Under the Third Reich, Nazi Germany undertook an unprecedented effort to refashion the city of Łódź. Home to prewar Poland’s second most populous Jewish community, this was to become a German city of enchantment—a modern, clean, and orderly showcase of urban planning and the arts. Central to the undertaking, however, was a crime of unparalleled dimension: the ghettoization, exploitation, and ultimate annihilation of the city’s entire Jewish population.
Ghettostadt is the terrifying examination of the Jewish ghetto’s place in the Nazi worldview. Exploring ghetto life in its broadest context, it deftly maneuvers between the perspectives and actions of Łódź’s beleaguered Jewish community, the Germans who oversaw and administered the ghetto’s affairs, and the “ordinary” inhabitants of the once Polish city. Gordon Horwitz reveals patterns of exchange, interactions, and interdependence within the city that are stunning in their extent and intimacy. He shows how the Nazis, exercising unbounded force and deception, exploited Jewish institutional traditions, social divisions, faith in rationality, and hope for survival to achieve their wider goal of Jewish elimination from the city and the world. With unusual narrative force, the work brings to light the crushing moral dilemmas facing one of the most significant Jewish communities of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, while simultaneously exploring the ideological underpinnings and cultural, economic, and social realities within which the Holocaust took shape and flourished.
This lucid, powerful, and harrowing account of the daily life of the “new” German city, both within and beyond the ghetto of Łódź, is an extraordinary revelation of the making of the Holocaust.
Gordon J. Horwitz is Associate Professor of History at Illinois Wesleyan University.
Table of Contents
Prologue 1
1 Autumn 1939: Conquest 8
2 A City without Jews 30
3 The Enclosure 62
4 The Ghetto Will Endure 91
5 The Ghetto and the City of the Future 113
6 Banishment 143
7 Departure, Worry, and Disappearance 159
8 "Give Me Your Children" 192
9 Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die? 232
10 Numbered Are the Days 266
Epilogue 311
Notes 325
Acknowledgments 383
Index 385
What People are Saying About This
Jeffrey Herf
A finely-wrought reconstruction of everyday life and death in the Łódź Ghetto. Horwitz is that most welcome of historians, one who conveys minute details while keeping in view the large political and moral issues they raise. This powerful book takes a prominent place in the ongoing discussion of what the Jews could and could not do to save themselves in the face of the Nazi determination to murder them all. --(Jeffrey Herf, author of The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust)
Charles S. Maier
Gordon Horwitz's unflinching and heartbreaking narrative of occupied Łódź juxtaposes the Nazi plans for its urban "cleansing" and renewal with the inexorable destruction of its ghettoized Jewish community. Even after so many accounts and interpretations of the Holocaust, we owe Horwitz a great debt as he dispassionately examines the most contentious issues, including the notorious role of Ghetto administrator Chaim Rumkowski, the negligible options for resistance, and the vain hope of playing for time. --(Charles S. Maier, author of The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity)
Michael R. Marrus
This wonderful history examines the Nazis' effort to transform the bustling , energetic metropolis of Łódź, with its 200,000 Jews, into the German-dominated Litzmannstadt -- from which the Jews were to disappear. Ghettostadt is a splendid, clear-eyed, detailed, and masterful look at the human and urban landscape of the teeming Jewish world the Nazis destroyed. --(Michael R. Marrus, University of Toronto)
