vintage Books, 2009), 105.

16 Kaplan, Scroll of Agony, 27.

17 Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg, 5.

18 Patricia Heberer, Children during the Holocaust (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2011), 38.

19 Kaplan, Scroll of Agony, 38. This was also testified to by Adam Czerniaków; see The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków: Prelude to Doom, ed. Joseph Kermish, Stanislaw Staron, and Raul Hilberg (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1999), 77.

20 Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg, 9.

21 Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?, 106.

22 Kaplan, Scroll of Agony, 37.

23 Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków, 76.

24 Seymour Levitan and Rachel Auerbach, “A Soup Kitchen in the Warsaw Ghetto: From the Memoirs of Rachel Auerbach,” Bridges 13, no. 2 (2008): 96–107.

25 Leyson, The Boy on the Wooden Box, 53.

26 Eva Smugler, interview 6211, segment 19, September 20, 1995, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

27 Pinchas Ringelblum, interview 37697, segment 169, October 30, 1997, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

28 Ringelblum, interview 37697, segment 176, October 30, 1997.

29 Kaplan, Scroll of Agony, 87.

30 Sierakowiak, The Diary of David Sierakowiak, 37–38.

31 Eleonora Bergman, Katarzyna Person, and Andrzej Żbikowski, eds., The Ringelblum Archive: Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny im. Emanuela Ringelbluma, 2017), 238, 243.

32 Lillian Kranitz-Sanders, Twelve Who Survived: An Oral History of the Jews of Łódź, Poland, 1930–1954 (New York: Irvington, 1984), 38.

33 Jacob Apenszlak, ed., The Black Book of Polish Jewry: An Account of the Martyrdom of Polish Jewry (New York: American Federation for Polish Jews, 1943), 29. Numerous other testimonies of mass rapes of Jewish women in Warsaw were recorded in The Black Book of Polish Jewry.

34 Mietek Pemper, The Road to Rescue: The Untold Story of Schindler’s List (New York: Hoffmann and Campe Verlag, 2008), 12.

35 Michael Etkind, quoted in Lyn Smith, Remembering: Voices of the Holocaust (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2006), 76.

36 Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków, 113, 115.

37 Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City, trans. Emma Harris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 140; Kaplan, Scroll of Agony, 55.

38 Jan Najder, testimony 301.171, May 29, 1945, Jewish Historical Institute (Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, ŻIH), Warsaw, Poland.

39 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 37.

40 Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków, 99.

41 See, for example, Decree 9, “Ordinance on the Provisional Settlement of Support Payments to Pensioners of the Former Polish State and Polish Self-Governing Bodies,” December 9, 1939, signed by Hans Frank, RG 27.001, USHMMA.

42 Blanka Rothschild, interview 2273, May 2, 1995, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

43 Benjamin Lesser, interview, RG 50.882*0003, USHMMA.

44 Apenszlak, The Black Book of Polish Jewry, 29.

45 Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg, 24.

46 Pemper, The Road to Rescue, 12.

47 Kaplan, Scroll of Agony, 42, 67.

48 Julian Baranowski, The Łódź Ghetto, 1940–1944 (Łódź: Archiwum Panstwowe w Łódźi and Bilbo, 2005), 14, 16.

49 Leib Salpeter, testimony, RG 15.084M, Relacje Ocalalych z Holocaustu, Sygn. 301, 1945–1946, USHMMA.

50 Diane Plotkin, “Smuggling in the Ghettos: Survivor Accounts from the Warsaw, Łódź, and Kraków Ghettos,” in Life in the Ghettos during the Holocaust, ed. Eric C. Sterling (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005), 114.

51 Decree 11, December 12, 1939, signed by Julius Kruger, RG 27.001, USHMMA.

52 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 144.

53 Kaplan, Scroll of Agony, 116.

54 Hal Elliott Wert, “U.S. Aid to Poles under Nazi Domination, 1939–1940,” Historian 57, no. 3 (1995): 511–24. Many diarists in all three cities mention seeing Jews thrown off breadlines.

55 Leib Salpeter, testimony, RG‐15.084M, Relacje Ocalalych z Holocaustu, Sygn. 301, 1945–1946, USHMMA.

56 Huberband et al., Kiddush Hashem, 64–65.

57 The Generalgouvernement was an administrative unit set up by the Nazi authorities to control the part of pre–World War II Poland that was not taken over by the Soviet Union or incorporated into the Reich. In 1939, Hans Frank was appointed the administrative head of the district.

58 The gau was an administrative district of the Nazi Party. Under the Nazi dictatorship, the Nazi Party officials responsible for a particular region were also made the administrative head of that same region. One such region was the Warthegau. Leaders of these regions were known as Gaultiers. Warthegau was rendered into English as “Wartheland.”

59 Sierakowiak, The Diary of David Sierakowiak, 38.

60 Michal Unger, “Religion and Religious Institutions in the Łódź Ghetto,” in Remembering for the Future, ed. John K. Roth et al. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001).

61 Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg, 23.

62 Yankl Nirenberg, Memoirs of the Łódź Ghetto, trans. Vivian Felsen (Toronto: Lugus Libros, 2003), 1–2.

63 Nechama Tec, Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 27.

64 See, for example, Mark Edele and Wanda Warlik, “Saved by Stalin? Trajectories of Polish Jews in the Soviet Second World War,” in Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union, ed. Mark Edele, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Atina Grossmann (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2017), 95–131.

65 Michal Unger, The Last Ghetto: Life in the Łódź Ghetto, 1940–1944 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1995), 44.

66 “Verordnung uber die Kennzeichnung von Juden und Juedinnen im Generalgouvernement,” Kraków, November 23, 1939, Hans Frank, RG 27.001, USHMMA. The text reads: “Beginning December 1, 1939, all Jews and Jewesses who are in the Generalgouvernement and are ten years old or older are obliged to wear a white armband with a Jewish star at least 10 centimeters wide on the right sleeve of their clothing and overclothes.”

67 Unger, The Last Ghetto, 44. Robert Moses Shapiro, in his notes on his translation of Isaiah Trunk’s Łódź Ghetto: A History, intro. Israel Gutman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), mentions that Friedrich Übelhör issued a decree on December 12, 1939, replacing the armband with a yellow Star of David.

68 Irena Glueck, diary entry, May 9, 1940, RG 02.208M, file 270, USHMMA. Translation of diary by Kristine Belfoure, provided courtesy of Alexandra Zapruder.

69 Julius Feldman, The Kraków Diary of Julius Feldman, trans. William Brand (Newark, NJ: Quill Press, 2002), 18.

70 Gertrude Schneider, ed., Mordechai Gebirtig: His Poetic and Musical Legacy (London: Praeger, 2000), 153.

71 Ludmila Page, interview, RG 50.005*0046, USHMMA.

72 Sierakowiak, The Diary of David Sierakowiak, 70.

73 Yisrael Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, 1939–1943: Ghetto, Underground, Revolt, trans. Ina Friedman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 25.

74 John R. Butterly, and Jack Shepherd, Hunger: The Biology and Politics of Starvation (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2010), 127.

75 Mendel Beale, interview 33137, segment 16, June 24, 1997, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

76 Samuel Lustiger, interview 47993, segment 100, November 15, 1998, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

77 Gusta Rubinfeld, interview 36610, segment 11, September 16, 1997, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

78 Anna Grun, manuscript, 2007.474.1, USHMMA.

79 Jacob Rosenberg, interview 20686, September 9, 1996, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

80 Joseph Curczinski, interview 52588, segment 40–46, August 30, 1997, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

81 Anna Grun, manuscript, 2007.474.1, USHMMA.

82 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 37.

83 Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków, 113.

84 Kaplan, Scroll of Agony, 97.

85 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 39.

86 Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków, 151–52.

87 Irena Glueck, diary entries, September 29, 1940, and October 26, 1940, RG 02.208M, file 270, USHMMA.

88 Jan Rozanski, testimony, RG 02.079*01, USHMMA.

89 Irena Glueck, diary entry, September 11, 1940, RG 02.208M, file 270, USHMMA.

90 Kaplan, Scroll of Agony, 33.

91 Irena Glueck, diary entry, September 11, 1940, RG 02.208M, file 270, USHMMA.

92 Kaplan, Scroll of Agony, 29, 30.

93 Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg, 22.

94 Levitan and Auerbach, “A Soup Kitchen in the Warsaw Ghetto.”

95 Judische Geminde Krakau, Raporty dotyczace Żydowsich osrodkow opiekunczych, p. 31, 218/17, ŻIH.

96 Kaplan, Scroll of Agony, 174–75.

97 Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?, 118; Levitan and Auerbach, “A Soup Kitchen in the Warsaw Ghetto.”

98 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 48.

99 Activities of the Judenrat (Jewish council) in Kraków, Poland, RG 15.072M, Rada Żydowska miasta Krakówa, Sygn. 218, 218/19, 27, USHMMA.

100 Huberband et al., Kiddush Hashem, 59.

101 ŻSS was the heir to the earlier coordinating committee established in Warsaw, through which Jewish organizations banded together in an effort to more effectively aid those in need. ŻSS continued to operate until 1942. For more on the history of Jewish social self-help, see Annalena Schmidt, “(Selbst-)Hilfe in Zeiten der Hilflosigkeit? die ‘Jüdische Soziale Selbsthilfe’ und die ‘Jüdische Unterstützungsstelle’ im Generalgouvernement, 1939–1944/45” (PhD diss., Univesity of Giessen, 2015); Michael Weichert, Jidiše aleinhilf 1939–1945 (Tel Aviv: Menora, 1962).

102 Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?, 120.

103 Moshe Fass, “Theatrical Activities in the Polish Ghettos during the Years 1939–1942,” Jewish Social Studies 38, no 1 (1976): 54–72.

104 Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg, 24–25, 36.

105 Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg, 47.

2 Jewish Leadership

1 It was likely the Einsatzgruppen that convened the Judenrat in all three cases. Michal Unger, Reassessment of the Image of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2004), 14; Adam Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków: Prelude to Doom, ed. Joseph Kermish, Stanisław Staron, and Raul Hilberg (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1999), 78–79.

2 Jewish communal organizations, or the kehillah, have a long history in Poland of serving as intermediaries between government authorities and the Jewish community as well as providing religious and charitable support for the community. With the emergence of the Polish Second Republic, Jewish communal organizations were incorporated into local governments, with oversight of religious institutions and activities. In theory, kehillah leadership was to be selected by enfranchised Jewish men, but at various times the Polish government stepped in to exercise control over Jewish communal leadership. In Warsaw, the elected board was dissolved and replaced in 1937 with a government-appointed council, in part as a rebuke for protesting against antisemitic legislation by the Polish state. In Łódź, the government postponed elections when faced with the possibility of a left-leaning kehillah under the control of the Bundists.

3 See, for example, Antoni Galinski, and Mark Budziark, eds., Eksterminacja inteligencji Łódźi i okregu łódźkiego, 1939–1940 (Łódź: Okręgowa Komisja Badania Zbrodni Przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu w Łodzi, Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 1992).

4 Rafał Landau, the head of the Jewish community of Kraków, Leibl Mincberg, president of the Łódź community board, and Maurycy Mayzel, the head of the Jewish community of Warsaw, all fled their respective cities.

5 In Łódź and Kraków, the Germans invaded well before Reinhard Heydrich issued directives, including the Schnellbrief of September 21, 1939, on the creation and format of the Jewish Councils. The Schnellbrief laid out Nazi Jewish policy in occupied Poland. For more on ghettos that predate the Schnellbrief and the function of the Schnellbrief, see Dan Michman, “Why Did Heydrich Write the Schnellbrief? A Remark on the Reason and Its Significance,” Yad Vashem Studies 32 (2004): 443–47.

6 Please note that Marek Bieberstein’s name appears on documents from the period as Bieberstein while his brother’s last name is rendered as Biberstein and some scholars use “Biberstein” in discussions of Marek Bieberstein. For the purposes of this monograph, I have used Bieberstein for Marek unless quoting another scholar who used Biberstein.

7 Chaim A. Kaplan, Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan, trans. and ed. Abraham Isaac Katsch (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 215.

8 Helene Sinnreich, “The Chairman,” in The Highest Form of Wisdom: A Memorial Publication in Honor of Saul S. Friedman (1937–2013), ed. Jonathan C. Friedman, and Robert D. Miller II (New York: Ktav, 2016), 54–78; Joseph L. Lichten, and Ludwik Krzyżanowski, “Adam Czerniaków and His Times,” Polish Review 29, no. 1/2 (1984): 71–89; see also Unger, Reassessment of the Image of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski.

9 Lichten and Krzyżanowski, “Adam Czerniaków and His Times.”

10 According to Yankl Nirenberg, Rumkowski had no power over Gertler or Kliger. See Yankl Nirenberg, Memoirs of the Łódź Ghetto, trans. Vivian Felsen (Toronto: Lugus Libros, 2003), 65. Other leading members of the ghetto leadership in Łódź, including Aron Jakubowicz, have also been suspected of reporting to the Gestapo. See Ewa Wiatr et al., Encyclopedia of the Ghetto: The Unfinished Project of the Łódź Ghetto Archivists (Łódź: Archiwum Państwowe, 2017), 10.

11 Abraham Gancwajch managed to escape to the Aryan side of Warsaw prior to being arrested. Dawid Gertler was arrested and deported to Auschwitz. He survived the war. Much of the Kraków ghetto Jewish police were killed just after the liquidation of the ghetto and the transfer of the population to Płaszów. Marek Kliger, who was not purged, survived the war. He was tried in an honor court after the war. On Kliger, see Sascha Feuchert, Erwin Leibfried, and Jörg Riecke, Letzte Tage: die Łódzer Getto-Chronik Juni/Juli 1944 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004), 12, 202 ff.

12 Not all ghettos became closed ghettos, but the three in this study did. See Helene Sinnreich, “Victim and Perpetrator Perspectives of World War II–Era Ghettos,” in The Routledge History of the Holocaust, ed. Jonathan C. Friedman (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 115–24.

13 Kaplan, Scroll of Agony, 210.

14 Maurycy Mayzel was killed by the Germans in 1942 in Kowel. See Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City, trans. Emma Harris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 138.

15 Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków, 78.

16 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 138–39.

17 Abraham Gepner would later be in charge of the provisioning department for the Warsaw Ghetto.

18 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 168–69.

19 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 137.

20 It is not clear how many Jews in Warsaw spoke Yiddish as their native language. In the 1931 census, 89 percent of Warsaw Jewry declared Yiddish to be their native tongue, while only 6 percent declared Polish. The 1931 census, however, was problematic because it offered no other way to indicate Jewish national identity, a protected status under the Minority Rights Treaty. As a result, people used language as a means of identification, and it is likely not an accurate reflection of language use.

21 Lichten and Krzyżanowski, “Adam Czerniaków and His Times.”

22 Browning, The Path to Genocide, p. 11

23 Kaplan, Scroll of Agony, 66.

24 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 38.

25 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 39.

26 Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków, 213. Czerniaków’s diary documents numerous beatings of members of the Warsaw Judenrat both before and after the establishment of the ghetto.

27 Kaplan, Scroll of Agony, 210.

28 Emmanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: The Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum, ed. Jacob Sloan (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), 86.

29 Charles Roland, Courage under Siege: Starvation, Disease, and Death in the Warsaw Ghetto (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 27.

30 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 149.

31 Katarzyna Person, Assimilated Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto: 1940–1943 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2014), 32. See also Katarzyna Person, Policjanci (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2018); Svenja Bethke, “Crime and Punishment in Emergency Situations: The Jewish Ghetto Courts in Łódź, Warsaw, and Vilna in World War II – A Comparative Study,” Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 28, no. 3 (2014): 1–17.

32 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 193.

33 Mary Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg: Growing Up in the Warsaw Ghetto, ed. S. L. Shneiderman (Oxford: One World, 2007), 32.

34 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 218.

35 Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg, 37.

36 Halina Nelken, And Yet, I Am Here!, vol. 1 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 124.

37 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 151.

38 The Schnellbrief of September 21, 1939, laid out Nazi Jewish policy in occupied Poland. For more on ghettos that predate the Schnellbrief and the function of the Schnellbrief, see Michman, “Why Did Heydrich Write the Schnellbrief?”

39 Unger, Reassessment of the Image of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, 14.

40 Adam Sitarek, “Otoczone drutem państwo”: Struktura i funkcjonowanie administracji Żydowskiej getta łódźkiego (Łódź: Instytut Pamie ̨ci Narodowej, 2015), 340.

41 There were numerous theories on how Rumkowski became the head of the Jewish community in Łódź. However, much of this speculation has been debunked. For more on this history, see Unger, Reassessment of the Image of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski; Sinnreich, “The Chairman.”

42 Wiatr et al., Encyclopedia of the Ghetto, 23.

43 On Babiacki, see Szymon Rogoziński and Andrew Firestone, My Fortunate Life (East Malvern, Australia: Bookaburra, 2000), 54. Babiacki was also a delegate to the Polish Ministry of Industry and the Chamber of Commerce and Industry; see Pawel Korzec, Studia i materiały do dziejów Łódźi i okręgu łódzkiego (Łódź: Wydawn Łódzkie, 1962), 200. On Faust, see Isaiah Trunk, Łódź Ghetto: A History, trans. Robert Moses Shapiro, intro. Israel Gutman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 87. On Gerszowski, who died at Auschwitz, see Andrzej Strzelecki, The Deportation of Jews from the Łódź Ghetto to KL Auschwitz and Their Extermination, trans. Witold Zbirohowski-Kościa (Oswiecim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2006), 55, 139. Dr. Helman was born on May 3, 1875, and worked as an otolaryngologist in Łódź, serving as head of the health department and deputy head of the Beirat until the sealing of the ghetto. He worked in the ghetto as a doctor until his death in November 1942; see Wiatr et al., Encyclopedia of the Ghetto, 93. Pick survived the imprisonment of the Beirat and was sent on a transport to Kraków; see Trunk, Łódź Ghetto, 457n92. Dawid Warszawski was present in September 1942 at Rumkowski’s “Give Me Your Children” speech, where he spoke and tried to explain the German edict; see Trunk, Łódź Ghetto, 242. Finally, on Wyszewiański, see Wiatr et al., Encyclopedia of the Ghetto, 23; Sitarek, Otoczone drutem państwo, 50–51.

44 Samuel Faust and Dawid Windman were spared arrest; see Michal Unger, “Religion and Religious Institutions in the Łódź Ghetto,” in Remembering for the Future, ed. John K. Roth et al., (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 335–351. Wiatr et al., Encyclopedia of the Ghetto, 23. Those who were arrested but survived were Dr. A. Damm, Arthur Frankfurt, Pinkus Gerszowski, Dr. Dawid Lajb Helman, Mieczysław Hertz, Jakub Lando, Leon Mokrski, Chil Majer Pick, Dawid Warszawski, and Maks Wyszewiański; see Wiatr et al., Encyclopedia of the Ghetto, 23.

45 Even before his days as leader of the Łódź ghetto, Rumkowski was a controversial figure. He had estranged himself from his political party, the Zionists, through battling with them on political issues in the 1930s; see Sinnreich “The Chairman,” 58. Among those who accused him of organizing the excution of his first council was Leon Szykier (testimony, 301/699, ŻIH).

46 The second Beirat comprised Abraham Alter, Lejzer Baum, Stanisław Bęczkowski, Ber Częstochowski, Lewi Edelman, Dr. Ludwig Falk, Henryk Hersz Fein, Mosze Jehuda Friedrich, Zygmunt Goldberg, Mendel Krasucki, engineer Grzegorz Łapp, Józef Lipski, Dr. Edward Reicher, Aron Hersz Szapiro, Dr. Leon Szykier, Wolf Ulinower, Dawid Warszawski, Chaim Mordka Winawer, and Mosze Zażujer, as well as Dr. Dawid Lajb Helman and Dawid Warszawski from the first Beirat. See Sitarek, Otoczone drutem państwo, 53; Wiatr et al., Encyclopedia of the Ghetto; Unger, Reassessment of the Image of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, 19.

47 Yitzhak Arad, Israel Gutman, and Abraham Margaliot, eds., Documents on the Holocaust: Selected Sources on the Destruction of the Jews of Germany and Austria, Poland, and the Soviet Union (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press), 192–94.

48 Public announcement no. 1, March 1, 1940, Gettoverwaltung Records (GV) 29211, doc. 1, Łódź State Archive (Archiwum Panstwowe w Łódźi), Łódź, Poland; Nechama Tec, Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 28–29.

49 Arad, Gutman, and Margaliot, Documents on the Holocaust, 192–94. The original announcement of the creation of the ghetto, dating to February 1940, included a provision that allowed Jews who were employed within the city to remain in the city, without their families, provided their employer meet their needs of food and housing.

50 GV 29211, doc. 5, Łódź State Archive; “Department of Groceries and Bread,” no author, n.d., box 19, folder 883, Nachman Zonabend Collection, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York.

51 Lucian Dobroszycki, ed., The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto, 1941–1944 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), xxxvii.

52 Alan Adelson, and Robert Lapides, eds., Łódź Ghetto: Inside a Community under Siege (New York: Viking Press, 1989), 58. Adelson puts “[sic]” next to the total number of apartments, but the number calculated is correct. Adding the total number of apartments with drains (1,338) to the total number of apartments with no facilities (30,624) results in a calculation of 31,962 apartments, the same number stated by Adelson. Before the war, 25 percent of apartments in Łódź had running water. The lack of water and sewage in the ghetto was appalling and noteworthy to its residents. However, to keep the situation in historical perspective, in 1939, only 16 percent of properties in Łódź were connected to the water and sewage systems; see Wiesław Pus, “The Development of the City of Łódź (1820–1939),” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 6 (2005): 17.

53 David Shavit, Hunger for the Printed Word: Books and Libraries in the Jewish Ghettos of Nazi-Occupied Europe (London: McFarland, 1997), 79.

54 Lillian Kranitz-Sanders, Twelve Who Survived: An Oral History of the Jews of Łódź, Poland, 1930–1954 (New York: Irvington, 1984), 84–85.

55 Public announcement no. 12, dated April 6, 1940, GV 29211/7, Łódź State Archive.

56 Michal Unger, The Last Ghetto: Life in the Łódź Ghetto, 1940–1944 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1995), 32.

57 Dobroszycki, The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto, xxxviii, xxxix.

58 Multiple individuals headed food distribution departments and then, as the food distribution system evolved, switched to other projects. These individuals were often either connected to Rumkowski through their activism in the Zionist movement before the war or connected to other high-ranking individuals in Rumkowski’s administration. For example, Boruch Praszkier served as head of housing, then co-organizer of kitchens, and later head of the Department for Special Matters. He was also an activist for the General Zionists before the war. His deputy at the Department of Special Matters was Dawid Gertler’s cousin Michal Gertler. The Department for Special Matters had the strongest connection between the ghetto and happenings at Chelmno extermination camp. It oversaw activities like sorting clothing from the extermination camp. Aron Dawid Najman headed milk and then vegetable distribution before retiring, after which he became director of the clothing department. Presumably, the last position was given to him to protect him from deportation. Luzer Najman headed the provisioning department and then the coal department, while Mordechaj Lajzerowicz was in charge of the bakery and flour supplies from the beginning of the occupation through the ghetto period. It was unusual for one person to stay in a single position. It was equally unusual for someone to change departments as often as Henry Neftalin, who went from heading housing to organizing ration cards to handling supplemental rations, or Zygmunt Reingold, who headed divisions in the Ordungsdienst, commanded the Sonderkommando, and then became co-head of the Provisioning Department. Abram Szajniak moved from the Housing Department to the Kitchen Department to the Commission of the Old Shoe Warehouse.

59 Freda Milstein, interview 34571, October 21, 1997, Visual History Archives, USC Shoah Foundation.

60 Reinhard Heydrich’s Schnellbrief of September 21, 1939, laid out Nazi Jewish policy in occupied Poland. For more on ghettos that predate the Schnellbrief and the function of the Schnellbrief, see Michman, “Why Did Heydrich Write the Schnellbrief?”

61 Announcement to the Jewish Community, dated September 17, 1939, p. 2, signed Prof. Marek Bieberstein and Dr. Wilhelm Goldblatt, RG-15.079M 811 I786, USHMMA.

62 There are multiple debates about the date. See, for example, Andrea Löw, and Agnieszka Zajaczkowska-Drozdz, “Leadership in the Jewish Councils as a Social Process: The Example of Cracow,” in The Holocaust and European Societies: Social Processes and Social Dynamics, eds. Frank Bajohr, and Andrea Löw (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 192. Some sources use Marek Bieberstein’s testimony of September 13, 1940, in which he states that he had been chair of the Jewish Council in Kraków since September 12, 1939. See Marek Bieberstein, testimony, September 13, 1940, RG-15.072, file 1, p. 254, USHMMA. Others use September 13, 1939, because it appears on a flyer. See Announcement to the Jewish Community, dated September 17, 1939, RG-15.079M 811 I786, p. 2, USHMMA.

63 Leib Salpeter, testimony, RG‐15.084M, Relacje Ocalalych z Holocaustu, Sygn. 301, 1945–1946, USHMMA.

64 Loew and Zajaczkowska-Drozdz, “Leadership in the Jewish Councils as a Social Process,” 192.

65 Agnieszka Zajaczkowska-Drozdz, “Krakówski Judenrat,” Studia nad Autorytaryzmem i Totalitaryzmem 37, no. 1 (2015): 57.

66 Michman, “Why Did Heydrich Write the Schnellbrief?,” 436.

67 Announcement to the Jewish Community, dated September 17, 1939, RG-15.079M 811 I786, p. 2, USHMMA; Questionnaires of Jews who applied for personal I.D. cards from circa 1940–1941, RG 15.098m 109, p. 547, USHMMA.

68 Born in 1897, Dembitzer survived the war through the intervention of Oskar Schindler. Leib Salpeter, testimony, RG‐15.084M, Relacje Ocalalych z Holocaustu, Sygn. 301, 1945–1946, USHMMA.

69 Questionnaires of Jews who applied for personal I.D. cards from circa 1940–1941, RG 15.098m 80, p. 930, USHMMA.

70 Letter signed by F. Schenker, dated October 24, 1940, RG 15.098m 74, p. 752, USHMMA.

71 Questionnaires of Jews who applied for personal I.D. cards from circa 1940–1941, RG 15.098m 141, p. 125, USHMMA.

72 Announcement to the Jewish Community, dated September 17, 1939, RG-15.079M 811 I786, p. 2, USHMMA.

73 On Greif, see Questionnaires of Jews who applied for personal I.D. cards from circa 1940–1941, RG 15.098m 24, pp. 862–63, USHMMA. On Haber, see Leib Salpeter, testimony, 301.448, ŻIH.

74 Leon Salpeter was a druggist, born on December 20, 1897, who worked in Julius Madritsch’s factory and then was at Bruennlitz with Oskar Schindler. He was the author of the letter given to Schindler by his workers to protect him, on the surrender of the German army. Salpeter wrote a forty-seven-page testimony of his wartime experience, which is part of the Jewish Historical Institute’s collection of Holocaust testimonies (ŻIH 301.448). He also participated in the Zionist Congress in London after the war.See Leib Salpeter, testimony, RG‐15.084M, Relacje Ocalalych z Holocaustu, Sygn. 301, 1945–1946, USHMMA. Rafał Morgenbesser, born October 9, 1900, was an accountant and member of Kraków Judenrat in charge of organization matters and general affairs. He was on Schindler’s list and liberated at Bruennlitz, and he married Henryka Krieger, born August 11, 1904, who was sister to Dr. Alfred Krieger. Dr. Dawid Schlang, who was born on July 8, 1903 or 1905, ended up in Bruennlitz due to being on Schindler’s list. He was a solicitor in Kraków before and after the war. See the Arolsen Archives, formerly the International Tracing Service archive (ITS), 32578387; Norbert Schlang, interview, 27127, segment 27, March 10, 1997, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation. Dr. Dawid Bulwa was born on March 12, 1882, and his last known address was ul Grodzka 49, Kraków, Poland; see ITS #4235385; Leib Salpeter, testimony, 301.448, ŻIH. Joachim Goldflus was arrested and transported to Auschwitz on April 5, 1941, and was given camp number 11969. His further fate is unknown. He was implicated in the Eugen Reichert affair (bribery).; Activities of the Judenrat (Jewish council) in Kraków, RG-15.072 file 1, p. 251, USHMMA.

75 On Symon Nowimiast, see Aleksander Bieberstein, Zaglada Żydow w Krakówie (Kraków: Wydawn Literackie, 1986), 16; see also Leib Salpeter, testimony, 301.448, ŻIH.

76 Leib Salpeter, testimony, 301.448, ŻIH.

77 Leib Salpeter, testimony, 301.448, ŻIH. This event was also reported by Malvina Graf, The Kraków Ghetto and the Płaszów Camp Remembered (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1989), 10.

78 Leib Salpeter, testimony, 301.448, ŻIH; Graf, The Kraków Ghetto, 10.

79 Jan Najder, testimony, dated May 29, 1945, RG‐15.084M, Relacje Ocalalych z Holocaustu, Sygn. 301, 1945–1946, USHMMA.

80 Leib Salpeter, testimony, 301.448, ŻIH.

81 Activities of the Judenrat (Jewish council) in Kraków, Poland, RG-15.072M, Rada Żydowska miasta, Krakówa, Sygn. 218, USHMMA. Adam Czerniaków mentions Bieberstein’s arrest in his diary on September 14, 1940; see Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków, 197.

82 Löw and Zajaczkowska-Drozdz, “Leadership in the Jewish Councils as a Social Process,” 194.

83 Questionnaires of Jews who applied for personal I.D. cards from circa 1940–1941, RG 15.098m 66, p. 1118, USHMMA.

84 Questionnaires of Jews who applied for personal I.D. cards from circa 1940–1941, RG 15.098m 62, p. 472, USHMMA. As far as I could find, the first document signed by Rosenzweig as Jewish community leader was dated November 25, 1940 (RG 15.098m 119, p. 1240, USHMMA). Prior to that Ferdinand Schenker, who noted in his own paperwork in early November 1940 that he was the interim head of the Jewish community, had been signing things on behalf of the community; see RG 15.098m 66, p. 1118, USHMMA. He last did so on November 22, 1940 (RG 15.098m 155, p. 87, USHMMA). Rosenzweig in his paperwork of November 18, 1940, mentions that he had been a solicitor but does not yet indicate his position in the Jewish community; see RG 15.098m 62, p. 453, USHMMA.

85 See document dated August 3, 1942, RG 15.098m 156, p. 505, USHMMA; David Gutter, registration, December 3, 1940, RG 15.098m 111, p. 1423, USHMMA. I established that this was the correct David Gutter by comparing the signature on the first of these documents (which included the official stamp of the head of the Jewish community) with the signature on his registration. Both documents render his name as David Gutter, not Dawid Gutter, the Polish spelling. Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków, 363.

86 The announcement appeared in the March 6, 1941, issue of the Krakauer Zeitung.

87 Abraham Melezin, Przyczynek do znajomosci stosunkow demograicznych wsrod ludnosci żydowskiej w Łódźi, Krakówie i Lublinie podczas okupacji niemieckij (Łódź: Centralnej Żydowskiej Komisji Historycznej, 1946), 26.

88 Joanna Sliwa, “A Link between the Inside and the Outside Worlds: Jewish Child Smugglers in the Kraków Ghetto,” Zeitschrift für Genozidforschung 13, no. 1–2 (2012): 62.

89 Melezin, Przyczynek do znajomosci stosunkow demograicznych, 29.

90 Mietek Pemper, The Road to Rescue: The Untold Story of Schindler’s List (New York: Hoffmann and Campe Verlag, 2008), 25.

91 Sliwa, “A Link between the Inside and the Outside Worlds,” 62; Melezin, Przyczynek do znajomosci stosunkow demograicznych, 26.

92 Diane Plotkin, “Smuggling in the Ghettos: Survivor Accounts from the Warsaw, Łódź, and Kraków Ghettos,” in Life in the Ghettos during the Holocaust, ed. Eric C. Sterling (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005), 113.

93 Melezin, Przyczynek do znajomosci stosunkow demograicznych, 28; Bieberstein, Zaglada Żydów w Krakówie, 53.

94 Melezin, Przyczynek do znajomosci stosunkow demograicznych, 28.

95 Melezin, Przyczynek do znajomosci stosunkow demograicznych, 67.

96 Melezin, Przyczynek do znajomosci stosunkow demograicznych, 29; Rachel Garfunkel, interview 55341, segment 42, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

97 Bernard Offen, My Hometown Concentration Camp: A Survivor’s Account of Life in the Kraków Ghetto and Płaszów Concentration Camp (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2008), 16.

98 Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 6.

99 Icchak Henryk Rubin, Żydzi w Łodzi pod niemiecką okupacją 1939–1945 (London: Kontra, 1988), 222.

100 Hans Biebow to Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, April 16, 1940, box 1, folder 84, YIVO; Biebow to Rumkowski, May 30, 1940, box 1, folder 98, YIVO.

101 Chronicle, March 1, 1941.

102 GV 2953, doc. 13, Łódź State Archive.

103 GV 29454, doc. 12 and doc. 34, Łódź State Archive; “Department of Groceries and Bread,” no author, n.d., box 19, folder 883, YIVO.

104 Chronicle, January 19, 1941.

105 Chronicle, January 26, 1941.

106 Rosensweig was also beaten when he was relieved of his position as head of the Kraków Judenrat. See Tadeusz Pankiewicz, The Cracow Ghetto Pharmacy (Washington, DC: Holocaust Library, 2000), 48.

107 In all three locations, exceptional and native German ability were always needed by Jewish leadership. The German abilities of the leadership in a specific city, however, affected how essential or indispensable individuals could become in an administration.

3 The Supply and Distribution of Food

1 The chapter epigraph is from Hanno Loewy, Andrzej Bodek, and François Coppée, Les Vrais Riches, Notizen am Rand: ein Tagebuch aus dem Ghetto Łódź (Mai bis August 1944) (Leipzig: Reclam, 1997), 62.

2 Jakub Poznanski, Dziennik z Łódźkiego getta (Warsaw: Dom Wydawniczy, 2002), 26.

3 “Department of Groceries and Bread,” no author, n.d., box 19, folder 883, YIVO.

4 Order no. 45, May 19, 1940, box 3, folder 184, YIVO; Emmanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: The Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum, ed. Jacob Sloan (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), 188.

5 Poznanski, Dziennik z Łódźkiego getta, 26; “Department of Groceries and Bread,” no author, n.d., box 19, folder 883, YIVO; Barbara Alpern Engel, “Not by Bread Alone: Subsistence Riots in Russia during World War I,” Journal of Modern History 69, no. 4 (1997): 715.

6 Department of Groceries and Bread,” no author, n.d., box 19, folder 883, YIVO; no. 48, May 25, 1940, box 3, folder 185, YIVO; no. 52, June 2, 1940, box 3, folder 187, YIVO.

7 Poznanski, Dziennik z Łódźkiego getta, 32.

8 Poznanski, 32.

9 At the same time that the Germans were attempting to draw out Jewish wealth with food, they were forcibly removing valuables from the ghetto population. In May 1940, the Kripo (Criminal Police) established an office in the ghetto with the aim of expropriating Jewish property both within and outside the ghetto. They held Jews suspected of hiding valuables and tortured them to reveal these valuables’ location. See, for example, Blanka Rothschild, interview 2273, May 2, 1995, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation; Ester H., interview 506, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

10 “Department of Groceries and Bread,” no author, n.d., box 19, folder 883, YIVO.

11 Order no. 186, December 27, 1940, box 6, folder 307, YIVO; Order no. 178, December 12, 1940, box 6, folder 300, YIVO; Order no. 177, December 10, 1940, box 6, folder 299, YIVO.

12 Ewa Wiatr et al., Encyclopedia of the Ghetto: The Unfinished Project of the Łódź Ghetto Archivists (Łódź: Archiwum Państwowe, 2017), 52, 112.

13 “Persons of good will need not worry about their fate. Only the unwelcome element will leave the ghetto”; speech dated December 20, 1941, box 20, folder 925, YIVO.

14 Biuletyn Kroniki Codziennej, February 1, 1942, box 20, folder 927, YIVO.

15 Chronicle, January 12, 1941; Chronicle, January 17, 1941. Children up to the age of fourteen received seven marks, adults of ages fifteen to sixty received ten marks, those of ages sixty-one to seventy received twelve marks, those from seventy-one to seventy-nine received fourteen marks, and those over age eighty received sixteen marks.

16 Order no. 186, December 27, 1940, box 6, folder 307, YIVO; Chronicle, January 19, 1941.

17 Chronicle, April 19, 1941.

18 NS 19/2655/26, Bundesarchiv, Berlin, Germany.

19 The calculations are based on figures given in NS 19/2655/23–29, Bundesarchiv; food permitted to be ordered, food actually ordered, and population statistics for May 1, 1941, in GV 29199/274, Łódź State Archive.

20 The calculations are based on NS 19/2655/26, Bundesarchiv.

21 Israel Tabaksblatt, testimony, 301/634, ŻIH.

22 Chronicle, September 1941 summary; Chronicle, November 1941 summary.

23 Avraham Barkai, “Between East and West: Jews from Germany in the Łódź Ghetto,” Yad Vashem Studies 16 (1984): 290.

24 Marian Turski, “Individual Experience in Diaries from the Łódź Ghetto,” in Holocaust Chronicles: Individualizing the Holocaust through Diaries and Other Contemporaneous Personal Accounts, ed. Robert Moses Shapiro (New York: Ktav, 1999), 118.

25 And where was God?, 1960, RG-02 *127, USHMMA.

26 GV 29200, Łódź State Archive.

27 Isaiah Trunk, Łódź Ghetto: A History, trans. Robert Moses Shapiro, intro. Israel Gutman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 139.

28 Isaiah Trunk, Łódź Ghetto: A History, trans. Robert Moses Shapiro, intro. Israel Gutman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 139.

29 Hersz Fogel, A Hidden Diary from the Łódź Ghetto, 1942–1944, ed. Helene Sinnreich (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2015), 130.

30 Alexandra Zapruder, Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 234.

31 Fogel, A Hidden Diary from the Łódź Ghetto, 110.

32 N. N., October 10, 1941, box 9, folder 421, YIVO. Cholent is a traditional Eastern European Jewish dish served on holidays that prohibit cooking. The dish is placed in a low-temperature oven the afternoon before the holiday and retrieved the next day for lunch. Sukkot in 1941 began on October 6, 1941.

33 Order no. 242, April 3, 1941, box 7, folder 359, YIVO; Order no. 248, April 13, 1941, box 7, folder 365, YIVO; Geto-tsaytung far informatsye, farordenungen un bakantmachungen (Ghetto Gazette for Information, Announcements, and Ordinances), nos. 1–18, Yiddish, March 7, 1941, through September 21, 1941, box 17, folder 825, YIVO. In 1941, Passover ran from April 11 to April 19.

34 Chronicle, April 1, 1941; Chronicle, April 4, 1941; Chronicle, April 5, 1941; Chronicle, April 10, 1941.

35 Chronicle, May 27–31, 1941; Geto-tsaytung far informatsye, farordenungen un bakantmachungen, nos. 1–18, March 7, 1941, through September 21, 1941, box 17, folder 825, YIVO.

36 “An opinion by the rabbinate in the matter of consumption of non-kosher meat,” February 27, 1941, box 15, folder 794, YIVO.

37 Chronicle, April 7, 1941: Administratively, a special section of the Order Service supervised food supplies entering the ghetto. Additionally, a section controlled food prices in the stores and on the streets and combated violations perpetuated in the official food distribution centers. The cycle of power transitions also seems to coincide with Rumkowski’s being pushed aside as actual leader of the ghetto following a mental breakdown after the September deportations of children, sick, and elderly.

38 Announcement by Hans Biebow, October 1943, December, 17, 1943–July, 25, 1944, box 2, folder 117, YIVO.

39 Order no. 401, November 3, 1943, box 11, folder 526, YIVO; Order no. 402, November 5, 1943, box 11, folder 528, YIVO; Order no. 403, November 8, 1943, box 11, folder 529, YIVO.

40 Announcement by Hans Biebow, October 1943, December, 17, 1943 -July, 25, 1944, box 2, folder 117, YIVO.

41 GV 30043/157; GV 30043/137; GV 29238/295; GV 29191/22, Łódź State Archive.

42 See, for example, Halina Bochenek, testimony, O.3/9862, 6, Yad Vashem Archives, Jerusalem, Israel.

43 Halina Nelken, And Yet, I Am Here!, vol. 1 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 74

44 Nelken, And Yet, I Am Here!, 75.

45 Nelken, And Yet, I Am Here!, 91.

46 Nelken, And Yet, I Am Here!, 92.

47 Norbert Schlang, interview 27127, segment 15, March 10, 1997, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation. Schlang’s father was a member of the Judenrat, and so the yellow card may have been either a special item or the typical card. However, this was also the color of the ration card and practice of distribution of cards in the Warsaw ghetto.

48 Leo Bach, interview 30751, segment 27, June 8, 1997, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

49 Aleksander Bieberstein, Zaglada Żydów w Krakówie (Kraków: Wydawn Literackie, 2001), 58.

50 Nelken, And Yet, I Am Here!, 144.

51 Nelken, And Yet, I Am Here!, 145.

52 Leib Salpeter, testimony, RG‐15.084M, Relacje Ocalalych z Holocaustu, Sygn. 301, 1945–1946, USHMMA.

53 Nelken, And Yet, I Am Here!, 124.

54 Bernard Offen, interview 53621, segment 171, April 22, 1992, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

55 Shimon Huberband et al., Kiddush Hashem: Jewish Religious and Cultural Life in Poland during the Holocaust (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1987), 208.

56 Mark Goldfinger, interview 44971, June 3, 1998, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

57 Adolf Wolfman, interview 32773, September 4, 1997, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

58 Tola Wehrman, interview 55051, segment 226, October 17, 2012, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

59 Anna Reich, interview 1292, segment 35, March 7, 1995, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

60 Nathan Nothman, interview 10564, segment 30, December 26, 1996, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

61 Tadeusz Pankiewicz, The Kraków Ghetto Pharmacy, trans. Garry Malloy (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2013), 34, 35

62 Pankiewicz, The Kraków Ghetto Pharmacy, 80.

63 Tadeusz Pankiewicz, interview by Claude Lanzmann, RG-60.5014, Shoah Collection, USHMMA.

64 Rena Birnhack née Wohlfeiler, interview, Ocalić od zapomnienia (Save from being forgotten), Historical Museum of the City of Kraków. Kraków, Poland, accessed June 27, 2020, https://ocalicpamiec.mhk.pl/en/?portfolio=rena-birnhack-nee-wohlfeiler.

65 Marcus Leuchter, interview 54896, segment 153, February 28, 1997, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

66 Engel, “Not by Bread Alone,” 715.

67 The letters name the companies Carlos Campos and Jose Joaquim Pires in Lisbon as having successfully reached them. Richard S. Hollander et al., Every Day Lasts a Year: A Jewish Family’s Correspondence from Poland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 262, 263, 278.

68 This transfer of internal distribution control from the city authorities to the Jewish ghetto administration in Warsaw took place on the same date that the Jewish ghetto administration in Łódź carried out a large-scale reorganization of food distribution and moved to ration cards.

69 Adam Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków: Prelude to Doom, ed. Joseph Kermish, Stanisław Staron, and Raul Hilberg (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1999), 218.

70 Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City, trans. Emma Harris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 303.

71 Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków, 238, 305.

72 The Supply Section was initially funded with a loan from its head, Abraham Gepner. Czerniaków, 218.

73 Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków, 230, 255, 263, 269.

74 Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków, 239.

75 Christopher R. Browning argues that the decision to better provision the Warsaw ghetto was essentially made in April 1941. However, the effects of the improved food conditions were not felt in the ghetto until summer 1941, with the bypassing of the Transferstelle and the increase of soup kitchen funds. See Christopher R. Browning, “Nazi Ghettoization Policy in Poland: 1939–41,” Central European History 19, no. 4 (1986): 343–68.

76 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 421.

77 Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków, 238. The German directive to open community kitchens in Warsaw came two days after Rumkowski visited the Warsaw ghetto.

78 Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków, 221, 223.

79 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 429.

80 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 182.

81 Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, 142.

82 Isaiah Trunk, “Religious, Educational and Cultural Problems in the Eastern European Ghettos under German Occupation,” in East European Jews in Two World Wars: Studies from the YIVO Annual, ed. Deborah Dash Moore (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990), 160. In the Warsaw ghetto, those who were better off supported the poorest of the ghetto dwellers. The Berg family, which was in a privileged position in the ghetto, supported a children’s hospital on its street and, along with its neighbors, supported Dr. Janusz Korczak’s children’s home, located on the same street. Mary Berg noted that in her house, “a special kettle of soup is cooked every Friday for the Mattias Berson Children’s Hospital on Sienna Street.” Mary Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg: Growing up in the Warsaw Ghetto, ed. S. L. Shneiderman (Oxford: One World, 2007), 6.

83 Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, 146.

84 Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków, 263, 308, 338.

85 Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg, 31.

86 Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków, 295.

87 Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków, 254, 273, 327.

88 Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków, 308, 311, 322.

89 Seymour Levitan and Rachel Auerbach, “A Soup Kitchen in the Warsaw Ghetto: From the Memoirs of Rachel Auerbach,” Bridges 13, no. 2 (2008): 96–107.

90 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 166.

91 For more on mail packages sent to ghettos, see Jan Lambertz and Jan Láníček, More Than Parcels: Wartime Aid for Jews in Nazi-Era Camps and Ghettos (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2022). Thank you to Natalia Aleksiun for alerting me to this forthcoming publication.

92 Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków, 274, 286.

93 See, for example, “Rada Żydowska m. Krakówa/Listy prywatne wyslane przez E. Waiomana do krewnego,” 218/6, ŻIH; Hollander et al., Every Day Lasts a Year.

94 Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, 106, 125.

95 Eliyana R. Adler. “Ties That Bind: Transnational Support and Solidarity for Polish Jews in the USSR during World War II,” in Lambertz and Láníček, More Than Parcels. My gratitude to Eliyana Adler for sharing a manuscript of this chapter prior to publication.

96 Chronicle, July 5–12, 1941.

97 Anna Eilenberg-Eibeshitz, Preserved Evidence: Ghetto Łódź (Haifa: H. Eibeshitz Institute for Holocaust Studies, 1998), 235.

98 George Topas, interview 40322, March 24, 1998, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

99 Wiatr et al., Encyclopedia of the Ghetto, 204.

100 Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg, 52; Order no. 36, May 11, 1940, box 3, folder 181, YIVO; “Department of Groceries and Bread,” no author, n.d., box 19, folder 883, YIVO; Łódź Ghetto newspaper, Geto-tsaytung, issue 5, April 4, 1941, O.34/589, Yad Vashem.

101 Order no. 229, March 7, 1941, box 7, folder 349, YIVO.

102 Chronicle, July 20, 1941.

103 Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg, 52.

104 Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, 187.

105 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 347.

106 Lucie Brent, interview 396, segment 38, December 4, 1994, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

107 Anatol Chari and Timothy Braatz, From Ghetto to Death Camp: A Memoir of Privilege and Luck (Lakeville, MN: Disproportionate Press, 2011), 66.

108 Order no. 41, May 13, 1940, box 3, folder 184, YIVO; Order no. 82, July 12, 1940, box 3, folder 207, YIVO.

109 Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków, 379.

110 Martin Baral, interview 1663, segment 10, March 22, 1995, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

111 Nathan Nothman, interview 10564, segment 30, December 26, 1996, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

112 Fogel, A Hidden Diary from the Łódź Ghetto, 118.

113 Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg, 51–52; Rachel Garfunkel, interview 55341, segment 43, January 1, 2007, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

114 Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg, 51–52.

115 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 424.

116 Ghetto bulletin from July 2, 1942, reproduced in Trunk, Łódź Ghetto, 138.

117 “The White Sea,” by O[skar] S[inger], August 20, 1942, box 19, folder 872, YIVO. Originally from Prague, Dr. Singer (1893–1944) served as director of the Łódź Ghetto Archives and chief editor of the Łódź ghetto Chronicle. It was under his supervision that the language of the Chronicle was changed from Polish to German.

118 Huberband et al., Kiddush Hashem, 221, 228.

119 Huberband, et al., Kiddush Hashem, 139.

120 Nelken, And Yet, I Am Here!, 106.

121 “Ghetto conditions; soup kitchen; eating in street” (film), RG-60.0722, USHMMA; “Ghetto conditions; soup kitchen; eating in street” (film), RG-60.3823, USHMMA; “Autobiographical drawing by Halina Olomucki of people waiting in line in the Warsaw ghetto”, 2001.122.1, USHMMA.

122 Chari and Braatz, From Ghetto to Death Camp, 66.

123 Lucille Eichengreen, From Ashes to Life: My Memories of the Holocaust (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1994), 3.

124 Nelken, And Yet, I Am Here!, 144.

125 Michal Unger, “The Status and Plight of Women in the Łódź Ghetto,” in Women in the Holocaust, ed. Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 133. Food shortages have long affected women in many cultures experiencing famine because women have been responsible for standing in food lines and providing sustenance for the household. For example, the role of women in coping with food shortages is noted in Bertram M. Gordon, ed., Historical Dictionary of World War II France: The Occupation, Vichy, and the Resistance, 1938–1946 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), 367.

126 “And Where was God?”, RG-02 *127, USHMMA.

127 Rachel Garfunkel, interview, RG-50.601*001, USHMMA.

128 Josef Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days: Notes from the Łódź Ghetto, ed. Michal Unger (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem Press, 2002), 198.

129 Lenore J. Weitzman, “Resistance in Everyday Life: Family Strategies, Role Reversal, and Role-Sharing in the Holocaust,” in Jewish Families in Europe, 1939–Present: History, Representation, and Memory, ed. Joanna Beata Michlic (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2017), 46–66.

130 Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days, 182–83, 184.

131 For examples of this in Leningrad, see Alexis Peri, “Queues, Canteens, and the Politics of Location in Diaries of the Leningrad Blockade, 1941–1942,” in Hunger and War: Food Provisioning in the Soviet Union during World War II, ed. Wendy Z. Goldman and Donald A. Filtzer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 175; Engel, “Not by Bread Alone,” 715.

132 Cormac Ó Gráda, Eating People Is Wrong, and Other Essays on Famine, Its Past, and Its Future (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 3.

133 Wiatr et al., Encyclopedia of the Ghetto, 26.

134 Engel, “Not by Bread Alone,” 715.

135 N. N., No Title [Testimony from the Lodz ghetto]. 302/191, ŻIH.

136 N. N., June 27, 1942, box 10, folder 499, YIVO.

137 Chari and Braatz, From Ghetto to Death Camp, 66.

4 The Physical, Mental, and Social Effects of Hunger

1 Myron Winick, ed., Hunger Disease: Studies by the Jewish Physicians in the Warsaw Ghetto, trans. Martha Osnos (New York: John Wiley, 1979).

2 For more on the physical impact of starvation, see John R. Butterly and Jack Shepherd, Hunger: The Biology and Politics of Starvation (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2010), 55–95. There were also studies done of starvation during the siege of Leningrad.

3 Ewa Wiatr et al., Encyclopedia of the Ghetto: The Unfinished Project of the Łódź Ghetto Archivists (Łódź: Archiwum Państwowe, 2017), 48

4 Wiatr et al., Encyclopedia of the Ghetto, 146.

5 Hersz Fogel, A Hidden Diary from the Łódź Ghetto, 1942–1944, ed. Helene Sinnreich (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2015), 78.

6 Oskar Rosenfeld, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto: Notebooks from Łódź, ed., Hanno Loewy and Brigitte Goldstein (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 16.

7 Sven-Erik Rose, “Writing Hunger in a Modernist Key in the Warsaw Ghetto: Leyb Goldin’s ‘Chronicle of a Single Day,’” Jewish Social Studies 23, no. 1 (2017): 29–63.

8 Chronicle, August 4, 1941.

9 Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston: Beacon Press, 2019), 49; Laurie DeRose, Ellen Messer, and Sara Millman, Who’s Hungry? And How Do We Know? Food Shortage, Poverty, and Deprivation (New York: United Nations University Press, 1998), 7; Charles Roland, Courage under Siege: Starvation, Disease, and Death in the Warsaw Ghetto (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 116; Anatol Chari and Timothy Braatz, From Ghetto to Death Camp: A Memoir of Privilege and Luck (Lakeview, MN: Disproportionate Press, 2011), 55; State of Israel Ministry of Justice, The Trial of Adolf Eichmann: Record of Proceedings in the District Court of Jerusalem (Jerusalem: State of Israel Ministry of Justice, 1992), 379.

10 Zoë Vania Waxman, Writing the Holocaust: Identity, Testimony, Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 29; see also Joseph Kermish, To Live with Honor and Die with Honor! Selected Documents from the Warsaw Ghetto Underground Archives O.S. (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1986), 405.

11 Samuel Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? (Bloomington: First Vintage Books, 2009), 139.

12 DeRose, Messer, and Millman, Who’s Hungry?, 8.

13 Josef Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days: Notes from the Łódź Ghetto, ed. Michal Unger (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem Press, 2002), 55.

14 Henry Greenblatt, interview 12447, February 25, 1996, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

15 Marian Turski, “Individual Experience in Diaries from the Łódź Ghetto,” in Holocaust Chronicles: Individualizing the Holocaust through Diaries and other Contemporaneous Personal Accounts, ed. Robert Moses Shapiro (New York: Ktav, 1999), 120.

16 Mary Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg: Growing Up in the Warsaw Ghetto, ed. S. L. Shneiderman (Oxford: One World, 2007), 45.

17 NS/19/54, Bundesarchiv.

18 Chronicle, January 1–5, 1942.

19 Ancel Keys et al., The Biology of Human Starvation, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1950), 769.

20 Michael Zylberberg, A Warsaw Diary, 1939–1945 (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1969), 72.

21 Alex de Waal, Famine That Kills: Darfur, Sudan, 1984–1985 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

22 Avraham Barkai, “Between East and West: Jews from Germany in the Łódź Ghetto,” Yad Vashem Studies 16 (1984): 295.

23 DeRose, Messer, and Millman, Who’s Hungry?, 8.

24 Chronicle, July 20, 1941

25 In the ghetto, according to the ghetto encyclopedia, pellagra sometimes manifested not from a vitamin B-2 deficiency as is common but rather from the absence of protein bodies. Eleonora Bergman, Katarzyna Person, and Andrzej Żbikowski, eds., The Ringelblum Archive: Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny im. Emanuela Ringelbluma, 2017), 161.

26 DeRose, Messer, and Millman, Who’s Hungry?, 4.

27 Elie Aron Cohen, Human Behavior in the Concentration Camp, trans. M. H. Braaksma (New York: University Library, 1953), 64.

28 Bergman, Person, and Ż̇bikowski, The Ringelblum Archive, 28.

29 Robert Dirks et al., “Social Responses during Severe Food Shortages and Famine,” Current Anthropology 21, no. 1 (1980): 21–44.

30 Flora Herzberger memoirs, 1945, RG-02 *162. USHMMA.

31 Gusta Rubinfeld, interview 36610, segment 70, September 16, 1997, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

32 Halina Nelken, And Yet, I Am Here!, vol. 1 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 163.

33 DeRose, Messer, and Millman, Who’s Hungry?, 7.

34 Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War against the Jews, 1933–1945 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winton, 1975), 210.

35 Rosenfeld, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto, 23.

36 Alexandra Zapruder, Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 236.

37 Alison Montagrin, “Effects of Hunger on Emotional Arousal Responses and Attention/Memory Biases,” Emotion 21, no. 1 (2021): 148–58.

38 Rosenfeld, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto, 24.

39 Keys et al., The Biology of Human Starvation, 784.

40 Keys et al., The Biology of Human Starvation, 789.

41 Turski, “Individual Experience in Diaries from the Łódź Ghetto,” 119–20.

42 Flora Herzberger memoirs. 1945, RG-02 *162, USHMMA.

43 Roland, Courage under Siege, 115.

44 Keys et al., The Biology of Human Starvation, 785.

45 Keys et al., The Biology of Human Starvation, 784.

46 Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 48.

47 Chaim A. Kaplan, Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan, trans. and ed. Abraham Isaac Katsch (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 226.

48 Leon Poliakov, Harvest of Hate: The Nazi Program for the Destruction of the Jews of Europe (New York: Holocaust Library, 1979), 96.

49 Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days, 181.

50 Lucille Eichengreen, From Ashes to Life: My Memories of the Holocaust (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1994), 6.

51 Rosenfeld, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto, 19.

52 Hanno Loewy, Andrzej Bodek, and François Coppée, “Les Vrais Riches,” Notizen am Rand: ein Tagebuch aus dem Ghetto Łódź (Mai bis August 1944) (Leipzig: Reclam, 1997), 36.

53 Isaiah Trunk, Łódź Ghetto: A History, trans. Robert Moses Shapiro, intro. Israel Gutman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 116. By May 1944, the ghetto had virtually been transformed into a labor camp; this low-calorie intake, which is far too little to sustain even a sedentary individual, was thus meant to nourish a worker.

54 Lillian Kranitz-Sanders, Twelve Who Survived: An Oral History of the Jews of Łódź, Poland, 1930–1954 (New York: Irvington, 1984), 85.

55 Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days, 112.

56 Katarzyna Person, “‘The Children Ceased to Be Children’: Day-Care Centres at Refugee Shelters in the Warsaw Ghetto,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 30 (2018): 341–52.

57 Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days, 183.

58 N.N., No Title [Testimony from the Lodz ghetto]. 302/191, ŻIH.

59 “And where was God?”, RG-02 *127, USHMMA.

60 Rosenfeld, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto, 25.

61 Leon Leyson, The Boy on the Wooden Box (New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2013), 87.

62 Rosenfeld, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto, 18.

63 Eichengreen, From Ashes to Life, 5.

64 Luba Librowitz, interview 34921, November 2, 1997, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

65 Rosenfeld, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto, 18.

66 Nelken, And Yet, I Am Here!, 82.

67 “And where was God?”, RG-02 *127, USHMMA.

68 Mini Sheraton, The Bialy Eaters: The Story of a Bread and a Lost World (New York: Broadway Books, 2000).

69 “A Politsiant” / אַ פּאָליציאַנט (A Policeman), Yankele Hershkowitz recording, Henia and Nochem Reinhartz, 2002.209.1, USHMMA.

70 Yankel Herszkowicz and Joseph Wajsblat, Dos gezang fun lodžer geto: 1940–1944 (Paris: les Éd. polyglottes, 1994).

71 “Broyt” / ברױט (Bread), Yankele Hershkowitz recording, 2002.209.1, USHMMA.

72 Robert Moses Shapiro, “Diaries and Memoirs from the Łódź Ghetto in Yiddish and Hebrew,” in Holocaust Chronicles: Individualizing the Holocaust through Diaries and Other Contemporaneous Personal Accounts, ed. Robert Moses Shapiro (New York: Ktav, 1999), 97.

73 Nelken, And Yet, I Am Here!, 103.

74 Rosenfeld, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto, 29.

75 Handwritten notes by “J.B.A.” [Yerakhmiel Bryman], 1941–44, box 19, folder 897, YIVO.

76 Janusz Korczak, Ghetto Diary (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 188.

77 Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days, 80.

78 Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days, 149.

79 Twenty-two reports from the ghetto by Joseph Zelkowicz [Spring to Summer 1943], box 19, folder 896, YIVO.

80 Twenty-two reports from the ghetto by Joseph Zelkowicz [Spring to Summer 1943], box 19, folder 896, YIVO.

81 Eichengreen, From Ashes to Life, 6.

82 Rosenfeld, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto, 17 (epigraph), 41.

83 Shimon Huberband et al., Kiddush Hashem: Jewish Religious and Cultural Life in Poland during the Holocaust (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1987), 113.

84 Adam Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków: Prelude to Doom, ed. Joseph Kermish, Stanisław Staron, and Raul Hilberg (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1999).

85 Richard Lourie, “Who Korczak Was and Why We Can Not Know Him?” in Shapiro, Holocaust Chronicles, 51.

86 Gila Flam, Singing for Survival: Songs of the Łódź Ghetto, 1940–1945 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 140–41.

87 Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City, trans. Emma Harris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 592.

88 Engelking and Leociak, 591.

89 “And Where was God?”, RG-02 *127, USHMMA.

90 Cohen, Human Behavior, 71.

91 GV 29199, Łódź State Archive. Calculated by counting the number of times inanition (hunger edema) or a nutritional deficiency disease such as pellagra was listed as cause of death and dividing by total number of individuals listed as having died in the ghetto during that time period.

92 Cohen, Human Behavior in the Concentration Camp, 71.

93 Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days, 38.

94 “Dying in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto,” by O[skar] S[inger], July 27, 1942, box 17A, folder 868, YIVO.

95 David Arnold, Famine: Social Crisis and Historical Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 22.

96 Jochen von Lang, ed., Eichmann Interrogated: Transcripts from the Archives of the Israeli Police (New York: De Capo Press, 1983), 91.

97 Chronicle, January 1–5, 1942.

98 Chronicle, January 14–31, 1942.

99 Elizabeth M. Collingham, The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (New York: Penguin, 2013), 6.

100 Wiatr et al., Encyclopedia of the Ghetto, 112.

101 Bergman, Person, and Żbikowski, The Ringelblum Archive, 22.

102 Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 55.

103 Chronicle, January 1–5, 1942; Chronicle, January 14–31, 1942.

104 Chronicle, January 10–13, 1942.

105 Chronicle, February 1942; Chronicle, March 1942.

106 Chronicle, March 1942.

107 Chronicle, January 1–5, 1942; Chronicle, January 7, 1942.

108 Kate Macintyre, “Famine and the Female Mortality Advantage,” in Famine Demography: Perspectives from the Past and Present, ed. Tim Dyson and Cormac Ó Gráda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

109 Michal Unger, “The Status and Plight of Women in the Łódź Ghetto,” in Women in the Holocaust, ed. Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 125.

110 Exposure to cold doubles the number of calories expended.

111 Rosenfeld, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto, 144.

112 Unger, “The Status and Plight of Women in the Łódź Ghetto,” 132.

113 “Spots of Light: Women in the Holocaust: Food Overview,” Yad Vashem, accessed June 13, 2021, www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/women-in-the-holocaust/food/index.asp.

114 Flam, Singing for Survival, 111.

5 Hunger and Everyday Life in the Ghetto

1 The epigraph is from “Draysik Deka Broyt” / ברױט דעקע דרײַסיק (Thirty Decagrams of Bread), Yankele Hershkowitz recording, 2002.209.1, USHMMA.

2 Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 29.

3 Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).

4 Mania Mandelbaum, interview 47118, segment 67, June 18, 1998, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

5 Eleonora Bergman, Katarzyna Person, and Andrzej Żbikowski, eds., The Ringelblum Archive: Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny im. Emanuela Ringelbluma, 2017), 242–43.

6 Sara Frenkel, interview 23508, December 10, 1996, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

7 Norbert Schlang, interview 27127, segment 11, March 10, 1997, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation; Kay Nabel, interview 34873, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

8 Josef Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days: Notes from the Łódź Ghetto, ed. Michal Unger (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem Press, 2002), 98–104.

9 Anna Eilenberg-Eibeshitz, Preserved Evidence: Ghetto Łódź (Haifa: H. Eibeshitz Institute for Holocaust Studies, 1998), 226.

10 “Dying in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto,” by O[skar] S[inger], July 27, 1942, box 17A, folder 868, YIVO.

11 Oskar Rosenfeld, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto: Notebooks from Łódź, ed. Hanno Loewy and Brigitte Goldstein (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 48.

12 Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days, 89.

13 Eilenberg-Eibeshitz, Preserved Evidence, 241.

14 Norbert Schlang, interview 27127, segment 15, March 10, 1997, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

15 Leon Fruchtman, interview 17528, segments 43 and 44, August 2, 1996, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

16 Eilenberg-Eibeshitz, Preserved Evidence, 228.

17 Bergman, Person, and Żbikowski, The Ringelblum Archive, 246, 248.

18 Gusta Rubinfeld, interview 36610, segment 70, September 16, 1997, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

19 Diane Plotkin, “Smuggling in the Ghettos: Survivor Accounts from the Warsaw, Łódź and Kraków Ghettos,” in Life in the Ghettos during the Holocaust, ed. Eric C. Sterling (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005), 114.

20 Halina Nelken, And Yet, I Am Here!, vol. 1 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 89.

21 Leon Leyson, The Boy on the Wooden Box (New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2013), 86.

22 Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days, 181.

23 Michal Unger, “The Status and Plight of Women in the Łódź Ghetto,” in Women in the Holocaust, ed. Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman, 123–42 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 129–30.

24 Lillian Kranitz-Sanders, Twelve Who Survived: An Oral History of the Jews of Łódź, Poland, 1930–1954 (New York: Irvington, 1984), 85.

25 Tom Vorstenbosch et al., “Famine Food of Vegetal Origin Consumed in the Netherlands during World War II,” Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 13, no. 1 (2017): 1–15.

26 Jenny Edkins, Whose Hunger? Concepts of Famine, Practices of Aid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 63.

27 Pola Süssman, interview 46311, segments 38 and 48, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

28 Svetlana P. Morozovskaya, “Staying Alive in Besieged Leningrad: Motivational Factors for Survival” (MA thesis, Sam Houston State University, 2017), 19.

29 Atilla Hoefling et al., “When Hunger Finds No Fault with Moldy Corn: Food Deprivation Reduces Food-Related Disgust,” Emotion 9, no. 1 (2009): 50–58.

30 Amalia Bertgram, testimony, 301/209, ŻIH.

31 Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days, 193–97.

32 Bella Karp, pers. comm., March 11, 2000; Unger, “The Status and Plight of Women in the Łódź Ghetto,” 135.

33 Isaiah Spiegel, Ghetto Kingdom: Tales of the Łódź Ghetto, trans. David H. Hirsch and Roslyn Hirsch (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 96.

34 Lusia Haberfeld, interview 20848, October 13, 1996, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

35 Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days, 43.

36 Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City, trans. Emma Harris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 430.

37 Anonymous girl’s diary, 302/9, ŻIH.

38 Jakub Poznanski, Dziennik z Łódźkiego getta (Warsaw: Dom Wydawniczy, 2002), 21.

39 Flora Herzberger memoir, 1945, RG-02 *162, USHMMA.

40 Leyson, The Boy on the Wooden Box, 86.

41 Charles Roland, Courage under Siege: Starvation, Disease, and Death in the Warsaw Ghetto (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 99.

42 Marian Turski, “Individual Experience in Diaries from Łódź Ghetto,” in Holocaust Chronicles: Individualizing the Holocaust through Diaries and Other Contemporaneous Personal Accounts, ed. Robert Moses Shapiro (New York: Ktav, 1999), 118.

43 Erna Fridman, “The Long Way Home,” 2010.426, USHMMA.

44 Bernard Offen, interview 53621, segment 171, April 22, 1992, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation; Richard S. Hollander et al., Every Day Lasts a Year: A Jewish Family’s Correspondence from Poland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); N. N., October 10, 1941, box 9, folder 421, YIVO. Cholent is a traditional Eastern European Jewish dish served on holidays that prohibit cooking. The dish is placed in a low-temperature oven the afternoon before the holiday and retrieved the next day for lunch.

45 Emmanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: The Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum, ed. Jacob Sloan (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), 141.

46 “Przepis przyrządzania brukwi” (Ways to make rutabaga), recipe from Warsaw, 15.079M 37, USHMMA.

47 Nelken, And Yet, I Am Here!, 111.

48 S. Glube, “Meachlim in Łódźer Ghetto,” Fun Lectn Churban: Tzytschrift fur Geshichte Yidishen Laben beten Nazi Rezim, no. 9 (1948): 80.

49 Ewa Wiatr et al., Encyclopedia of the Ghetto: The Unfinished Project of the Łódź Ghetto Archivists (Łódź: Archiwum Państwowe, 2017), 22.

50 Glube, “Meachlim in Łódźer Ghetto,” 80.

51 Eilenberg-Eibeshitz, Preserved Evidence, 235.

52 Glube, “Meachlim in Łódźer Ghetto,” 80.

53 Wiatr et al., Encyclopedia of the Ghetto, 106.

54 Glube, “Meachlim in Łódźer Ghetto,” 81.

55 Shimon Huberband et al., Kiddush Hashem: Jewish Religious and Cultural Life in Poland during the Holocaust (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1987), 205.

56 Isaiah Trunk, “Religious, Educational and Cultural Problems in the Eastern European Ghettos under German Occupation,” in East European Jews in Two World Wars: Studies from the YIVO Annual, ed. Deborah Dash Moore (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990), 156.

57 Trunk, “Religious, Educational and Cultural Problems,” 160.

58 218/7 A sygnata na 1 kg. macy (Coupon for 1 kg. of matzah), ŻIH.

59 Trunk, “Religious, Educational and Cultural Problems,” 162.

60 Huberband et al., Kiddush Hashem, 205, 207.

61 An opinion by the rabbinate in the matter of consumption of non-kosher meat, February 27, 1941, box 15, folder 794, YIVO.

62 Robert Moses Shapiro, “Diaries and Memoirs from the Łódź Ghetto in Yiddish and Hebrew,” in Holocaust Chronicles: Individualizing the Holocaust through Diaries and Other Contemporaneous Personal Accounts, ed. Robert Moses Shapiro (New York: Ktav, 1999), 97.

63 Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days, 143–48.

64 Moshe Taube, interview 13063, March 7, 1996, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

65 Oral History with Henryk Łagodzki, RG-50.488.0311, USHMMA.

66 Oral History with Henryk Łagodzki, RG-50.488.0311, USHMMA.

67 Roland, Courage under Siege, 99.

68 Gila Flam, Singing for Survival: Songs of the Łódź Ghetto, 1940–1945 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 70.

69 Robert Moses Shapiro, “Yiddish Slang under the Nazis: A Small Book Published in Munich in 1949 Captures the Rich Jewish Idiom Which Flourished in the Face of Death,” Book Peddler, no. 11–12 (Summer 1989).

70 Lusia Haberfeld, interview 20848, October 13, 1996, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

71 Wiatr et al., Encyclopedia of the Ghetto, 143.

72 Rosa Taubman, “A Memoir Relating to Experiences in Kraków,” 1995.a.0714, USHMMA.

73 Rosenfeld, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto, 21.

74 Alexandra Zapruder, Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 231.

75 “And Where was God?”, RG-02 *127, USHMMA.

76 Rosenfeld, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto, 23.

77 Chronicle, February 1, 1944.

78 Bergman, Person, and Żbikowski, The Ringelblum Archive, 93.

79 Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days, 195.

80 Bergman, Person, and Żbikowski, The Ringelblum Archive, 303.

81 State of Israel Ministry of Justice, The Trial of Adolf Eichmann: Record of Proceedings in the District Court of Jerusalem (Jerusalem: State of Israel Ministry of Justice, 1992), 381–82.

82 Eilenberg-Eibeshitz, Preserved Evidence, 235.

83 Alice Hemar, interview 17, July 18, 1994, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

84 Lucille Eichengreen, From Ashes to Life: My Memories of the Holocaust (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1994), 19.

85 Roland, Courage under Siege, 99–100.

86 Myron Winick, Hunger Disease: Studies by Jewish Physicians in the Warsaw Ghetto, trans. Martha Osnos (New York: John Wiley, 1979).

87 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 255.

88 Adam Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków: Prelude to Doom, ed. Joseph Kermish, Stanisław Staron, and Raul Hilberg (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1999), 328.

89 Unger, “The Status and Plight of Women in the Łódź Ghetto,” 134.

90 Roland, Courage under Siege, 99.

91 Chronicle, January 12, 1941.

92 “CV” of Janusz Korczak to the Personnel Appointments Department of the Judenrat in the Warsaw (Warszawa) ghetto, February 9, 1942, #29156, Ghetto Fighters House Archive (Beit Lohamei Ha-Getaot), Western Galilee, Israel. In this document, Korczak requests to be given responsibility for the home for abandoned children at No. 39 Dzielna Street. The tone of the CV suggests that Korzak felt the formal application process to be a joke. In part this may have to do with his prewar fame and the fact that he asked to do this job without payment – just in exchange for a place to sleep and two meals per day.

93 Bergman, Person, and Żbikowski, The Ringelblum Archive, 135.

94 Bergman, Person, and Żbikowski, The Ringelblum Archive, 128, 136.

95 Levenstein, Harvey A. Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 9–23.

6 Socioeconomic Status and Food Access

1 I borrow here the term “socioeconomic position” developed by N. Krieger, D. R. Williams, and N. Moss to distinguish between actual resources and rank-related characteristics. See N. Krieger, D. R. Williams, and N. Moss, “Measuring Social Class in U.S. Public Health Research: Concepts, Methodologies, and Guidelines,” Annual Review of Public Health 18 (1997): 341–78.

2 Leon Fruchtman, interview 17528, segment 43, August 2, 1996, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

3 Anatol Chari and Timothy Braatz, From Ghetto to Death Camp: A Memoir of Privilege and Luck (Lakeville, MN: Disproportionate Press, 2011), 52.

4 Chaim A. Kaplan, Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan, trans. and ed. Abraham Isaac Katsch (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 19–20.

5 Josef Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days: Notes from the Łódź Ghetto, ed. Michal Unger (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem Press, 2002), 113.

6 Emmanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: The Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum, ed. Jacob Sloan (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), 154.

7 Shimon Huberband et al., Kiddush Hashem: Jewish Religious and Cultural Life in Poland during the Holocaust (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1987), 139–40.

8 Chari and Braatz, From Ghetto to Death Camp, 26.

9 Erica R., interview 31559, segment 9, July 20, 1997, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

10 Henry Greenblatt, interview 12447, segment 74, February 25, 1996, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

11 Moshe Taube, interview 13063, segment 75, May 7, 1996, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

12 Rosa Taubman, “A Memoir Relating to Experiences in Kraków,” 1995.a.0714, USHMMA.

13 Originally established in 1914 to save Palestinian Jews from starvation, the American Joint Distribution Committee expanded to provide assistance to impoverished Jews worldwide. They were especially active providing food kitchens, health-care and educational facilities, and cultural institutions in Eastern Europe between the world wars.

14 Bernard Offen, interview 53621, segment 170–77, April 22, 1992, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

15 Katarzyna Person, Assimilated Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto: 1940–1943 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2014), 34.

16 Halina Bochnik, testimony, O.3/9862, 6, Yad Vashem.

17 Ernest A, interview 15941, segment 7, May 7, 1996, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

18 “Hunger March,” recording, RG-91.0094, USHMMA; section epigraph is from Adam Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków: Prelude to Doom, ed. Joseph Kermish, Stanisław Staron, and Raul Hilberg (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1999), 351.

19 In the Łódź ghetto there were several terms for these individuals: dygnitarz (dignitary), jachsens (privileged), and, more derisively, szyszki (fat cats). Ewa Wiatr et al., Encyclopedia of the Ghetto: The Unfinished Project of the Łódź Ghetto Archivists (Łódź: Archiwum Państwowe, 2017), 60, 211.

20 Chronicle, June 7–8, 1941.

21 Mary Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg: Growing Up in the Warsaw Ghetto, ed. S. L. Schneiderman (Oxford: One World, 2007), 81.

22 Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg, 45–46.

23 Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg, 51.

24 Tadeusz Pankiewicz, The Kraków Ghetto Pharmacy, trans. Garry Malloy (Washington, DC: Holocaust Library, 2000), 10; Aleksander Bieberstein, Zaglada Żydów w Krakówie (Kraków: Wydawn Literackie, 2001), 58.

25 Pankiewicz, The Kraków Ghetto Pharmacy, 32.

26 Halina Nelken, And Yet, I Am Here! vol. 1 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 104.

27 Nelken, And Yet, I Am Here!, 116.

28 Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City, trans. Emma Harris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 205.

29 Nelken, And Yet, I Am Here!, 114.

30 Nelken, And Yet, I Am Here!, 88.

31 Chari and Braatz, From Ghetto to Death Camp, 54.

32 Pankiewicz, The Kraków Ghetto Pharmacy, 29.

33 Pankiewicz, The Kraków Ghetto Pharmacy, 8.

34 Oskar Rosenfeld, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto: Notebooks from Łódź, ed. Hanno Loewy and Brigitte Goldstein (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 41.

35 Jakub Poznanski papers, 2005.53.1, USHMMA.

36 Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg, 51

37 Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg, 53–54.

38 Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg, 39.

39 See Table 6.1 for a list of supplemental rations in the Lodz Ghetto.

40 Lucian Dobroszycki, ed., The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto, 1941–1944 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 31ff.

41 Jakub Poznanski papers, 2005.53.1, USHMMA.

42 Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days, 196–97, 225; “Department of Groceries and Bread,” no author, n.d., box 19, folder 883, YIVO.

43 Alan Adelson and Robert Lapides, eds., Łódź Ghetto: Inside a Community under Siege (New York: Viking Press, 1989), 234.

44 Chari and Braatz, From Ghetto to Death Camp, 68.

45 Gershon Bacon, “Interwar: Poland,” The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, Jewish Women’s Archive, December 31, 1999, https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/poland-interwar.

46 Wiatr et al., Encyclopedia of the Ghetto, 38, 47.

47 Havi Dreifuss, “‘The Work of My Hands Is Drowning in the Sea, and You Would Offer Me Song?!’: Orthodox Behaviour and Leadership in Warsaw during the Holocaust,” in Warsaw: The Jewish Metropolis: Essays in Honor of the 75th Birthday of Professor Antony Polonsky, ed. Glenn Dynner and François Guesnet (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 467–95.

48 Eleonora Bergman, Katarzyna Person, and Andrzej Żbikowski, eds., The Ringelblum Archive: Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny im. Emanuela Ringelbluma, 2017), 22–23.

49 Bergman, Person, and Żbikowski, The Ringelblum Archive, 24.

50 Bergman, Person, and Żbikowski, The Ringelblum Archive, 24.

51 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 51. On young women in famines, see, for example, Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley, Tears from Iron: Cultural Responses to Famine in Nineteenth-Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

52 Bergman, Person, and Żbikowski, The Ringelblum Archive, 24.

53 Bergman, Person, and Żbikowski, The Ringelblum Archive, 24.

54 Bergman, Person, and Żbikowski, The Ringelblum Archive, 25.

55 Sela Selinger, interview 6195, segment 74, November 23, 1995, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

56 Nelken, And Yet, I Am Here!, 89.

57 Geto-tsaytung far informatsye, farordenungen un bakantmachungen (Ghetto Gazette for Information, Announcements, and Ordinances), nos. 1–18, Yiddish, March 7, 1941, through September 21, 1941, box 17, folder 825, YIVO.

58 “An opinion by the rabbinate in the matter of consumption of non-kosher meat,” February 27, 1941, box 15, folder 794, YIVO.

59 Wiatr et al., Encyclopedia of the Ghetto, 160.

60 Chari and Braatz, From Ghetto to Death Camp, 68.

61 Joanna Sliwa, “A Link between the Inside and the Outside Worlds: Jewish Child Smugglers in the Kraków Ghetto,” Zeitschrift für Genozidforschung 13, no. 1–2 (2012): 74.

62 Huberband et al., Kiddush Hashem, 229, 232. Emanuel Ringelblum also mentions this village as a source of meat but notes that the meat was transported by individuals on foot. Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, 118.

63 Huberband et al., Kiddush Hashem, 232–33.

64 Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, 119.

65 Kaplan, Scroll of Agony, 290.

66 Pankiewicz, The Kraków Ghetto Pharmacy, 80.

67 Kaplan, Scroll of Agony, 307.

68 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 499.

69 Gutta Sternbuch, Gutta: Memories of a Vanished World: A Bais Yaakov Teacher’s Poignant Account of the War Years, with a Historical Overview (New York: Feldheim, 2005), 80.

70 Esther Farbstein, Hidden in Thunder: Perspectives on Faith, Halachah and Leadership during the Holocaust (New York: Feldheim, 2007), 129.

71 Farbstein, Hidden in Thunder, 127.

72 Wiatr et al., Encyclopedia of the Ghetto, 230–31.

73 Wiatr et al., Encyclopedia of the Ghetto, 44–45.

74 Rosenfeld, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto, 285.

75 Rav Alter Horowitz had been in the Tarnow ghetto and, when it was liquidated, was brought to the Kraków ghetto. Yaakov Levertov, “Testimony in English,” recorded by Yanus Turkov, July 15 and 27, 1957, Rav Menashe Yaakov Levertov (website), accessed June 15, 2017, www.levertov4ever.com/testimony-in-english.

76 Hillel Seidman, The Warsaw Ghetto Diaries, trans. Yosef Israel (Jerusalem: Targum Press, 1997), 347.

77 Rosenfeld, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto, 137.

78 Hersz Fogel, A Hidden Diary from the Łódź Ghetto, 1942–1944, ed. Helene Sinnreich (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2015), 155.

79 Rosenfeld, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto, 83.

80 Person, Assimilated Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, 39–40.

81 Person, Assimilated Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, 45; Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg, 113.

82 Nelken, And Yet, I Am Here!, 116.

83 Tadeusz Pankiewicz, interview, RG-60.5014, Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection, USHMMA.

84 Edward Klein, oral history, RG-50.030.0580, USHMMA.

85 Erna Fridman, “The Long Way Home,” 2010.426, USHMMA. Bosco’s first name is not given in the memoir, but it could be Oswald Bosco.

86 Pankiewicz, The Kraków Ghetto Pharmacy, 62–63.

87 Michael Zylberberg, A Warsaw Diary, 1939–1945 (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2005), 81.

7 Relief Systems and Charity

1 The epigraph is from Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City, trans. Emma Harris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 305.

2 Aleksandra Bańkowska, “Jewish Social Welfare Institutions and Facilities in the General Government from 1939 to 1944: A Preliminary Study,” Studia z Dziejów Rosji i Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej 3 (2018): 135, 137; Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 304.

3 Bańkowska, “Jewish Social Welfare Institutions and Facilities,” 138.

4 Bańkowska, “Jewish Social Welfare Institutions and Facilities,” 142.

5 Weichert was ultimately prosecuted, first in Poland and later by a Jewish honor court. The Jewish honor court was in part created in Poland due to anger over Weichert’s acquittal in the Polish court.

6 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 306.

7 “Department of Groceries and Bread,” no author, n.d., box 19, folder 883, YIVO.

8 Josef Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days: Notes from the Łódź Ghetto, ed. Michal Unger (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem Press, 2002), 69–75.

9 Jakub Poznanski, Dziennik z Łódźkiego getta (Warsaw: Dom Wydawniczy, 2002), 32.

10 François Guesnet, “Khevres and Akhdes: The Change in Jewish Self-Organization in the Kingdom of Poland before 1900 and the Bund,” in Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100, ed. Jack Jacobs (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 5.

11 Gila Flam, Singing for Survival: Songs of the Łódź Ghetto, 1940–1945 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 71–72.

12 “Department of Groceries and Bread,” no author, n.d., box 19, folder 883, YIVO.

13 Elizabeth M. Collingham, The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (New York: Penguin, 2013), 11.

14 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 184.

15 Adam Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków: Prelude to Doom, ed. Joseph Kermish, Stanisław Staron, and Raul Hilberg (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1999), 345.

16 Czerniaków, 233.

17 Charles Roland, Courage under Siege: Starvation, Disease and Death in the Warsaw Ghetto (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 40.

18 Czerniaków, et al., The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków, 305.

19 Czerniaków, et al., The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków, 312.

20 Czerniaków, et al., The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków, 321.

21 Chronicle, January 21, 1941.

22 Chronicle, January 17, 1941.

23 Alan Adelson and Robert Lapides, eds., Łódź Ghetto: Inside a Community under Siege (New York: Viking Press, 1989), 114.

24 Chronicle, January 29, 1941.

25 Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days, 113–21.

26 Chronicle, March 6, 1941.

27 Geto-tsaytung far informatsye, farordenungen un bakantmachungen (Ghetto Gazette for Information, Announcements, and Ordinances), March 21, 1941, box 17, folder 825, YIVO.

28 Chronicle, April 10, 1941; Chronicle, July 5–12, 1941.

29 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 224.

30 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 225.

31 Felicja Karay, The Women of Ghetto Kraków, trans. Sara Kitai (Tel Aviv: n.p., 2001), 21, originally published in Yalkut moreshet 71 (April 2001); Statement of Sabina Mirowska, in Maria Hochberg-Marianska and Noe Gruess, The Children Accuse (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1996), 240.

32 For a list of CENTOS supported institutions providing food, see Appendix A.

33 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 305.

34 Mary Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg: Growing Up in the Warsaw Ghetto, ed. S. L. Schneiderman (Oxford: One World, 2007), 46.

35 See, for example, Frances Gelbart, interview 12003, segment 23, February 14, 1996, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

36 Chronicle, March 4, 1941.

37 Ewa Wiatr et al., Encyclopedia of the Ghetto: The Unfinished Project of the Łódź Ghetto Archivists (Łódź: Archiwum Państwowe, 2017), 117.

38 Morris Price, interview 8072, October 29, 1995, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

39 Oskar Rosenfeld, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto: Notebooks from Łódź, ed. Hanno Loewy and Brigitte Goldstein (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 14.

40 Eleonora Bergman, Katarzyna Person, and Andrzej Żbikowski, eds., The Ringelblum Archive: Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny im. Emanuela Ringelbluma, 2017), 116, 124.

41 Bergman, Person, and Żbikowski, The Ringelblum Archive, 124.

42 Bergman, Person, and Żbikowski, The Ringelblum Archive, 125. Groszy are a Polish currency. There are 100 groszy in a zloty.

43 Bergman, Person, and Żbikowski, The Ringelblum Archive, 126.

44 Bergman, Person, and Żbikowski, The Ringelblum Archive, 118.

45 Katarzyna Person, “‘The Children Ceased to Be Children’: Day-Care Centres at Refugee Shelters in the Warsaw Ghetto,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 30 (2018): 343.

46 Sabina Mirowska in Hochberg-Marianska and Gruess, The Children Accuse, 242–43.

47 Bergman, Person, and Żbikowski, The Ringelblum Archive, 128.

48 Bergman, Person, and Żbikowski, The Ringelblum Archive, 121.

49 Bergman, Person, and Żbikowski, The Ringelblum Archive, 112–15.

50 Bergman, Person, and Żbikowski, The Ringelblum Archive, 118.

51 William Schiff, Rosalie Schiff, and Craig Hanley, William and Rosalie: A Holocaust Testimony (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2007), 29.

52 Esther Farbstein, Hidden in Thunder: Perspectives on Faith, Halachah and Leadership during the Holocaust (New York: Feldheim, 2007), 483.

53 For a list of kitchens and food distribution points in the Warsaw ghetto, see Appendix A.

54 Jack Schlussel, interview 7259, segment 64, September 28, 1995, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

55 Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg, 51.

56 Wiatr et al., Encyclopedia of the Ghetto, 153.

57 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 306.

58 Shimon Huberband et al., Kiddush Hashem: Jewish Religious and Cultural Life in Poland during the Holocaust (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1987), 186; Roland, Courage under Siege, 39.

59 Announcement about High Holy Day services on the premises of Public Kitchen No. 2, undated, box 15, folder 791, Nachman Zonabend Collection, YIVO.

60 Samuel Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? (Bloomington: First Vintage Books, 2009), 118.

61 Chaim A. Kaplan, The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan, trans. and ed. Abraham Isaac Katsh (New York: Collier Books, 1973), 235.

62 Hanna Strawczynski, interview 27351, March 17, 1997, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

63 Chronicle, March 4, 1941.

64 Chronicle, March 4, 1941.

65 “And where was God?” RG-02 *127, USHMMA.

66 Wiatr et al., Encyclopedia of the Ghetto, 77.

67 Chronicle, September 25, 1942.

68 Edith Millman, interview 21310, October 21, 1996, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

69 Seymour Levitan and Rachel Auerbach, “A Soup Kitchen in the Warsaw Ghetto: From the Memoirs of Rachel Auerbach,” Bridges 13, no. 2 (2008): 96–107.

70 Zoë Vania Waxman, Writing the Holocaust: Identity, Testimony, Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 30; and see Emmanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: The Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum, ed. Jacob Sloan (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), 181–82.

71 Wiatr et al., Encyclopedia of the Ghetto, 118–19.

72 Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days, 82.

73 Marian Turski, “Individual Experience in Diaries from the Łódź Ghetto,” in Holocaust Chronicles: Individualizing the Holocaust through Diaries and Other Contemporaneous Personal Accounts, ed. Robert Moses Shapiro (New York: Ktav, 1999), 121.

74 Kaplan, Scroll of Agony, 221.

75 Stefan Stok, interview 27507, February 17, 1997, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

76 Zoë Vania Waxman, Women and the Holocaust: A Feminist History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 38.

77 Chuna T., interview 54502, August 21, 2001. Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation; Erica R., interview 31559, segment 10, July 20, 1997, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

78 Henry Greenblatt, interview 12447, February 25, 1996, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

79 Rosenfeld, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto, 15.

80 Michał Grynberg, Words to Outlive Us: Eyewitness Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto (London: Granta Books, 2004), 29.

81 Grynberg, Words to Outlive Us, 34.

82 His recordings are held at YIVO.

83 Amos Goldberg, “A Fool or a Prophet: Rubinstein the Warsaw Ghetto Jester,” J. B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Annual Lecture at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, March 13, 2019, https://www.academia.edu/38809091.

84 Stefan Stok, interview 27507, February 17, 1997, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

85 Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg, 39.

86 Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days, 35–39.

87 “And where was God?,” RG-02 *127, USHMMA.

88 Chronicle, January 1–5, 1942.

89 Avraham Barkai, “Between East and West: Jews from Germany in the Łódź Ghetto,” Yad Vashem Studies 16 (1984): 299–300.

90 Biuletyn Kroniki Codziennej, February 1, 1942, box 20, folder 927, YIVO.

91 Adelson and Lapides, Łódź Ghetto, 234.

92 Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days, 199–201.

93 Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków, 347. For more on Nazi views of poverty, see John William Rall, “Nazi Charity: Giving, Belonging, and Morality in the Third Reich” (PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2018).

94 On the connection between Nazi food policy and mass killings, see Christian Gerlach, Krieg, Ernährung, Volkermord: Deutsche Vernichtungspolitik im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Zürich: Pendo, 2001); Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York: Penguin Books, 2008).

8 Illicit Food Access

1 The epigraph is from Gertrude Schneider, ed., Mordechai Gebirtig: His Poetic and Musical Legacy (London: Praeger, 2000), 173.

2 Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City, trans. Emma Harris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 150; Chaim A. Kaplan, Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan, trans. and ed. Abraham Isaac Katsh (New York: Collier Books, 1973), 55.

3 Tadeusz Pankiewicz, The Kraków Ghetto Pharmacy, trans. Garry Malloy (Washington, DC: Holocaust Library, 2000), 47.

4 Yisrael Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, 1939–1943: Ghetto, Underground, Revolt, trans. Ina Friedman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 66.

5 Icchak Henryk Rubin, Żydzi w Łodzi pod niemiecką okupacją 1939–1945 (London: Kontra, 1988), 220. Schupo is short for Schutzpolizei or Protection Police. The Schupo essentially carried out regular police duties, similar to what a police officer in the present day might do.

6 Rubin, 220–21.

7 Some have held Rumkowski personally responsible for eradicating smuggling in the Łódź ghetto. While he did battle smuggling more than his counterpart in Warsaw, the German administration ultimately played the most significant role in combating smuggling in the Łódź ghetto. Rumkowski’s image as a crusader against smuggling was partially formed by antismuggling orders issued in his name by the German authorities: Order no. 77, July 6, 1940, box 3, folder 202, YIVO; July 9, 1940, box 4, folder 216, YIVO.

8 Chronicle, January 23, 1941; Chronicle, August 4, 1941. For more on the August meeting, see Svenja Bethke, “Crime and Punishment in Emergency Situations: The Jewish Ghetto Courts in Łódź, Warsaw, and Vilna in World War II—A Comparative Study,” Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 28, no. 3 (2014): 1–17.

9 Rubin, Żydzi w Łodzi pod niemiecką okupacją 1939–1945, 221; “Twenty-Five Live Chickens and One Dead Document,” by [Jospeh Zelkowicz], January 1942, box 17, folder 851, YIVO.

10 Aron Grynwald, testimony, RG 50.002*0058, USHMMA.

11 Emmanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: The Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum, ed. Jacob Sloan (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), 106.

12 Leon Leyson, The Boy on the Wooden Box (New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2013), 86.

13 Max Falk, interview 33414, segments 8 and 13, September 22, 1997, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

14 Mary Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg: Growing Up in the Warsaw Ghetto, ed. S. L. Schneiderman (Oxford: One World, 2007), 31.

15 Anna Eilenberg-Eibeshitz, Preserved Evidence: Ghetto Łódź (Haifa: H. Eibeshitz Institute for Holocaust Studies, 1998), 239.

16 Pankiewicz, The Kraków Ghetto Pharmacy, 29.

17 Chronicle, March 4, 1941; Chronicle, April 10, 1941.

18 Chronicle, August 1, 1941.

19 Katarzyna Person et al., Warsaw Ghetto: Everyday Life (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny im. Emanuela Ringelbluma, 2017), 20–21.

20 “Twenty-Five Live Chickens and One Dead Document,” by [Jospeh Zelkowicz], January 1942, box 17, folder 851, YIVO.

21 Diane Plotkin, “Smuggling in the Ghettos: Survivor Accounts from the Warsaw, Łódź, and Kraków Ghettos,” in Life in the Ghettos during the Holocaust, ed. Eric C. Sterling (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005), 115–16.

22 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 197.

23 Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, 113, 145.

24 “Twenty-Five Live Chickens and One Dead Document,” by [Jospeh Zelkowicz], January 1942, box 17, folder 851, YIVO.

25 Kaplan, Scroll of Agony, 290.

26 Pankiewicz, The Kraków Ghetto Pharmacy, 74.

27 Donald L. Niewyk, Fresh Wounds: Early Narratives of Holocaust Survival (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 303.

28 Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg, 32.

29 Henry Greenblatt, interview 12447, February 25, 1996, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

30 Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, 136–37.

31 Person et al., Warsaw Ghetto, 102.

32 Person et al., Warsaw Ghetto, 441–42.

33 Plotkin, “Smuggling in the Ghettos,” 115.

34 Joanna Sliwa, “A Link between the Inside and the Outside Worlds: Jewish Child Smugglers in the Kraków Ghetto,” Zeitschrift für Genozidforschung 13, no. 1–2 (2012): 74.

35 Kaplan, Scroll of Agony, 230. The going rate for a kilo of butter in the ghetto in December 1940 when he was writing was 30 zloty.

36 Bernard Offen, My Hometown Concentration Camp: A Survivor’s Account of Life in the Kraków Ghetto and Płaszów Concentration Camp (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2008), 58.

37 Bernard Offen, My Hometown Concentration Camp, 38.

38 Erna Fridman, “The Long Way Home,” 2010.426, USHMMA.

39 Person et al., Warsaw Ghetto, 101–2.

40 Josef Meszorer, interview 1112, February 23, 1995, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

41 Felicja Karay, The Women of Ghetto Kraków, trans. Sara Kitai (Tel Aviv: n.p., 2001), 12–13, originally published in Yalkut moreshet 71 (April 2001).

42 Murray Pantirer, testimony, RG-50.030*0174, USHMMA.

43 Henry Greenblatt, interview 12447, February 25, 1996, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

44 Oral History with Henryk Łagodzki, RG-50.488.0311, USHMMA.

45 Oral History with Henryk Łagodzki, RG-50.488.0311, USHMMA.

46 Bernard Offen, interview 53621, segment 171, April 22, 1992, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

47 Henry Greenblatt, interview 12447, February 25, 1996, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

48 Lenore J. Weitzman, “Resistance in Everyday Life: Family Strategies, Role Reversal, and Role-sharing in the Holocaust,” Jewish Families in Europe, 1939–Present: History, Representation, and Memory, ed. Joanna Beata Michlic (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2017), 46–66.

49 Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg, 105.

50 Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg, 124.

51 Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, 106.

52 Person et al., Warsaw Ghetto, 243–44.

53 Sliwa, “A Link between the Inside and the Outside Worlds,” 71.

54 Rubin, Żydzi w Łodzi pod niemiecką okupacją 1939–1945, 221.

55 Aneta Weinreich, interview 14405, segments 5–8, May 3, 1998, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

56 The Germans claimed to be overlooking smuggling and the Warsaw ghetto but would not tolerate Jews leaving the ghetto due to the typhus epidemic in the city. Adam Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków: Prelude to Doom, ed. Joseph Kermish, Stanislaw Staron, and Raul Hilberg (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1999), 248.

57 Czerniaków, 296.

58 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 203.

59 Kaplan, Scroll of Agony, 279.

60 Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, 228–29.

61 Biuletyn Kroniki Codziennej, January 3 and 14–31, 1942, box 20, folder 926, YIVO; Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 203.

62 Person et al., Warsaw Ghetto, 31.

63 For more on the black market in the General government, see Jerzy Kochanowski, “Black Market in the General Government 1939–1945: Survival Strategy or (Un)Official Economy?,” in Coping with Hunger and Shortage under German Occupation in World War II, ed. Tatjana Tönsmeyer, Peter Haslinger, and Agnes Laba (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 27–47.

64 Joanna Sliwa, “Clandestine Activities and Concealed Presence: A Case Study of Children in the Kraków Ghetto,” in Jewish Families in Europe, 1939–Present: History, Representation, and Memory, ed. Joanna Beata Michlic (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2017), 26–45.

65 Chronicle, January 8–9, 1942.

66 Seymour Levitan and Rachel Auerbach, “A Soup Kitchen in the Warsaw Ghetto: From the Memoirs of Rachel Auerbach,” Bridges 13, no. 2 (2008): 96–107.

67 Niewyk, Fresh Wounds, 304.

68 Person et al., Warsaw Ghetto, 340.

69 “And where was God?” RG-02*127, USHMMA. Oskar Rosenfeld, describing the same time period as Alfred Dube (they were both from the Prague transports), wrote that “One pair of shoes = one loaf of bread.” See Oskar Rosenfeld, In the Beginning was the Ghetto: Notebooks from Łódź, ed. Hanno Loewy and Brigitte Goldstein (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 14.

70 Leyson, The Boy on the Wooden Box, 87.

71 Tola W., interview 55051, segment 219, October 17, 2012, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

72 Halina Nelken, And Yet, I am Here!, vol. 1 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 92.

73 Gila Flam, Singing for Survival: Songs of the Łódź Ghetto, 1940–1945 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 87.

74 Pankiewicz, The Kraków Ghetto Pharmacy, 33.

75 Anatol Chari and Timothy Braatz, From Ghetto to Death Camp: A Memoir of Privilege and Luck (Lakeville, MN: Disproportionate Press, 2011), 37.

76 Oskar Singer, Przemierzaja szybkim krokiem getto (Łódź: Oficyna Bibliofilów, 2002), 38.

77 Order no. 45, May 19, 1940, box 3, folder 184, YIVO.

78 Chronicle, January 27, 1941; Chronicle, January 12, 1941; Chronicle, January 21, 1941.

79 Chronicle, January 12, 1941.

80 Chronicle, January 8, 1942.

81 Chronicle, March 29, 1941; Chronicle, June 26, 1941; Chronicle, December 17, 1941.

82 “Bread in the Year Nineteen Forty-Two,” by [Joseph Zelkowicz], 1942 January, Box: 17, Folder: 853. YIVO

83 “Bread in the Year Nineteen Forty-Two,” by [Joseph Zelkowicz], January 1942, box 17, folder 853, YIVO; Chronicle, January 1–5, 1942; Chronicle, January 10–13, 1942.

84 Chronicle, May 1, 1942; Chronicle, May 15, 1942; Chronicle, June 25, 1942.

85 Isaiah Trunk, Łódź Ghetto: A History, trans. Robert Moses Shapiro, intro. Israel Gutman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 114.

86 Irena Glueck, diary entry, May 7, 1941, RG-02.208M, file 270, trans. Kristine Belfoure, thanks to Alexandra Zapruder, USHMMA.

87 Renia Knoll, diary, 302 file 197, ŻIH; RG 2.208M, 137–38, USHMMA.

88 Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków, 242; Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 497.

89 Renia Knoll, diary, 178, ŻIH.

90 Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg, 78.

91 Renia Knoll, diary, 196, ŻIH.

92 Adam Kaminski, Diariusz Poreczny, 1939–1945 (Warsaw: Instytut Pamieci Narodowej, 2001), 94, 128.

93 Kaminski, Diariusz Poreczny, 111, 194.

94 Kaminski, Diariusz Poreczny, 128, 131.

95 Julius Feldman, The Kraków Diary of Julius Feldman, trans. William Brand (Newark: Quill Press, 2002), 58.

96 Kaminski, Diariusz Poreczny, 131–32, 194.

97 Nelken, And Yet, I am Here!, 99.

98 Sela Selinger, interview 6195, segment 77, November 23, 1995, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

99 Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, 92.

100 Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, 139.

101 Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, 147, 154.

102 Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków, 238, 242.

103 Kaplan, Scroll of Agony, 277.

104 Kaplan, Scroll of Agony, 252.

105 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 497.

106 Kaplan, Scroll of Agony, 327.

107 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 499.

108 Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg, 80–81.

109 Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg, 38.

110 Singer, Przemierzaja szybkim krokiem getto, 33.

111 Although a family might be entitled to a food ration, they might still choose not to purchase their ration due to being unable to afford it.

112 Josef Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days: Notes from the Łódź Ghetto, ed. Michal Unger (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem Press, 2002), 199–201. Zelkowicz was so angered by the actions of a butcher who literally beat away his customers that he recorded the name of the butcher, Jakob Bornsztajn, for posterity.

113 Barbara Alpern Engel, “Not by Bread Alone: Subsistence Riots in Russia during World War I,” Journal of Modern History 69, no. 4 (1997): 715.

114 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 201.

115 Orders no. 273 and 274, May 25, 1941, and n.d., box 7, folder 389, YIVO; Order no. 393, September 13, 1942, box 10, folder 506, YIVO.

116 Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków, 317.

117 Ancel Keys et al., The Biology of Human Starvation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1950), 785.

118 Flam, Singing for Survival, 63.

119 Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, 141.

120 Order no. 124, September 20, 1940, box 5, folder 248, YIVO.

121 Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków, 235.

122 Chari and Braatz, From Ghetto to Death Camp, 49.

123 Chronicle, January 12, 1941; Chronicle, January 15, 1941. An eighty-year-old woman was killed during an attack on a wagon transporting rutabaga.

124 Alice H., interview 17, segments 12 and 13, July 20, 1994, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

125 Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg, 110.

126 Chronicle, July 29, 1941.

127 Stephan Stok, interview 27507, February 17, 1997, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

128 Person et al., Warsaw Ghetto, 78–79.

129 Eilenberg-Eibeshitz, Preserved Evidence, 228–29.

130 Lucille Eichengreen, From Ashes to Life: My Memories of the Holocaust (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1994), 5.

131 Eilenberg-Eibeshitz, Preserved Evidence, 236–39.

132 Marian Turski, “Individual Experience in Diaries from the Łódź Ghetto,” in Holocaust Chronicles: Individualizing the Holocaust through Diaries and other Contemporaneous Personal Accounts, ed. Robert Moses Shapiro (New York: Ktav, 1999), 120–21.

133 Eilenberg-Eibeshitz, Preserved Evidence, 229–30.

134 Isaiah Spiegel, Ghetto Kingdom: Tales of the Łódź Ghetto, trans. David H. Hirsch and Roslyn Hirsch (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 77.

135 Isaiah Spiegel, Ghetto Kingdom: Tales of the Łódź Ghetto, trans. David H. Hirsch and Roslyn Hirsch (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 81.

136 Order no. 393, September 13, 1942, box 10, folder 506, YIVO; Order no. 394, September 17, 1942, box 10, folder 507, YIVO.

137 See the Aleksander Herszkowicz collection, 2002.209.1, USHMMA.

138 Stephanie Druc, interview 6777, October 5, 1995, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

139 Bethke, “Crime and Punishment in Emergency Situations,” 10, 11.

140 Oskar Rosenfeld, In the Beginning was the Ghetto, 154.

141 Eilenberg-Eibeshitz, Preserved Evidence, 231–32.

142 Eilenberg-Eibeshitz, 234–35.

143 “And Where was God?” RG-02 *127, USHMMA.

144 Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days, 132.

145 Eilenberg-Eibeshitz, Preserved Evidence, 231–33.

146 Mania Mandelbaum, interview 47118, segment 59, June 18, 1998, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

147 Chronicle, January 26, 1941.

148 Eilenberg-Eibeshitz, Preserved Evidence, 234; Flam, Singing for Survival, 63.

149 Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days, 187.

150 Ewa Wiatr et al., Encyclopedia of the Ghetto: The Unfinished Project of the Łódź Ghetto Archivists (Łódź: Archiwum Państwowe, 2017), 135.

151 Alexandra Zapruder, Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 235.

152 Arline T. Golkin, Famine: A Heritage of Hunger (Claremont, CA: Regina Books, 1987), 23.

153 Flam, Singing for Survival, 140–41.

154 Cormac Ó Gráda, Eating People Is Wrong, and Other Essays on Famine, Its Past, and Its Future (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 3.

155 “Persons of good will need not worry about their fate. Only the unwelcome element will leave the ghetto,” December 20, 1941, box 20, folder 925, YIVO.

156 Rosenfeld, In the Beginning was the Ghetto, 154.

157 Flam, Singing for Survival, 95–96.

158 Kaplan, Scroll of Agony, 243.

159 Flam, Singing for Survival, 61.

160 For more on prosecution of crime in the ghettos, see Svenja Bethke and Sharon Howe, Dance on the Razor’s Edge: Crime and Punishment in the Nazi Ghettos (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021).

161 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 200.

162 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 200.

163 Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days, 136–37.

164 Chronicle, May 27–31, 1941.

165 Shimon Huberband et al., Kiddush Hashem: Jewish Religious and Cultural Life in Poland during the Holocaust (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1987), 151–71.

9 Labor and Food in the Ghettos

1 Poem by Gustava Steindig-Lindberg from Felicja Karay, The Women of Ghetto Kraków, trans. Sara Kitai (Tel Aviv: publisher, 2001), originally published in Yalkut moreshet 71 (April 2001): 21, 18.

2 Isaiah Trunk, Łódź Ghetto: A History, trans. Robert Moses Shapiro, intro. Israel Gutman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 148, 150.

3 Christopher R. Browning, The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 43.

4 Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City, trans. Emma Harris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 409.

5 Christopher R. Browning, “Nazi Ghettoization Policy in Poland: 1939–41,” Central European History 19, no. 4 (1986): 343–68.

6 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 409.

7 Henry Brauner, interview, RG 50.029*0008, USHMMA.

8 Adam Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków: Prelude to Doom, eds. Joseph Kermish, Stanisław Staron, and Raul Hilberg (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1999), 256.

9 Pauline Buchenholz, memoir, USHMMA Accession Number: 1994.A.0198.1

10 Halina Nelken, And Yet, I Am Here!, trans. Halina Nelken and Alicia Nitecki (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1986), 156.

11 Michał Grynberg, Words to Outlive Us: Voices from the Warsaw Ghetto (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002), 35.

12 Hersz Fogel, A Hidden Diary from the Łódź Ghetto, 1942–1944, ed. Helene Sinnreich (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2015), 82.

13 Anna Eilenberg-Eibeshitz, Preserved Evidence: Ghetto Łódź (Haifa: H. Eibeshitz Institute for Holocaust Studies, 1998), 231.

14 Josef Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days: Notes from the Łódź Ghetto, ed. Michal Unger (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem Press, 2002), 62.

15 Alan Adelson and Robert Lapides, eds., Łódź Ghetto: Inside a Community under Siege (New York: Viking Press, 1989), 31–32.

16 Malvina Graf, The Kraków Ghetto and the Płaszόw Camp Remembered (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1989), 38.

17 Anna Maxell Ware, interview, April 1–4, 1996, RG.50.030*0427, 35, USHMMA.

18 Karay, The Women of Ghetto Kraków, 7.

19 Anna Heilman, interview 8569, February 22, 1996, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

20 Sylvia G, interview 43386, segments 40 and 41, June 30 1998, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

21 Ziuta Grunhut, interview, RG 50.120*0260, USHMMA.

22 “In your Blood I Live,” RG 02.079*01, USHMMA.

23 Martin Ira Glassner, And Life Is Changed Forever: Holocaust Childhoods Remembered (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2006), 217.

24 Stella Müller-Madej, A Girl from Schindler’s List, trans. William R. Brand (Kraków: DjaF, 2006), 14.

25 Alice Hemar, interview 17, July 18, 1994, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

26 Graf, Kraków Ghetto and the Płaszόw Camp, 43.

27 “Give Me Your Children: Voices from the Łódź Ghetto,” US Holocaust Memorial Museum, accessed April 27, 2007, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/give-me-your-children-voices-from-the-lodz-ghetto.

28 Leon Fruchtman, interview 17528, segments 43 and 44, August 2, 1996, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

29 Henry Tennebaum, interview 18817, segment 59, August 20, 1996, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

30 Mary Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg: Growing Up in the Warsaw Ghetto, ed. S. L. Schneiderman (Oxford: One World, 2007), 51.

31 Fogel, A Hidden Diary from the Łódź Ghetto, 117.

32 Fogel, 118.

33 Trunk, Łódź Ghetto, 141.

34 Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days, 193.

35 Maria Hochberg-Marianska and Noe Gruess, The Children Accuse (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1996), 51. Grüner himself has been accused of having been a Gestapo informant. See Tadeusz Pankiewicz, The Kraków Ghetto Pharmacy, trans. Garry Malloy (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2013), 38

36 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 197; Fogel, A Hidden Diary from the Łódź Ghetto, 110; Ludwig Brand, interview 55049, November 10, 1992, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

37 Jane Schein, interview 415, segment 59, December 18, 1994 Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

38 Anatol Chari and Timothy Braatz, From Ghetto to Death Camp: A Memoir of Privilege and Luck (Lakeville, MN: Disproportionate Press, 2011), 61–62.

39 Donald L. Niewyk, Fresh Wounds: Early Narratives of Holocaust Survival (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press: 1998), 303, 304.

40 Fogel, A Hidden Diary from the Łódź Ghetto, 123.

41 Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków, 287, 291.

42 Gusta Rubinfeld, interview 36610, segment 56, September 16, 1997, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

43 Charles Roland, Courage under Siege: Starvation, Disease and Death in the Warsaw Ghetto (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 99.

44 Alexandra Zapruder, Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 231.

45 Order no. 186, December 27, 1940, box 6, folder 307, YIVO.

46 “The Carpenter’s Strike,” by J. Z., January 23 through February 2, 1941, box 17, folder 836, YIVO; Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days, 206.

47 Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days, 208–11, 225, 229; N. N., January 24, 1941, box 7, folder 321, YIVO. According to François Guesnet, the Jewish grave diggers in Łódź had a history of organization, having had their illegal organization uncovered by the Russian police in 1883; see Guesnet, “Khevres and Akhdes: the Change in Jewish Self-Organization in the Kingdom of Poland before 1900 and the Bund,” in Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100, ed. Jack Jacobs (New York: New York University Press, 2001).

48 “The Carpenter’s Strike,” by J. Z., January 23 through February 2, 1941, box 17, folder 836, YIVO.

49 Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days, 219, 226, 231.

50 “The Carpenter’s Strike,” by J. Z., January 23 through February 2, 1941, box 17, folder 836, YIVO.

51 Chronicle, March 6, 1941.

52 Marian Turski, “Individual Experience in Diaries from the Łódź Ghetto,” in Holocaust Chronicles: Individualizing the Holocaust through Diaries and Other Contemporaneous Personal Accounts. ed. Robert Moses Shapiro (New York: Ktav, 1999), 122.

53 Nelken, And Yet, I Am Here!, 99.

54 Luna Kaufman, testimony, RG.002*0010, USHMMA.

55 Statement of Sabina Mirowska, in Hochberg-Marianska and Gruess, 240.

56 Lucille Eichengreen, Rumkowski and the Orphans of Łódź (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1998), 6–7.

57 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 237.

58 Ewa Wiatr et al., Encyclopedia of the Ghetto: The Unfinished Project of the Łódź Ghetto Archivists (Łódź: Archiwum Państwowe, 2017), 95.

59 Interestingly, one private business that survived until the liquidation of the ghetto was Sonenberg Lending Library. For more information on books and lending libraries in the Łódź ghetto, see David Shavit, Hunger for the Printed Word: Books and Libraries in the Jewish Ghettos of Nazi-Occupied Europe (London: McFarland, 1997).

60 Bernard Offen, My Hometown Concentration Camp: A Survivor’s Account of Life in the Kraków Ghetto and Płaszów Concentration Camp (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2008), 25; Leon Leyson, The Boy on the Wooden Box (New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2013), 89.

61 Erica Ringelblum, interview 31559, segment 9, July 20, 1997, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

62 Leyson, The Boy on the Wooden Box, 88.

63 Niewyk, Fresh Wounds, 304–5.

64 Erna Fridman, “The Long Way Home,” 2010.426, USHMMA.

65 Katarzyna Person, “Sexual Violence during the Holocaust: The Case of Forced Prostitution in the Warsaw Ghetto,” Shofar 33, no. 2 (2015): 109.

66 Katarzyna Person et al., Warsaw Ghetto: Everyday Life (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny im. Emanuela Ringelbluma, 2017), 248.

67 Fogel, A Hidden Diary from the Łódź Ghetto, 123.

68 Oskar Singer, Przemierzaja szybkim krokiem getto (Łódź: Oficyna Bibliofilów, 2002), 32.

69 Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków, 295.

70 Chari and Braatz, From Ghetto to Death Camp, 56.

71 Chari and Braatz, From Ghetto to Death Camp, 65.

72 Summary of a meeting between Biebow and the Gestapo on June 11, 1942, as quoted in Michal Unger, Reassessment of the Image of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2004), 49.

73 Andrzej Strzelecki, The Deportation of Jews from the Łódź Ghetto to KL Auschwitz and Their Extermination, trans. Witold Zbirohowski-Kościa (Oswiecim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2006), 22.

74 Elie Aron Cohen, Human Behavior in the Concentration Camp, trans. M. H. Braaksma (New York: University Library, 1953), 111.

75 Michal Unger, “The Status and Plight of Women in the Łódź Ghetto,” in Women in the Holocaust, eds. Dalia Ofer and Lenore J Weitzman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 127.

76 GV 30043/140; GV 29238/295; GV 29191/22, Łódź State Archive.

77 Tadeusz Pankiewicz, The Cracow Ghetto Pharmacy (Washington, DC: Holocaust Library, 2000), 203.

78 Pankiewicz, 205 (quoted), 202–4.

10 Deportations and the End of the Ghettos

1 Oskar Rosenfeld, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto: Notebooks from Łódź, ed. Hanno Loewy and Brigitte Goldstein (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 112.

2 Oskar Rosenfeld, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto: Notebooks from Łódź, ed. Hanno Loewy and Brigitte Goldstein (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 12.

3 Rosenfeld, 12. By comparison, here is the description of the arrival of Western Jews as reported by the captain of the Security Police: “The unloading was done so that in each case the Jews from six railway carriages made up one group and were escorted to the ghetto gate by two security policemen … Despite the unfavorable weather and the difficulties arising from the fact that a large number of the railway carriages had only two doors … the unloading and the transportation of the Jews to the ghetto was accomplished smoothly in a very short space of time.” Dieter Corbach, 6:00 Uhr ab Messe Köln-Deutz Deportationen, 1938–1945 (Cologne: Scriba Verlag, 1999), 666.

4 Michal Unger, The Last Ghetto: Life in the Łódź Ghetto, 1940–1944 (Jerusalem: Vad Yashem, 1995), 179.

5 Danuta Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle: 1939–1945 (New York: Holt, 1990), 687–712.

6 Edith Millman, interview 21310, October 21, 1996, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

7 Mary Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg: Growing Up in the Warsaw Ghetto, S. L. Schneiderman, ed. (Oxford: One World, 2007), 59.

8 William Schiff, Rosalie Schiff, and Craig Hanley, William and Rosalie: A Holocaust Testimony (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2007), 29.

9 See Emmanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: The Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum, ed. Jacob Sloan (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), 129.

10 For details on the deportation of Western Jews into Łódź, including lists of names, places of origin, prewar addresses, birth dates, and places of birth, see Corbach, 6:00 Uhr ab Messe Köln-Deutz Deportationen.

11 Adam Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków: Prelude to Doom, ed. Joseph Kermish, Stanisław Staron, and Raul Hilberg (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1999), 341.

12 Corbach, 6:00 Uhr ab Messe Köln-Deutz Deportationen, 665–66.

13 Barkai, “Between East and West,” 289–90.

14 “A Lodz ghetto diary written by Szmul Rozensztajn, February through November 1941,” catalog no. 1459, Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum Archive.

15 Barkai, “Between East and West,” 292.

16 “Persons of good will need not worry about their fate. Only the unwelcome element will leave the ghetto,” December 20, 1941, box 20, folder 925, YIVO.

17 Barkai, “Between East and West,” 290. For more on this, see the Chronicle, November 1941 summary.

18 Chronicle, January 8–9, 1942.

19 Chronicle, November 1941 summary.

20 Rosenfeld, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto, 14.

21 “In Your Blood I live,” RG-02 *127, USHMMA.

22 Donald L. Niewyk, Fresh Wounds: Early Narratives of Holocaust Survival (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 303.

23 “In Your Blood I live,” RG-02 *127, USHMMA.

24 Gila Flam, Singing for Survival: Songs of the Łódź Ghetto, 1940–1945 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 93–94.

25 Tadeusz Pankiewicz, The Kraków Ghetto Pharmacy, trans. Garry Malloy (Washington, D.C.: Holocaust Library, 2000), 96.

26 Pankiewicz, 96–97.

27 Herzs Fogel, A Hidden Diary from the Łódź Ghetto, 1942–1944, ed. Helene Sinnreich (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2015), 90, 95, 142–43.

28 “In Your Blood I live,” RG 02.079*01, USHMMA.

29 Pankiewicz, The Kraków Ghetto Pharmacy, 43.

30 Rachel Cymber, interview 2015, segments 27–29, April 11, 1995, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

31 Order no. 414, March 3, 1944, box 11, folder 538, YIVO.

32 Anna Heilman, interview 8569, February 22, 1996, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

33 Rosa Taubman, “A Memoir Relating to Experiences in Kraków,” 1995.a.0714, USHMMA.

34 Gusta Davidson Draenger, Justyna’s Narrative, ed. Eli Pfefferkorn and David Hirsch, trans. Roslyn Hirsch and David Hirsch (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 115–16.

35 Davidson Draenger, 116.

36 Rosenfeld, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto, 71.

37 Ewa Wiatr et al., Encyclopedia of the Ghetto: The Unfinished Project of the Łódź Ghetto Archivists (Łódź: Archiwum Państwowe, 2017), 37, 73.

38 Michał Grynberg, Words to Outlive Us: Eyewitness Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto (London: Granta Books, 2004), 108.

39 David Lipstadt, interview 21550, October 22, 1996, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

40 N. N., August 19, 1944, box 11, folder 572, YIVO; Harry Fogel, interview by Shirley Dichter, January 25, 1996, Oral History Collection, Holocaust Documentation and Education Center, Miami, FL; see also Flora Hertzberger memoir, 1945, RG-02 *162, USHMMA.

41 Pankiewicz, The Kraków Ghetto Pharmacy, 34, 43.

42 State of Israel Ministry of Justice, The Trial of Adolf Eichmann: Record of Proceedings in the District Court of Jerusalem (Jerusalem: State of Israel Ministry of Justice, 1992), 380.

43 Shmuel Krakowski and Ilya Altman, The Testament of the Last Prisoners of the Chelmno Death Camp (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1991), 112.

44 Gordon Horowitz, Ghettostadt: Łódź and the Making of a Nazi City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 284.

45 Bernard Offen, My Hometown Concentration Camp: A Survivor’s Account of Life in the Kraków Ghetto and Płaszów Concentration Camp (New York: Vallentine Mitchell, 2008), 61.

46 Joseph Zelkowicz, “In Those Days of Nightmare,” September 12, 1942, box 19, folder 880, YIVO.

47 Grynberg, Words to Outlive Us, 135–36.

48 Fogel, A Hidden Diary from the Łódź Ghetto, 160.

49 Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City, trans. Emma Harris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 502.

50 For more on food and hiding, see Natalia Aleksiun, “Food, Money, and Barter in the Lvov Ghetto, Eastern Galicia,” in Coping with Hunger and Shortage under German Occupation in World War II, ed. Tatjana Tönsmeyer, Peter Haslinger, and Agnes Laba (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 223–47.

51 Rachel Cymber, interview 2015, segments 29–31, April 11, 1995, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

52 “Bread in the Year Nineteen Forty-Two,” by [Joseph Zelkowicz], January 1942, box 17, folder 853, YIVO.

53 “Bread in the Year Nineteen Forty-Two.”

54 Rosenfeld, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto, 31–32.

55 “Bread in the Year Nineteen Forty-Two,” by [Joseph Zelkowicz], January 1942, box 17, folder 853, YIVO.

56 Rosenfeld, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto, 104.

57 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 500, 502.

58 “Bread in the Year Nineteen Forty-Two,” by [Joseph Zelkowicz], January 1942, box 17, folder 853, YIVO.

59 “Bread in the Year Nineteen Forty-Two.”

60 Rosenfeld, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto, 104.

61 Oskar Singer, Przemierzaja szybkim krokiem getto (Łódź: Oficyna Bibliofilów, 2002), 38.

62 Rosenfeld, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto, 105.

63 Isaiah Trunk, Łódź Ghetto: A History, trans. Robert Moses Shapiro, intro. Israel Gutman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 115.

64 Pankiewicz, The Kraków Ghetto Pharmacy, 168.

65 Grynberg, Words to Outlive Us, 127.

66 George Hoffman, interview 17554, segment 55, July 17, 1996, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

67 Regina Brand, interview 47621, segment 96, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

68 Malvina Graf, The Kraków Ghetto and the Płaszόw Camp Remembered (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1989), 71.

69 Philip Friedman, Martyrs and Fighters: The Epic of the Warsaw Ghetto (New York: F. A. Praeger, 1954), 247.

70 Eichmann Trial, sessions 25 and 26, RG-60.2100.037, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), Washington DC.

71 Bernard Mark, Uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), 29.

72 Sam Goodchild, interview 29135, segment 15, March 14, 1997, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation; David Jakubowski, interview 9898, segment 85, December 11, 1995, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

73 Renny Kurshenbaum, interview 1024, segment 17, February 16, 1995, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

74 Jack Baum, interview 20658, segment 21, October 8, 1996, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation; Eddie Bachner, interview 43304, segment 103, June 26, 1998, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

75 Marek Edelman, “A Luxury Bunker in the Ghetto,” posted September 11, 2017, by Web of Stories – Life Stories of Remarkable People, YouTube vide, 3:14, www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v_HCvWFXvE.

76 Renia Britstone, interview 53970, segment 63, August 31, 1988, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

77 Jerry Rawicki, interview 54012, segments 64–65, March 18, 2001, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

78 Erna Rosenthal, interview 20525, segment 21, October 7, 1996, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

79 Luscia Haberfeld, interview 20848, segment 19, October 13, 1996, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

80 Rapes also took place during deportations from Łódź and Kraków. See Helene Sinnreich, “‘And It Was Something We Didn’t Talk About’: Rape of Jewish Women during the Holocaust,” Holocaust Studies 14, no. 2 (2008): 1–22; see also Luscia Haberfeld, interview 20848, October 13, 1996, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation; Erna Rosenthal, interview 20525, segment 23, October 7, 1996, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation; Thaddeus Stabholz, interview 12869, March 11, 1996, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation; Pinchas Gutter, interview 534, segment 65, January 12, 1995, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation; David Jakubowski, interview 9898, segment 87, December 11, 1995, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation; Eddie Bachner, interview 43304, segment 108, June 26, 1998, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

Conclusion

1 Hanno Loewy, Andrzej Bodek, and François Coppée, “Les Vrais Riches,” Notizen am Rand: Ein Tagebuch aus dem Ghetto Łódź (Mai bis August 1944) (Leipzig: Reclam, 1997), 105. The quote that appears as this chapter’s epigraph was originally written in English in the boy’s diary.

2 Hanno Loewy, Andrzej Bodek, and François Coppée, “Les Vrais Riches,” Notizen am Rand: Ein Tagebuch aus dem Ghetto Łódź (Mai bis August 1944) (Leipzig: Reclam, 1997).

3 The diary’s last entry was made on August 3, 1944. In it, the anonymous author indicates that deportations are taking place. Deportations to Chelmno extermination camp had ceased in July 1944. As of August, the majority of Jews remaining in the Łódź ghetto were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. A small number were sent to the Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück concentration camps and a smaller contingent remained in the ghetto, to be liberated by Soviet forces. During that time frame, sections of the ghetto were closed off. We do not know whether the unknown diarist was deported to Auschwitz, died in the ghetto, or remained in the ghetto but lost access to his diary when that section of the ghetto was closed off to Jews.

4 Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, trans. Barbara Vedder (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 168.

Appendix: List of Kitchens and Food Distribution Sites in the Warsaw Ghetto

1 Zespół Zwiazek Towarzystw Opieki Sierotami, CENTOS (Sygn. 200), 1941–1942. RG-15.077M 200/3 USHMMA. [hereafter CENTOS]

2 CENTOS 200/10 USHMMA.

3 CENTOS 200/3 USHMMA.

4 CENTOS 200/8 USHMMA.

5 CENTOS 200/3 USHMMA.

6 RING. II/177.

7 CENTOS 200/3 USHMMA.

8 RING. I/449. Mf. N.N., Notes from life in the Warsaw Ghetto.

9 CENTOS 200/8 USHMMA.

10 CENTOS 200/12. USHMMA.

11 CENTOS 200/12 USHMMA.

12 CENTOS 200/3 USHMMA.

13 CENTOS 200/12 USHMMA.

14 CENTOS 200/11 USHMMA.

15 CENTOS 200/11 USHMMA.

16 CENTOS 200/9 USHMMA.

17 CENTOS 200/3 USHMMA.

18 CENTOS 200/3 USHMMA.

19 CENTOS 200/9 USHMMA.

20 Archiwum Ringelbluma. Vol. 2, Warsaw. 2000, pp. 183–184.

21 Archiwum Ringelbluma. Vol. 2, Warsaw. 2000, p. 196.

22 ZIH 211A/248.

23 Archiwum Ringelbluma. Vol. 2, Warsaw. 2000, p. 188.

24 Archiwum Ringelbluma. Vol. 2, Warsaw. 2000, p. 197.

25 Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, “Fig. 2.50 Community Kitchens and Food-Subsidy Programs,” in The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 335–336.

26 RING. I/190. N.N., Report of the rabbi of Ske˛pe for the CKU on kosher food in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941 (Kitchen Director – Feldmebel).

27 RING. I/178; Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, pp. 335–336.

28 CENTOS 200/6 USHMMA; CENTOS 200/9 USHMMA.

29 CENTOS 200/4 USHMMA.

30 CENTOS 200/5 USHMMA.

31 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, pp. 335–336.

32 CENTOS 200/7 USHMMA.

33 CENTOS 200/23 USHMMA.

34 CENTOS 200/7 and 200/9 and 200/12 and 200/23 USHMMA; Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, pp. 335–336.

35 CENTOS 200/6 USHMMA.

36 CENTOS 200/5 and 200/12; Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, pp. 335–336.

37 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, pp. 335–336.

38 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, pp. 335–336.

39 CENTOS 200/18 USHMMA.

40 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, pp. 335–336.

41 CENTOS 200/7 and 200/21 and 200/22 USHMMA.

42 CENTOS 200/5 and 200/22 USHMMA; RING. I/204. (Date unknown, Warsaw Ghetto. N.N., “Plan fun der dertsierisher arbet in di bashpaizungs-punktn Karmelitske 29, Novolipki 68, Krokhmalne 36”).

43 CENTOS 200/19 USHMMA.

44 RING. I/204.; RING. II/177; Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, pp. 335–336.

45 The Kitchen at ul. Leszno was used for multiple celebrations and large events including performances. It was also the site of a food distribution center. RING. I/674/1. (Lb. 1688). Mf. Invitation dated 29.03.1942 to the seder celebration on 1.04.1942 at the Kitchen at ul. Leszno 14; RING. I/1112/4 (1431). (Lb. 1429). Mf. 01.[1942], Invitation to the commemorative meeting on the occasion of the 40th year of existence of the Jewish National Fund (K.K.L.), 17.01.[1942] at the kitchen at ul. Leszno 14; RING. I/1112/4 (1431). (Lb. 1429). 01.[1942], Invitation to the commemorative meeting on the occasion of the 40th year of existence of the Jewish National Fund (K.K.L.), 17.01.[1942] at the kitchen at ul. Leszno 14; Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, pp. 335–336.

46 RING. II/123. 5.03.[year unknown], Warsaw Ghetto, Invitation to a show on 5.03.[year unknown] organized in the premises of the public kitchen at ul. Leszno 29.

47 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, pp. 335–336; RING. I/641; RING. I/654; RING. I/307/2; Report of Activity; RING. I/594/1.

48 CENTOS 200/5 USHMMA; RING. I/1096/2 Invitation for the opening of the Bialik Children’s Home at Kitchen no. 135 (ul. Leszno 42, apt. 11), on 14.07.1942.

49 CENTOS 200/5 USHMMA.

50 CENTOS 200/21 USHMMA.

51 RING. I/1201 (1520) 2.07.1942, Warsaw Ghetto. Director of the C[entral] J[ail], Letter of 2.07.1942.

52 CENTOS 200/7 and 200/19 and 200/22 USHMMA.

53 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, pp. 335–336.

54 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, pp. 335–336.

55 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, pp. 335–336.

56 CENTOS 200/5 USHMMA; Rachela Honigman with husband and Dr Rapaport lived there, see: Rachela Honigman, Testimony 301-4239, Jewish Historical Institute Archives. Location of a Beis Yakov school – See: Gazeta Zydowska 1941, Source Pages: 88/89 p.3, 111/2, III 65/2; GŻ 22, art; RING. I/190. N.N., Report of the rabbi of Skępe for the CKU on kosher food in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941; Kitchen director – Landenberg.

57 CENTOS 200/5 and 200/27 USHMMA.

58 RING. I/190. N.N., Report of the rabbi of Ske˛pe for the CKU on kosher food in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941 (Kitchen Director – Heber).

59 CENTOS 200/7 and 200/19 USHMMA; RING. II/388.

60 There were two kitchens in the building. One for poor children run by CENTOS. A second one for wealthy children. On was managed by Genia Silkes. See CENTOS 200/5 USHMMA; Adolf Berman, Wos der gojr hot mir baszert. Mit jidn in Warsze 1939–1942, Israel 1980, p. 69; RING. II/121; RING. II/384; Balbina Osser, Testimony 301-4808; Jewish Historical Institute Archives. CENTOS 200/21 USHMMA; Genia Silkes. Zeznania ocalałych Zydow. Testimony 301-6289, Jewish Historical Institute Archives; CENTOS 200/9 USHMMA.

61 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, pp. 335–336; Note: Teachers and employees of the kitchen and school include: Natan Smolar and Fejga Herclich – directors, Izrael Lichtensztajn, Gela Seksztajn, Ł. Fajnsztajn, D. Perelman. CENTOS 200/5 USHMMA; Ring. I/201 (515) Letter of 1.06.1942 to Central Provisioning Commission at KOM [Komitet Opiekun´czy Miejski, Municipal Guardian Committee] in Warsaw; RING. I/777/7. (1099). Sponsors’ Committee Invitation for tsholnt [czulent] on 22.11.1941; RING. I/269; RING. I/1205 (1524); Ghetto Fighters House Archive. catalogue number 5990. From the Adolf – Abraham Berman collection: A list of civic activists, artists, intellectuals, and educators, by profession. Note: memorial service for Liza Nachtensztajn held at ul. Nowolipki. Nachtensztajn was an educator.; RING. I/332. Reports of the children’s council and pupils’ compositions; RING. I/332. Reports of the children’s council and pupils’ compositions; CENTOS 200/4-5 and 200/21-22 USHMMA.

62 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, pp. 335–336.

63 RING. I/1207 (1526). Minutes of the session of representatives of political parties in the Warsaw Ghetto. [23.03.1942?]

64 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, pp. 335–336.

65 RING. I/777/9. (1099); RING. II/384.

66 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, pp. 335–336.

67 CENTOS 200/7 and 200/18 USHMMA.

68 CENTOS 200/7 USHMMA.

69 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, pp. 335–336.

70 Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg, 22. “A meal in such a kitchen consists of potato or cabbage soup and a tiny portion of vegetables. Twice a week one receive a tiny piece of meat which costs 1 zloty 20 groszy.”

71 CENTOS 200/4 and 200/21 USHMMA; See Letter addressed on the manager of the kitchen # 138 from CENTOS Control Department, December 14, 1941, concerning report dated December 10, 1941. CENTOS 200/5 USHMMA.

72 CENTOS 200/8 USHMMA.

73 CENTOS 200/19 USHMMA.

74 RING. I/1220/25. Certificate of 2.09.1940 for Basia Getler (ul. S´wie˛tojerska 36) “with meal privileges on the basis of identification no. 12034/40.”

75 CENTOS 200/23 USHMMA.

76 Ring. I/298 After 4.06.1942, Warsaw Ghetto. Sponsors’ committee of the Kitchen (ul. S´wie˛tojerska 34), Letter of 4.06.1942 to Central Provisioning Commission at KOM in Warsaw; CENTOS 200/22 USHMMA.

77 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, pp. 335–336.

78 RING. I/777/1. (1099). Date unknown, Announcement about the availability of meals at the kosher kitchen at ul. Tłomackie 11.

79 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, pp. 335–336; RING. I/1098 (1417) Invitation to a commemorative meeting dedicated to Abraham Rajzen’s (Raisin) fiftieth year as an author, on 22.02.1942 in the hall at ul. Tłomackie 5.

80 I am grateful to Ian Fuchs whose email of 12/20/2020 shared with me the address which he located in Seidman, Hillel. 1970. Ishim she-hikarti: demuyot me-ʻavar ḳarov be-Mizraḥ Eropah. Yerushalayim: Mosad ha-Rav Ḳuḳ. Thank you to Naomi Seidman for making the introduction to Ilan Fuchs.

81 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, pp. 335–336.

82 RING. I/190. N.N., Report of the rabbi of Ske˛pe for the CKU on kosher food in the Warsaw Ghetto in 194; Kitchen Director – Kobak.

83 RING. I/995 (1314). (Lb. 401). N.N., Account of the memorial meeting in memory of Chaim Nachman Bialik and Theodor Herzl at the public kitchen at ul. Zamenhofa 13 (15.06.[07?].1940).

84 CENTOS 200/6 USHMMA.

85 CENTOS 200/7 USHMMA.

86 RING. I/190. N.N., Report of the rabbi of Ske˛pe for the CKU on kosher food in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941; Kitchen Director – Godszlak [?Goldszlak].

87 RING. I/190. N.N., Report of the rabbi of Ske˛pe for the CKU on kosher food in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941 (Director of Kitchen: Kozłowski).

88 RING. II/19. Department of Women’s Social Work, Districts IV and V. E. Secemska, Report of activity for the month of August 1940.

89 CENTOS. 200/4 USHMMA.

90 CENTOS. 200/4 USHMMA.

91 RING. II/383/1.

92 RING. I/307/2. (Lb. 1676, 1677). Report of Activity.

93 RING. I/307/2. (Lb. 1676, 1677). Report of Activity.

94 RING. I/307/2. (Lb. 1676, 1677). Report of Activity.

95 Gazeta Zydownska nr 11 og, 48/3, III 40/2, 43/2.

96 Berg, 45–46.

97 Gazeta Zydownska nr 11, 48/3, III 40/2, 43/2.

98 Person, Katarzyna. “Sexual Violence during the Holocaust: The Case of Forced Prostitution in the Warsaw Ghetto.” Shofar 33, no. 2 (2015): 110

99 RING. I/269. (Lb. 18, 19, 19A).

100 Berg, 45–46.

101 Berg, 45–46.

102 RING. I/307/2. (Lb. 1676, 1677). Report of Activity.

103 RING. I/307/2. (Lb. 1676, 1677). Report of Activity.