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Emotions in Yiddish Ghetto Diaries

This book uses an empathic reading of Yiddish diarists’ feelings, evaluations, and
assessments about persecutors in the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna ghettos to present an
emotional history of persecution in the Nazi ghettos.
It re-­centers the daily experiences of psychological and physical violence that
made up ghetto life and that ultimately led victims to use their diaries as a place of
agency to question and attempt to maintain their own beliefs in prewar Jewish and
Enlightenment ethics and morality. Holocaust scholars and students, as well as
people interested in personal narratives, interpersonal relations, and the problem of
dehumanization during the Holocaust will find this study particularly
thought-­provoking.
Essentially, this book highlights the benefits of reading with empathy and paying
attention to emotions for understanding the experiences of people in the past,
especially those facing tragedy and trauma.

Amy Simon holds the Farber Family Chair in Holocaust Studies and European
Jewish History at Michigan State University. She writes about Holocaust diaries
and pedagogy, including the article, “Imperfect Humans and Perfect Beasts:
Changing Perceptions of German and Jewish Persecutors in Holocaust Ghetto
Diaries” (2020).
Routledge Studies in Second World War History

The Second World War remains today the most seismic political event of the past
hundred years, an unimaginable upheaval that impacted upon every country on
earth and is fully ingrained in the consciousness of the world’s citizens. Traditional
narratives of the conflict are entrenched to such a degree that new research takes
on an ever important role in helping us make sense of the Second World War.
Aiming to bring to light the results of new archival research and exploring notions
of memory, propaganda, genocide, empire and culture, Routledge Studies in
Second World War History sheds new light on the events and legacy of global war.

Recent titles in this series

Jewish Child Soldiers in the Bloodlands of Europe

David M. Rosen

Jewish Art in Nazi Germany

The Jewish Cultural League in Bavaria
Dana Smith

Allied Air Attacks and Civilian Harm in Italy, 1940–1945

Bombing among Friends
Matthew Evangelista

National Perspectives on the Global Second World War

Ashley Jackson

Politics of Death
The Cult of Nazi Martyrs, 1920–1939
Jesús Casquete

Emotions in Yiddish Ghetto Diaries

Encountering Persecutors and Questioning Humanity
Amy Simon

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/

Routledge-Studies-in-Second-World-War-History/book-series/WWII
Emotions in Yiddish Ghetto
Diaries
Encountering Persecutors and Questioning
Humanity

Amy Simon
First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 Amy Simon
The right of Amy Simon to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Simon, Amy (Historian), author.
Title: Emotions in Yiddish ghetto diaries : encountering persecutors and
questioning humanity / Amy Simon.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Series:
Routledge studies in Second World War history | Includes bibliographical
references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022060413 (print) | LCCN 2022060414 (ebook) | ISBN
9781032440187 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032440194 (paperback) | ISBN
9781003369981 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Holocaust victims--Poland--Diaries. | Emotions in
literature. | War diaries--Poland. | Jewish ghettos--Poland. |
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Poland--Personal narratives. | World War,
1939-1945--Poland--Personal narratives.
Classification: LCC DS134.55 .S56 2023 (print) | LCC DS134.55 (ebook) |
DDC 943.8/00492400904--dc23/eng/20230307
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022060413
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022060414
ISBN: 978-1-032-44018-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-44019-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-36998-1 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003369981
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by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)
For my loves, Davey, Maxi, and Ezra
Contents

Preface: Language and Sources viii

Acknowledgments x

1 Introduction: Reading Ghetto Diaries 1

2 The Cities and Their People 20

3 The Art of Cruelty 48

4 Censure and Casting Out 82

5 The Deepening Darkness 116

6 Conclusion: Humanity, Expectation, Agency, and Morality 143

Bibliography 150
Index 159
Preface
Language and Sources

This book presents an emotional history of persecution in Poland during World

War II through an examination of the Yiddish diaries and diarists who lived and
wrote in the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna ghettos. Doing so required long years of
research—finding all surviving Yiddish diaries written in the three ghettos, track-
ing them down in multiple archives in the United States, Israel, and Poland, and
investigating seventy-­five years of publications in Yiddish and English to see what
is already in circulation. What is written here is the result of that long process
during which I had many difficult choices to make regarding how to use and cite
sources. The reader will see that most of the diaries used here have been translated
into English and that I use the translations for quotes in the text. During my
research, I always cross-­referenced the translations with the originals, or at least
with the published Yiddish versions when the originals were inaccessible. In many
cases it was difficult to access or read the originals. Herman Kruk’s diary, for exam-
ple, was in large part held up in a bureaucratic process during my research years,
and the available digital version of Emanuel Ringelblum’s diary is almost impossi-
ble to read due to water and age damage. I also rarely had the opportunity to access
the actual documents themselves; I most often had to rely on microfilm or elec-
tronic copies which posed their own problems in terms of ease of reading. I have
included in the footnotes of this book both references for the original documents
in the archives and the published versions. Footnotes for secondary sources include
both translations of texts and original language titles in German, Yiddish, Polish,
and Hebrew where the texts have not been translated to English. I chose to use the
English translations in the text of the book because I believe strongly in the value
of providing published, professional translations for ease of reading and accessibility
so that all readers can continue their own reading and research.
Some parts of the analysis rely on a discussion of particular Yiddish terms and
expressions; for these, I provide both the English translation and the Yiddish orig-
inal (as published or cross-­listed with the diaries in the archive) in the footnotes,
especially in Chapter 4. I have also used several un-­translated diaries in this book,
including those of Ruth Leymonson-­Engelstern and Lazar Epstein from Vilna;
Jakub Hiller, Tobiasz, Bono Wiener, Leon Hurwicz, and Leon Korman from
Lodz; and an anonymous diary and unpublished sections of diaries by Abraham
Lewin and Hersh Wasser from Warsaw. For examples and quotations from these, I
have included my own translations.
 Preface ix
The questions of spelling and language for place names during the period cov-
ered in this book are particularly complicated. Aside from the long and complex
multi-­national and multi-­ethnic history of all the cities examined here, during
World War II, each city found itself in a different German bureaucratic area in
which further renaming often took place. Lodz and its ghetto, for example, were
renamed Litzmannstadt by the Nazis. Vilna was in a geographically contested area
that had previously been Lithuanian (Vilnius), Polish (Wilno), and Russian (Vilna).
The Yiddish name for the city (‫ )ווילנע‬transliterates to “Vilne” which is similar to
the Russian “Vilna” that has come to dominate the English-­language scholarship
on the Jews of that city. For place names, then, I have decided to use the common
English-­language spellings, such as Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna. For peoples’ names,
I have used the spellings used by the archives that house the original manuscripts.
Overall, I use English translations for most Yiddish and German terms, and where
I include the original language terms, I do so in italics and accompanied by an
English explanation. It is my hope that these choices will help make this book
accessible to an audience of both experts and lay-­readers.
Acknowledgments

A project like this, so many years in the making, requires me to thank so many
people from different places and times in my life. Throughout my higher educa-
tion, a number of people have served as mentors and teachers, igniting and inspir-
ing my further education and research. To these people—Robert Abzug, David
Crew, Pascale Bos, Tsila Ratner, and the wonderful, late John Klier, thank you.
A special thanks goes to a former teacher-­turned-­colleague and friend, Michael
Berkowitz. He encouraged me from my early days as a graduate student at UCL
and has provided invaluable advice, support, and comradeship for almost twenty
years. The best advice he ever gave me was to apply to a Jewish Studies graduate
program in the middle of Indiana. As someone who had never even been to the
Midwest, I would never have known that Indiana University (IU), Bloomington,
houses one of the most extensive and impressive graduate programs in Jewish
Studies in the world.
To my teachers at IU—Matthias Lehmann, Jeff Veidlinger, Dov-­Ber Kerler, and
Ed Linenthal—thank you. Each of you provided a model of engaged scholarship,
considerate teaching and support, and brilliant intellectual insight for me to follow.
A very special thank you to the members of my dissertation committee, who
provided essential feedback on the manuscript which, many years later, has turned
into this book—Padraic Kenney, Antony Polonsky, Roberta Pergher, and Mirjam
Zadoff.
Thank you especially to my dissertation advisor, Mark Roseman, for taking a
chance on me though I was an unusual student intent on using my background in
literature to examine questions of Holocaust history. Thank you for always push-
ing me to read across disciplines, sharpen my arguments, consider Jewish perspec-
tives, and clarify my writing. And thank you for suggesting I consider the
relationship between victims and perpetrators which has become such a fascinating
and fruitful intellectual endeavor for me.
I have been fortunate to receive financial support from numerous organizations.
Thank you especially to the Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program
at IU for funding years of my graduate study and research. Thank you to the
Claims Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany for a generous
two-­year Saul Kagan Fellowship in Advanced Shoah Studies. Thank you to the
Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for a Leon Milman Memorial
 Acknowledgments xi
Fellowship which funded a significant portion of my research. Thanks also for the
smaller grants I received from the Association for Jewish Studies and the Holocaust
Educational Foundation. Finally, thank you to Michigan State University’s
Humanities and Arts Research Program (HARP) for an essential development
grant that I used to do late-­stage revisions on the manuscript.
Through each of these organizations, I have met amazing colleagues and schol-
ars who deserve thanks for their friendship, collegiality, and intellectual and emo-
tional support—the late David Cesarani, Elizabeth Strauss, Kierra Crago-­Schneider,
Jeffrey Koerber, Jennifer Hansen-­ Glucklich, Dominique Schroeder, Hana
Kubátová Rivka Brot, and Michelle Kelso.
Thank you to colleague-­friends who have spent time writing with me over the
past few years—Evelyn Dean-­Olmsted, Laura Brade, and Laura Yares. It has been
an amazing opportunity to work together as each of us has muddled through the
book-­publishing process.
In terms of research, I never could have navigated the archives, determined the
relevant sources, and understood the provenance and complicated histories of the
diaries discussed here without the help of various librarians, archivists, and schol-
ars. At the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, thank you to Ron
Coleman, Michlean Amir, and Karen Auerbach who taught me how to use his-
torical archives and thoroughly introduced me those relevant to my study. A spe-
cial thank you to Vincent Slatt for tirelessly and creatively searching for related
documents and sharing his significant knowledge to enrich my work. Another
special thank you to Emil Kerenji and Leah Wolfson who became colleagues and
friends and who provided much more than emotional support as I finished the
initial manuscript, went on the job market, and started my family. Thank you also
to Suzy Snyder, Robert Ehrenreich, and Alexandra Lohse for their friendship,
advice, and humanity over the years. Finally, thank you to Steve Feldman who has
followed my publishing process over the past several years, providing materials and
advice every step of the way. He has helped me from choosing presses, to compos-
ing proposals, to revision, communication, and every other part of the process.
Aside from the knowledge he has shared, having his encouragement has been an
enormous support to me.
At YIVO, I want to especially thank Gunnar Berg for his kind helpfulness in
accessing some of the most important diaries used in this study. His encourage-
ment and assistance served as a beacon during difficult days of research. Noam
Rachmilevitch at the Ghetto Fighter’s House went over and above to welcome me
the archive, facilitate my research, and provide a lovely visit in northern Israel.
Thank you to my developmental editor, Gloria Sturzenacker, for her careful
revision of my manuscript, which did the heavy lifting of moving it from disserta-
tion to book. Thank you also to the various anonymous readers of this manuscript.
I cannot overstate the amount their comments have helped me sharpen my argu-
ments, understand my contributions, and reconsider my methodologies. This
book is immensely better as a result of their feedback.
The support I have received from everybody I have met at Michigan State
University (MSU) is one of the most important reasons this book has come to
fruition. From the very first moment I interacted with the people who would
xii Acknowledgments
become my colleagues there, I have been met with compassion, respect, and sup-
port on every level. I feel like the luckiest person in the world to count the follow-
ing people as my mentors, role models, colleagues, and friends—Andaluna Borcila,
Deborah Margolis, Sherman Garnett, Linda Racciopi, Sejuti Das Gupta, Matthew
Pauly, Ken Waltzer, Steve Weiland, Margot Valles, and Sean Valles. Thank you to
Yael Aronoff, Kirsten Fermaglich, and Anna Pegler-­Gordon, who represent the
type of academic and person I would like to be—successful, kind, generous, bal-
anced, and impassioned. They have shown me the very best of what academia has
to offer. A special thank you to Michael and Elaine Serling who not only worked
passionately to ensure the continuity of Holocaust studies at MSU through an
endowed professorship, but also showed me the utmost appreciation, considera-
tion, kindness, and support from the moment I arrived. Thank you also to the
Farber family which generously donated to this important position which I have
been so fortunate to fill. One of the most amazing aspects of life at MSU is our
wonderful students. I would like to especially thank Anna Cumming and Mateusz
Leszczynski who have helped me with research for this book. Anna particularly
helped to revise Chapter 4. Some material from that chapter has previously
appeared as “Imperfect Humans and Perfect Beasts: Changing Perceptions of
German and Jewish Persecutors in Holocaust Ghetto Diaries,” Copyright © 2020
Johns Hopkins University Press. This article first appeared in Journal of Jewish
Identities Volume 13, Issue 1, 2020, pages 85–106. Finally, thank you to PhD stu-
dent McKayla Sluga who has taken the time to reread and edit this book with me.
On a personal note, I could not have persevered without the love, friendship, and
support of various friends and family members. First, I would like to thank Rabbi
Alana Wasserman and Scott Mellon. They have been my friends, supporters, and
Jewish role-­models, introducing me to what it means to be a Jewish leader and to
care deeply about Jewish history and people. Alana has been my best friend since we
were children at Jewish summer camp and has been a constant inspiration to me
since then. Every time I thought I couldn’t, she assured me that I could. Thank you.
To Jim Seaver, who started the graduate student journey with me all those years
ago, and who is an amazing historian in his own right—thank you for the many
pep talks over the years, for coming through when I desperately needed an editor,
and for ongoing friendship.
Thank you to my aunt Linda and her husband Alan Ellman who invited me to
stay with them many times over the course of several months as I conducted
research at YIVO in New York. They now live in sunny Florida, but the time with
them there not only helped me practically and financially, but emotionally too.
They became invested in my journey and have served as staunch supporters of my
work ever since.
Thank you to Olivia Wieda, our nanny-­turned-­friend, who cared for our chil-
dren during the first five years of their lives. Her friendship and support meant
everything when we were new to East Lansing and didn’t know anyone yet. Her
interactions with our children provided a model of kind patience which we have
sought to emulate as parents, and her presence in our lives has quite practically made
my work possible. Never having to worry about my children while I was teaching,
researching, and writing meant that I could be successful both at work and at home.
 Acknowledgments xiii
Thank you to my in-­laws, Jack and Barbara Simon. I’m pretty sure they could
never have imagined how long and complicated the academic path could be when
I met their son in my second week of graduate school, but they welcomed me in
with open arms and have learned alongside me over these years. Every step of the
way, they have been generous, supportive, interested parties in my teaching and
research. Their kindness has made all parts of my life easier.
Thank you to my parents, Michael and Beth Shapiro, for their unbelievable
support over these many years. When I first began my journey into academia, they
did not really understand, yet they consistently did everything to help me succeed,
sending me to graduate school, supporting my years of study abroad, listening to
me worry about my work and my worth, flying to help support me and my family
after 9/11, after the birth my twins, during the pandemic. Every step of the way,
they have been there to talk, to listen, and to cheer me on. My mom has become
a Holocaust expert in her own right, serving as a docent at Holocaust Museum
Houston for the past twenty years, and my dad is the only person who read my
entire PhD dissertation of his own volition. Thank you.
Finally, thank you to the indefatigable David Simon who has supported me
through it all—the not-­inconsequential struggles of graduate school, two cross-­
country moves for my career, the nearly-­impossible early years of raising twins, a
global pandemic, and the stresses of the tenure track. His complete confidence in
me has been the constant that has kept me going. Perhaps most importantly, he and
our sweet boys, Max and Ezra, have given me a home-­base of joy and love with
which to face the darkness of this history. Thank you.
1 Introduction
Reading Ghetto Diaries

October, 1941:

We are in the hide-out again. We expect something any moment… Everything

becomes completely enveloped in a black, dreadful silence, a silence from
which there shouts forth the great tragedy of our helplessness, the destructive
storm which is now pervading the ghetto… We are like animals surrounded
by the hunter. The hunter on all sides: beneath us, above us, from the sides…1

The author of this text was Yitzhak Rudashevski, a thirteen-year-old boy living in
the Vilna ghetto. From June 1941 to April 1943, Rudashevski kept a diary explain-
ing the minutest details of daily life in a Nazi ghetto.2 His precocious writing and
searing insights provide us with one of the most important documents regarding
Jewish life in the Vilna ghetto. Like other diarists writing in the major ghettos in
occupied Poland and other German-occupied territories, Rudashevski described
a daily existence characterized by a fight for personal and Jewish communal sur-
vival. This selection is indicative of the richness found in a larger corpus of diary
writing from the Nazi-created Jewish ghettos from 1939 to 1944. These diaries
alert us to the terror, anguish, fear, anger, frustration, disappointment, helplessness,
and betrayal ghetto inhabitants felt as they struggled not only to survive but also to
make sense of the people and situations around them.
Not simply a powerless mass of people destined to perish in the “Final Solution,”
ghetto inhabitants were individuals, many of whom thought deeply about the
world around them. The large number of diaries that have survived attest to the
intellectual activity of many ghetto inhabitants, and the many more that have
been lost indicate the extent to which people living in the ghettos participated in
more than just the most basic attempts at survival.3 Rudashevski’s entry above
continues:

Suddenly, somewhere upstairs, a child bursts into tears. A desperate groan

breaks forth from everyone’s lips. We are lost… They stop up the child’s
mouth with pillows. The mother of the child is weeping. People shout in wild
terror that the child should be strangled. The child is shouting more loudly,
the Lithuanians are pounding more strongly against the walls.4

DOI: 10.4324/9781003369981-1
2 Introduction
On a daily basis, Rudashevski experienced traumatic scenes such as this one and
made the decision to write about them. At the same time, he went to school and
took part in clubs for literature, poetry, and history. He visited the library often and
participated in political movements. Within his own story, then, we can see in the
rich cultural life of the ghetto a hopefulness about the survival of Jewish culture
that existed side by side with the helplessness of confinement and external control.
Over the ghettos’ short history, though, this balance shifted as the increasing fre-
quency, brutality, and ubiquity of persecution made misery dominant.
We also see from Rudashevski’s diary a few more sets of contradictions. On the
one hand, he captures the blind feeling of being hunted by an anonymous enemy
“pounding … against the walls.” He cannot see the assailant from his position
inside a dark hiding place, making the reader question the ability of the ghetto
diarist to fully identify his perpetrator. On the other hand, Rudashevski knows
something about his persecutors based on previous experience. He can name the
group of enemies from which this particular threat originated—the Lithuanians.
Rather than typical German aggressors, these were Lithuanian collaborators who
played a large role in killing the Jews of Vilna.
Yet another contradiction that Rudashevski reveals comes in his explanation of
people’s reactions to the crying baby. Instead of trying to shush the child quietly,
as might be expected of people in hiding, he writes that they began shouting that
the child must be strangled. This moment highlights the ways that emotions under
the extreme stress of ghetto life could lead to people’s irrational behavior. Fear and
panic could cause people to act against their own best interests, in this case loudly
revealing their hiding place, and could even make them consider previously
unthinkable actions like strangling a baby. Only three months into the occupation,
regular people in Vilna were calling for murder of an innocent child, if only in the
throes of mortal fear.
That Rudashevski chose to write about this terrible reality shows the impor-
tance of contemporary writing for later understanding of daily life in the ghettos—
the feelings and reactions expressed here could not be recovered in their intensity
by survivors writing or speaking after the war. Furthermore, the vast majority of
diarists studied here, including Rudashevski, did not survive; their voices and
experiences would be lost without the recovery of their wartime writings.
Rudashevski is only one of the many diarists here who clearly described the felt
experience of ghetto life for Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. Whichever ghetto
people lived in, whether large or small, walled or open, short-lived or long-term,
their experience could be characterized by a progressive feeling of helplessness
engendered by the many and worsening “destructive storms” they faced there.
These “storms” occurred regularly; they took numerous forms and were carried
out by many different people. In examining diarists’ emotional responses to these
“storms” and the people who caused them, this book highlights the everyday felt
experiences of Jewish Holocaust victims. While the expected feelings of fear, pain,
terror, sadness, and hopelessness appear throughout, the ubiquity of less-com-
monly researched emotions such as anxiety, betrayal, and internalized dehumani-
zation push us to reconceptualize the ghettos as particular sites of intensification
and normalization of suffering during the Holocaust.
 Introduction 3
Methodology
This book brings two newer, dynamic fields, the history of emotions and empathic
history, to the study of Holocaust victims and their experiences in the ghettos
during World War II. While it purports to provide, to some extent, an emotional
history of the ghettos, this comes with a caveat. A full emotional history of the
ghettos would trace not only negative emotions like fear and pain, but also positive
ones such as hopefulness and happiness. Of course, people experienced the entire
gamut of human emotion while living in the ghettos. This book, however, is
particularly about the emotions engendered by the persecution at the heart of
ghetto life and the people who carried it out. It is most concerned with the par-
ticularity of the ghettos, as places created and defined by Nazi anti-Jewish policy,
but/yet/and functioning largely as “Jewish spaces.”
The history of emotions has generally attempted to examine changes in emo-
tions over time that can signify broader changes in society or to understand the
emotional vocabulary of a certain epoch.5 It largely relies on the concept of “emo-
tional community” as defined by Barbara Rosenwein:

People lived—and live—in what I propose to call “emotional communities.”

These are precisely the same as social communities…but the researcher look-
ing at them seeks above all to uncover systems of feeling: what these commu-
nities (and the individuals within them) define and assess as valuable or harmful
to them; the evaluations that they make about others’ emotions; the nature of
the affective bonds between people that they recognize; and the modes of
emotional expression that they expect, encourage, tolerate, and deplore.6

Using this method of examining the “systems of feeling” revealed in ghetto diaries
brings a deeper understanding of the “felt sense of the quality of life at a particular
place and time.”7 Specifically, it can help us here to understand more fully how
diarists experienced harm, how they evaluated those who harmed them, how
those interpretations changed over the course of time, and how they perceived
others’ feelings about that harm.
Despite the facts that “historians are becoming increasingly interested in sub-
jectivity,” and the field of history of emotions is already decades old, the field of
Holocaust history has not yet taken up either subjectivity or emotions in a
protracted way.8 There has been more attention to emotions in the areas of
Holocaust literature, testimony, memory, linguistics, and pedagogy than in his-
tory.9 Some Holocaust historians concerned with personal narratives have men-
tioned emotions in passing, and others have assessed German and Nazi emotions
during the period, but none have taken up a full-length study of Holocaust vic-
tims’ emotions.10 I have often struggled to understand how my reading and inter-
pretation of the pervasive emotions expressed in ghetto diaries fits within the
larger field of history of emotions, which it seems it must, though the field more
often deals with large social, cultural, or political structures over the longue durée,
rather than with the kind of flashpoint historical moment engaged here. Thus, I
propose that this book presents a new approach to the history of emotions by
4 Introduction
exploring which emotions are expressed in ghetto diaries, when, where, and
how, how they change over time, and what those changes mean in a volatile,
uncertain, short-term, traumatic situation. Within the ghettos, certain negative
emotions intensified and became normalized around particular interactions and/
or spaces; at the same time, tracing emotions demonstrates change over time,
highlighting the prolific, persistent, yet progressive persecution ghetto inhabitants
faced.
To interpret these emotions and their meanings, this book employs the system-
atic use of empathic reading. It presents some conclusions regarding “social and
cultural manifestations and functions” of emotions in the ghettos as they changed
over time (as expected in a history of emotions) as well as new ways of under-
standing reactions to and perceptions of perpetrators and perpetration as seen
through the eyes of Holocaust victims. It accomplishes this through an empathetic
reading of individuals’ writings which seeks to understand their experiences from
their own perspectives.11 Thomas Kohut has defined the historical use of empathy
as a “way of knowing and understanding in history” by “imagining one’s way,
thinking one’s way, feeling one’s way inside the ‘space of experience’ and ‘horizon
of expectation’ of past people.”12 This book seeks to imagine people’s felt experi-
ences of ghetto life by contextualizing the diarists’ lives and probing the ways their
activities and perspectives before and during the Holocaust impacted their inter-
pretations of people in the ghettos. Furthermore, this book seeks to understand
those people through “occupying the internal or empathic observational posi-
tion… to view historical phenomena from the perspective of the people of the
past, to view and understand their world as they themselves viewed and under-
stood it.”13 As Kohut explains, this positionality has not always been accepted
within the historical profession, which often prefers that historians inhabit an
external position from which to describe and understand past processes and peo-
ple. Even cultural historians who use empathy, he claims, do not always do so
consistently or even consciously.14 This book, to the contrary, takes empathy as its
starting point, relying on diarists’ own words to tell us about their subjective
experiences during the Holocaust. “By taking seriously the experiences that past
people took seriously themselves, empathic history illuminates possibility and
contingency, not what ultimately happened but what might have occurred.”15
Indeed, the Holocaust was not pre-ordained, even with the creation of the ghet-
tos, and ghetto inhabitants certainly did not anticipate it. Their experiences of
suffering, as examined here, occurred more often in response to a multitude of
daily persecutions than to their understanding of an overall project of destruction.
This book seeks to uncover, center, and assess those moments of oppression from
the victims’ perspectives.
Using an empathic approach to reading ghetto diaries that focuses on the emo-
tions, feelings, and sentiments expressed by the authors themselves, rather than
starting with predefined conclusions and structures, leads to the three main argu-
ments that will be explored in this book. First, suffering in these ghettos was
caused most of all by an onslaught of daily occurrences, not primarily by the
knowledge of the extermination project of the “Final Solution.” For years before
people learned of the systematic killing (and, in fact, before the “Final Solution”
 Introduction 5
was officially decided), daily life in the ghettos consisted of other forms of vio-
lence, deprivation, and wearing down of body and spirit that people endured and
wrote about regularly. Though historians know this, most histories of the ghettos
pay more attention to broader political, cultural, economic, and societal develop-
ments.16 Instead, this book takes these forms of everyday distress as its main subject,
arguing that the quotidian oppression by so many people in so many different ways
in the ghettos resulted in a prolific, persistent, progressive feeling of persecution
particular to the ghettos.
Second, the focus on diarists’ most emotional reactions to the people who
caused their suffering often point toward less-researched persecutors such as Jews
with social, economic, or bureaucratic privilege (rather than just Jewish police
and council members who have been well-researched) and local Poles and
Lithuanians who often inhabited several positions simultaneously. The people
carrying out this violence did not always fit into the traditional postwar catego-
ries of victim, perpetrator, and bystander that Raul Hilberg made popular in the
1990s as a way to explain different behaviors in the Holocaust.17 Furthermore,
diarists saw people continually shift amongst Hilberg’s categories, contributing to
their confusion and uncertainty about what to expect from one day and one
person to the next—another important and under-studied form of suffering
especially magnified and intensified in the enclosed and closing-in space of the
ghettos.
Third, the encounters diarists had with the multitude of perceived persecutors,
especially Jews who became more and more complicit in the persecution and
murder, led to a particular form of psychological suffering that began in the ghet-
tos and deepened in the camps—a forced reckoning with any positive notions they
may have believed about community and humanity before the war.18 They con-
stantly wrote about, assessed, evaluated, and judged all manner of persecutors
around them, trying to make sense of and maintain some concept of morality by
using harsh language to separate themselves from the perpetrators they faced at
every turn. This book argues that in ascribing agency to those who they felt com-
mitted crimes against the Jews, whether those people had real power or not, dia-
rists were working hard to retain their own humanity. The ghettos offered a
particular site for Jews to participate in writing as an ethical act.19 Especially in
describing the shifting emotional community of ghetto inhabitants, as the perpe-
trators closed in, they revealed a fundamental concern over whether they them-
selves may have fallen victim to the moral disintegration they witnessed all around.
As Amos Goldberg has suggested, Jewish Holocaust diaries present not only a
collapse of self, but, more importantly, a constant struggle against it.20 This book
seeks to tell the story of this effort to maintain a moral, human self, in the midst of
nearly complete societal breakdown. The dynamic relationship between emotions
and morals

is the key to what constitutes value in human societies, and makes the history
of emotions more than an end in itself. It has the potential to unlock—at the
level of experience—that thing that historians have always searched for:
namely, what it means to be human.21
6 Introduction
Research Scope

Diaries as Sources
This book rests on several fundamental decisions by the researcher. The first involves
sources. Because this study is most interested in personal reactions, it looks for per-
ceptions and feelings apparent in individual writings in the form of diaries. Though
historians know that diaries are not “windows” into the past—that they are, in fact,
constructed, selective, incomplete, and sometimes more public-facing than pri-
vate—diaries still represent the most intimate form of wartime writing.22 Some of
the authors that appear here wrote for themselves while others wrote primarily as a
public service, or to keep a chronicle for postwar records and study.23 Even these
public chronicles necessarily reveal the authors’ opinions and emotions, especially as
the destruction of Jews in Europe intensified from 1942. For our purposes, the most
important element of diary writing is one that Alexandra Garbarini has identified:
diary writing reveals the changes of perception that derive from contemporary lived
experience and the slow uncovering of knowledge about oneself and one’s environ-
ment.24 To track these changes and for the sake of consistency, this study focuses on
diaries that were written chronologically, though not necessarily daily, during the
ghetto period. This study does not include reports and letters which more obviously
took for their audience someone other than the author and did not usually preserve
the gradual acquisition of knowledge by an individual the way the diaries do.
Holocaust diaries also call up questions of historical interpretation. Because
ghetto diarists lived in the midst of the persecution, they could not always under-
stand the historical importance of daily events. Similarly, because of their lack of
good information and the prevalence of rumors in their closed communities, they
could not always contextualize their experiences. Furthermore, the trauma the
diarists faced on a regular basis affected the types of events they chose to describe
and the ways they were able to describe them.25 Many diarists also wrote under the
assumption that if their diaries were found, they would be killed because the Nazis
did not want there to be any evidence of their crimes. Historian Emanuel
Ringelblum pretended to be writing letters, for example, and the diarists often
used euphemisms to mask their meaning.
The volatile situation and emotional trauma it induced also led to shifts in lan-
guage itself. The language used within the diaries changed and morphed into
something created out of the confrontation between the old world, informed by
religion, Enlightenment, and modern scholarship, and the new world, which saw
all of this destroyed. For example, Yiddish terms had to be created to describe new
historical facts, such as the work permits (arbet-shaynen) that saved people in the
early days of the Vilna ghettos, Old terms could also be adapted to the new situa-
tion. For example, the term khaper, used during the period of the Cantonist con-
scription decrees, was adapted to apply to those who kidnapped Jews from the
ghettos for labor and death. In the Lodz ghetto, a lexicon was even created to
describe events and people particular to the ghetto. For example, it included
entries such as that for the Slavic-Yiddish term balagan. It demonstrated a shift
from its Polish meaning of “wandering circus” to its Yiddish meaning of “tasteless,”
 Introduction 7
to its specific ghetto meaning of “chaotic mess of people lining up for food at
distribution points.”26 Similarly, Holocaust survivor and author Yisrael Kaplan
compiled his own list of wartime terminology common in the places of his impris-
onment—the Kovno, Riga, and Shavel ghettos, as well as several camps in Latvia,
Lithuania, and Germany. First published in Yiddish in 1949 by the Central
Historical Commission in Munich, this study similarly demonstrates the major
shifts in language that took place in the midst of the radically new situation. The
2018 English translation of Kaplan’s work alerts us to both “code words” and terms
used to describe all types of ghetto experience, including those prevalent in depict-
ing “strong men” and “our own Jewish oppressors.”27 This work demonstrates the
ways that Yiddish language, in particular, was used in new and creative ways dur-
ing the war.
The different meaning of common words in wartime and postwar contexts
presents another obstacle between Holocaust writing and our understanding of
Jewish emotions during World War II. Primo Levi best described the inability of
language to bridge the divide between survivors and others and to express the
reality of what happened. He wrote of language as perceived by Holocaust
victims:

Just as our hunger is not that feeling of missing a meal, so our way of being cold
has need of a new word. We say “hunger”, we say “tiredness”, “fear”, “pain”,
we say “winter” and they are different things. They are free words, created and
used by free men who lived in comfort and suffering in their homes.28

At the most basic level, then, if language is unable to describe the events of the
Holocaust, how can we read or understand representations of those events?29 The
diarists themselves recognized these questions and tried to provide answers within
their works.
Lazar Epstein, a Vilna diarist, included poems about religious practice, fear,
and the terrible living conditions throughout his diary in addition to regular
dated entries. Abraham Lewin of Warsaw reflected after the start of the Great
Deportation,

In our language, in human speech, there are no expressions that can describe
the behavior of the sick and savage butcher, Brandt, just as there are no words
in our human tongue to capture the devilishness of their ghoulish acts during
the three months of the “actions.”30

Lewin was not referring simply to the Yiddish or Hebrew tongue, but to any
language spoken by human beings. Similarly, Lodz diarist Josef Zelkowicz expressed
the inability of people to understand and believe, and thus to for writers capably
represent, the atrocities going on around them. On September 6, 1942, he wrote:

But won’t truth remain “true?” This truth will cry out: Not only is everything
that has been written absolute truth, but no pen and no human force has the
ability and the talent to describe all of these events as they really occurred…
8 Introduction
No pen, no tongue has a vocabulary capable of conveying even a small frac-
tion of the emotions and sensitivities that overtake anyone who has observed
and heard everything that has occurred in recent days.31

It seems clear that, though ghetto diarists felt the frustrations of human language’s
limitations in explaining the depth of horror they experienced, they nonetheless
sought to overcome those boundaries through persistence, creative approaches,
and an ultimate faith that people in the postwar world would be able to understand
at least something of the “truth” of their experiences.
In this attempt to represent and convey some of the reality of living in the
ghetto, most diarists recorded both what they experienced themselves and what
they heard about others’ experiences. Many contemplated the notion of “eyewit-
ness,” and Josef Zelkowicz even used the term “earwitness” to describe one of the
types of witnessing he achieved.32 The same reliance on secondhand stories appears
in each of the diaries examined; here those written by professional writers, laypeo-
ple, adults, and teenagers all sought to record and/or explain something “true”
about the horrifying world they were forced to live in.
To complicate the story further, besides reporting on news they had heard or
recording other peoples’ testimonies, every single diarist from all three ghettos
made continuous mention of rumors.33 The most common rumors were those
concerning the immediate fate of the ghetto, closely combined with those discuss-
ing the course of the war. This type of rumor altered the mood of the ghetto up
and down. In December 1940, Hersh Wasser explained that the mood of the
Warsaw ghetto was hopeful in anticipation of positive events in Italy after
Churchill’s December 23 speech exhorting the Italians to switch loyalties.34 In
January 1944, Bono Wiener, in Lodz, wrote of rumors that all Jews would be
killed.35 As we will see, especially in the final chapter of this book, these rumors
radically impacted the emotions documented in these diaries. Sometimes diarists
wrote about their own reactions and other times about the reactions of the ghetto
as a whole—rumors held a central role in impacting the physical and psychological
state of all ghetto inhabitants.
Many of the diarists recognized the difficulty of separating facts from unverified
rumors and lies, whether or not they knew about the German policy of spreading
incorrect information in hopes of confusing the ghetto populations and making
them more submissive. At other times, diarists demonstrated the precarious nature
of their testimonies almost unconsciously. Herman Kruk recorded news about the
Bund in the Vilna ghetto on January 26, 1942, “reported from a reliable source.
The conversation was overheard from behind a door.”36 Perhaps without even
realizing the implications, Kruk tried to convince the reader that his source was
reliable, despite the fact that he did not directly witness the conversation in ques-
tion. This example typifies the nature of diary writing during the Holocaust.
Sometimes consciously and sometimes not, diary writers wove together informa-
tion they received through direct eye/earwitness, testimonies of others, overheard
conversations, and rumors. These sources together, though problematic from the
viewpoint of reconstructing a factual history of the ghettos, can give us a profound
understanding of ghetto life.
 Introduction 9
The diaries examined in this study reflect the personality, education, priorities,
and moral universe of their authors, framed by each diarist’s upbringing, career,
and past activities. As we will see, most were teenagers and men of the middle
classes who participated in some way in cultural, literary, political, or historical
activities in their respective ghettos. They therefore represent a relatively elite por-
tion of Jewish society, though as the next chapters will argue, their leadership
positions and ideological empathy with the greater Jewish community led them to
comment on perspectives much broader than just their own. In large part, this
work takes a “constructivist” approach to reading ghetto diaries, which “stresses
the cultural lens through which the Holocaust is perceived.”37 David Roskies spe-
cifically emphasizes the importance, for those who study Holocaust diaries, of
intimate knowledge of Yiddish culture, Jewish religion, and Jewish history.38 Each
author wrote differently, choosing to include certain elements of the ghetto expe-
rience and leaving out others. Each author chose a different style of writing. Some
wrote a more literary prose, including imagery and literary and religious allusions.
Others jotted down notes to remind them of events until after the war, when they
planned to go back and fill in the gaps. Most diarists fell somewhere in between,
writing straightforward prose entries about many aspects of daily life with occa-
sional historical, religious, and literary references littered throughout. Some of the
authors had been writers before the war, while others took up pen and paper only
to record the Nazi atrocities. Despite this variety among the works, each one offers
insight into the mindset of those enduring the persecution of the ghetto period,
and, as this study will show, the similarities in content far outweigh any differences
in form or style.

Place
The second decision for this study is that of place. This book focuses on diaries
written in Nazi ghettos in three major cities under Polish control in 1939—
Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna.39 Though there were thousands of ghettos in operation
during World War II, many of them in modern-day Poland and Lithuania, most
do not have the documentation available to reach broad conclusions about the
perceptions of people living there. Furthermore, it would be difficult for this study
to produce meaningful conclusions while looking at so many different types of
ghettos with various social groupings, different types of leadership, differences in
size, location, history, and experiences. Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna represent three
places with large Jewish populations, complex but different social organizations
within and relationships outside the Jewish communities, and substantial amounts
of surviving personal documents. Comparison among them therefore provides a
robust examination of a cross-section of Jewish life in Eastern Europe during the
Holocaust. While this book approaches the recent “spatial turn” in Holocaust
history with its focus on three distinct cities, Jewish living spaces within them, and
micro-spaces within those areas, it does so only briefly.40 I urge future researchers
to more thoroughly investigate the meanings of different spaces, movement, and
travel within (and sometimes between) these ghettos in the interest of further
deepening our understanding of daily lived experience there.
10 Introduction
Language
The final decision regards language. The lens through which this book engages
questions about Jewish victims’ perceptions of perpetrators during the Holocaust
is that of Yiddish language. This linguistic choice was motivated by several impor-
tant factors, and despite the fact that one of those factors is the researcher’s linguis-
tic limitations (I do not read Polish), this choice offers the opportunity to tell a
unique and distinctive story. First, many of the diaries examined here were written
by people involved in YIVO (Yidisher visnshaftlekher institute, Yiddish Scientific
Institute), founded in Vilna and Berlin in 1925. Scholars and community activists
at YIVO worked to document Jewish life in Eastern Europe and to demonstrate
the importance of the academic study of that life in Yiddish. Like the YIVO intel-
lectuals included in this study, this book centers Yiddish as a way of “emphasizing
the personal life of the people, restoring agency to the Jews in history, and promot-
ing national solidary.”41
As we know, not all Jews during the Holocaust spoke and wrote in Yiddish. The
study of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe is, by definition, a multilingual one. Jews
living in Poland and Lithuania before and during World War II inhabited at least a
tri-lingual reality, in which they spoke Yiddish as a native language, Hebrew with
more or less fluency, and at least one local language, most often Polish or Russian.
This means that when the war started and they began recording their experiences
for personal benefit and/or posterity, they had a decision to make about which
language to use. This was in no way a simple choice, and it depended on each
individual’s interpretation of language identity, the past and future of Jewish life in
Eastern Europe, Jewish identity, religious identity, level of assimilation, and politi-
cal identity. As Chone Shmeruk has noted, 80% of Polish Jews claimed Yiddish as
their first language in the 1931 census, though Polonization from that period until
World War II was rampant. Thus, most ghetto inhabitants would have had Yiddish
as their mother tongue and would also have been very familiar with Polish.
Younger people may have spoken Polish as their first language, which is also indi-
cated in the diaries chosen here—they include a few teenaged voices, but more
often represent people writing in their thirties to fifties.42 The case of Rachel
Auerbach (1903–1976), journalist and contributor to the Oyneg Shabes clandestine
archive in the Warsaw ghetto, provides an instructive example of this multi-lingual
reality. In a recent article, Karolina Szymaniak demonstrates Auerbach’s immensely
complicated linguistic world:

It is significant how Auerbach explained her reasons for writing in Polish in a

Yiddish book that was first published in 1974; the book also included transla-
tions from Polish of her texts from the “Aryan” side. Celebrated in the Yiddish
press, this book was to be Auerbach’s testament and monument to the life and
destruction of Warsaw as a Jewish and Yiddish cultural centre, told through
the individual fates of those who lived there. Auerbach touches briefly upon
the issue of language choice, and seems to be puzzled herself by the fact that
in the ghetto she wrote in Polish: which is as a sign of her uneasiness about
the fact.43
 Introduction 11
Clearly, even “Yiddishists,” those who adhered to a political and cultural move-
ment that viewed Yiddish “as a powerful vehicle, capable of serving the needs of
the emerging modern nation, and of providing the bedrock for the constitution of
a national community in the Diaspora,” found themselves in the middle of a com-
plex web of identities and ideologies centered around the question of language.44
This movement, called “Yiddishism,” was largely a cultural and national, rather
than a religious project. The Yiddishists were, by and large, secular Jewish intellec-
tuals thinking and writing about Jewish life and culture in Europe.45 Many of the
diarists discussed in this book were part of this intellectual movement—the diaries
used here represent a glimpse into their outlook, giving insight into their particular
worldviews and conceptions of humanity.
Yiddish is also particularly important as the mamaloshn (mother tongue) of the
vast majority of Eastern European Jews. It is an essentially Jewish language. Though
many Jews knew and wrote in Polish, German, or Russian, these were never
Jewish languages. People like Auerbach saw Yiddish, in fact, as the very antidote
to assimilation, even as they also spoke and wrote in local languages.46 As Jeffrey
Shandler suggests,

vernacular, or demotic, is not merely a language that people use in the course
of daily life for basic, routine communication. Often referred to as a native or
mother tongue, it can have a defining significance for its speakers’ sense of
belonging to a national, regional, ethnic, or religious community.47

Indeed, Yiddish served this purpose. Writers who chose Yiddish out of a group
of fluent languages did so as a result of this sense of belonging to the Jewish
people, and those who only wrote fluently in Yiddish did so by default. Both
perspectives appear here. People also chose language based on the audiences they
had in mind—intellectuals who chose Yiddish were likely imagining a postwar
Jewish readership, while those who chose local languages had their eyes on non-
Jews who might read their works. Non-intellectuals who chose Yiddish likely did
so because of their comfort within and attachment to the Jewish community.
This attachment is important for this book, as it makes arguments about how
feelings of betrayal toward Jewish leaders in the ghettos destroyed these authors’
very conceptions of humanity. Community belonging stands at the center of this
argument.
This book follows a call in Alexandra Garbarini’s ground-breaking book on
Holocaust diaries, Numbered Days: Diaries and the Holocaust. She reads in German,
Polish, and French but not in Yiddish, and suggests that “Thus, undoubtedly,
our understanding of Jewish experiences under German occupation and of the
place of diary writing would be enhanced by such additional research [on
Yiddish diaries].”48 And although Yiddish diaries and testimonies were used
extensively by early Jewish survivor-historians to write the history of the
Holocaust, that reliance has largely become obsolete as there are many fewer
native Yiddish speakers and researchers today.49 Therefore, the use of Yiddish
diaries in this book does the work of reclaiming them as an essential source of
Holocaust knowledge.
12 Introduction
Finally, what has been left out of this discussion of language, and out of the book
more broadly, is the fact that many of the most important, insightful, and searing
perspectives on the Holocaust in Poland and Lithuania were revealed in ghetto
diaries written in other languages, most importantly German, Hebrew, and Polish.
Among these are the Warsaw diaries of Chaim Kaplan (Hebrew), Adam Czerniaków
(Polish), Rachel Auerbach (Polish), and Janusz Korczak (Polish); the Lodz diaries
of Oskar Rosenfeld (German) and Dawid Sierakowiak (Polish); and the Vilna
diary of Zelig Kalmanovich (Hebrew).50 There are also more untranslated diaries
in archives in the United States, Israel, and Poland in each of these languages.

A Dearth of Female Voices

A profound limitation of this language source is that it leads to an almost com-
plete lack of female voices in this study. Only two female voices among appear
among the Yiddish diaries I could locate while the most visible female author in
any of the archival projects, Rachel Auerbach, wrote her diary in Polish. This
means that the conclusions drawn in the current study are influenced almost
entirely by men. There are a number of well-known diaries written by girls and
women in countries occupied by the Germans during the Holocaust, and even
from the Warsaw ghetto, but none of these were written in Yiddish.51 Because
this study deals specifically with the group of people who chose to write in
Yiddish, this examination will not address these women’s diaries. However, their
absence leaves open many further questions, such as whether the lack of female
Yiddish diaries speaks to an inability of women to save their diaries, a reluctance
of women to write in Yiddish, a difference in male and female wartime experi-
ence that made it harder for women to write, general gender inequalities of the
period that valued men’s over women’s writing, or the unlucky nature of destruc-
tion, perhaps randomly allowing fewer women’s than men’s diaries to survive.
The lack of female diaries here also leaves out the perspectives of the mothers,
sisters, wives, and daughters with whom these male diarists lived, worked, and
died. A reading of a few of the Polish diaries from the ghettos studied here, like
those of Mary Berg and Rachel Auerbach, suggests that emotions may have played
a larger role and more directly influenced interpretations of events and people in
women’s diaries than in those written by men. However, others, like the diary
written by an anonymous female author who wrote perhaps the only surviving
document from the time of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, demonstrate a third-per-
son descriptive, rather than a first-person emotional version of events, using a
similar tone and style of recounting events as in many of the diaries composed by
men. In ghetto diaries, as suggested also in Garbarini’s analysis of female versus
male letter-diaries written to children during the Holocaust, “Gender was possibly
a factor in… writing styles. On the whole, men tried to be more dispassionate
than women when writing to their children, though some were not.”52 Most
importantly, Polish-language women’s treatment of German, local, and Jewish
functionaries in the diaries read for this study, while only read in translation and
not examined in depth in the text, demonstrate a remarkable similarity to those of
the men. As with the male diarists highlighted here, Mary Berg wrote about her
 Introduction 13
frustrations with Poles who seemed happy to collaborate with Nazis in persecuting
Jews, the Jewish police whom she saw as corrupt, and the Nazi “beasts.”53 Rachel
Auerbach similarly wrote about the exploitation of the masses by powerful Jewish
people in the ghetto and about German “monsters.”54 Though their voices are
essential for understanding the full gamut of ghetto experiences, we can state with
confidence that on the subject of perceptions of perpetrators, their words echo
those of their male counterparts.
This book, however, is not about all diaries—it is about specifically Yiddish
diaries, in order to explore the particular stories that Yiddish writers told. As
Garbarini called on others to address Yiddish diaries in their works, I call on others
to ask similar questions to those posed in this study of the Polish- and Hebrew-
language diaries written in the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna ghettos as well as those
specifically written by women. A comparison of the perspectives demonstrated in
the various languages would give an important glimpse into the changing status of
language identity and values and limits of certain linguistic modes of expression in
the midst of the destruction of European Jewry, and an incorporation of female
diarists would open up an entire vista for doing the important work of gender
history in this context.

Organization and Concluding Remarks

The resulting examination of Yiddish diarists’ descriptions of and responses to daily
threats in these three ghettos which makes up the remainder of this book appears
in four chapters. These chapters follow and highlight diarists’ movement through
various stages of encounters with persecutors and persecution, starting with recog-
nition, moving to evaluation and judgment, and finally demonstrating an obsession
with internalization. At each step along the way (which, of course, also overlapped
and moved both backward and forward), these authors used their written words to
attempt to bring meaning and understanding to their experiences.
Chapter 2 begins with an introduction to the cities, sources, and personalities
examined in this book. It has three goals: 1) to explain the development and qual-
ities of Jewish life in the three cities under discussion, most importantly the life
Jews faced in the ghettos in each place, demonstrating reasons for differences
among the diaries while pointing toward the abundant similarities in identity and
worldview that impacted conceptions of perpetrators in each place; 2) to contex-
tualize broader documentation efforts in the ghettos and how diary writing fit
within them; and 3) to introduce the diarists to orient the reader for the remainder
of the book. Because this book seeks to imagine the experiences of its subjects,
focusing on personal emotions, it must start with a basic knowledge of those indi-
viduals’ life stories.
This book is about the feeling of prolific, persistent, progressive persecution
people experienced in the ghettos. Chapter 3 centers on the “prolific” part of this
trio, reading diarists’ emotion-words to determine when, where, and how they felt
persecuted. At the center of these feelings were those who carried out the various
forms of persecution; this chapter therefore examines the recognition aspect of
encounters with persecution and persecutors. Based on the reading of emotional
14 Introduction
responses to these, it suggests a new taxonomy of perpetration which more pre-
cisely captures victims’ experiences of threat and suffering in the ghettos than
studies have done in the past. This is not an ontological taxonomy, but rather a
taxonomy of perception—it presents a new way of understanding the constant
violence and the confusing behaviors of all kinds of people from the victims’ per-
spectives. The new categories developed in this chapter are: Taking Advantage,
Persecuting Administratively, Robbing, Guarding, Beating, Rounding Up, and
Killing. Each of these categories includes the activities of various types of people
as described by diarists in their daily accounts of ghetto life, making clear the
multitude of persecutors they perceived. Furthermore, several of these categories
have spatial components, such as “Guarding” and “Rounding up;” this chapter
therefore taps into recent trends in Holocaust historiography that take up questions
of “space.” Taking a close look at the behaviors included here highlights the inces-
sancy of persecution, the unpredictability of people’s actions, and the essential roles
of expectation and change for diarists’ perceptions of people’s movement in and
out of these categories throughout the ghetto period.
Chapter 4 moves forward to analyze how diarists assessed and evaluated the
persecutors presented above. As such, it deals both with the prolific and persistent
aspects of persecution. Moreover, it delves into the sophisticated array of language,
symbols, and references two particular diarists, Herman Kruk and Emanuel
Ringelblum, used to judge people in the behavior categories introduced in
Chapter 3. Here and in the following chapter, the Yiddish language of the diaries
becomes central. The authors included here located the core of their identity
within the Jewish community. As we will see in more detail from later biographies,
the Yiddish viewpoint often demonstrated a commitment to the welfare of the
“everyday” Jew, especially when s/he was in need. Kruk’s and Ringelblum’s cul-
tural, political, and religious prewar conceptions of community and society were
based on an understanding of Jews as a relatively cohesive minority group, despite
its members’ diversity; their feelings of betrayal at the behavior of Jews who harmed
others are therefore particularly potent. Analyzing the emotional language, types
of representation, and historical imagery in these diaries provides a key to compre-
hending the ever-changing nature of daily life in the ghettos and how diarists
grappled with attacks on their internal and societal moral values. Here, I argue that
it was precisely through writing these critical evaluations and judgments of various
perpetrators that these diarists attempted to maintain their belief in the concepts of
humanity and community amidst the destruction. The analysis here further under-
scores the particular distress and pain of watching those values falling apart.
To investigate the shifts in perceptions of others and of self resulting from these
myriad experiences and interpretations of persecution, Chapter 5 presents an
emotional history of the ghettos as they changed over time. Here, the progressive
aspect of emotional turmoil becomes paramount, as does a discussion of how
diarists internalized and attempted to reject the suffocating dehumanization they
faced. Diarists felt a pressing need to understand how their own relationships to
and beliefs in prewar Jewish and Enlightenment ethics and morality were changing
with each new persecution. They used their diaries as a place of agency to examine
and attempt to maintain those values. Using mainly quotes, this chapter presents
 Introduction 15
an empathetic reading of ghetto narratives to immerse readers in the shared sense
of the advance of suffering, feeling of suffocation, and sense of doom that closed
in on the Jews in the Nazi-created ghettos. It traces shifts in the “emotional com-
munity” of Yiddish-speaking Jews, demonstrating the way it moved from anxiety
to shame to ultimate despair as time went on. The chapter also presents the persis-
tent juxtaposition of hope and hopelessness and the constant terror that pervaded
all. It both analyzes diarists’ emotions from the historian’s (external) perspective
and examines the self-reflective ways diarists analyzed their own and others’ emo-
tions in the ghettos. The chapter, and ultimately the book, argues that representing
and closely examining their own and the broader ghetto community’s emotions
was a primary way that ghetto diarists demonstrated agency during the Holocaust.
Though they could not ultimately save themselves, they recorded their own human
spirit through the searing emotions they chose to discuss in their diaries.
This book sheds new light on the complex experiences of some of the most
vulnerable ghetto residents, but it also helps us to think more generally about
victim experiences of persecution in all situations of mass murder and genocide. In
every local context, people more and less familiar participate in more and less
violent ways in the destruction of the targeted group. Ghetto diarists experienced
and described the messy, complicated behaviors of a variety of actors. This book’s
examination of the diarists’ resulting feelings of despair and loss of faith in human-
ity and community can help us to think more empathetically about the experi-
ences of other victims of genocide, as well. It is my hope that this study’s method
of reading first-person narratives for emotions and perceptions about experiences
can serve as a model for thoughtful ways of engaging with many people’s traumatic
pasts.
The diaries, as this book shows, make it clear that these victims were facing
persecution on all sides and that ghetto life was truly a fight for survival on a daily
basis. Ghetto inhabitants had to fight against German SS members, administrators,
police, and non-SS military men. They had to fight against Polish police and other
individual Poles who seemed to relish the opportunity to finally steal everything
away from their Jewish neighbors, and Lithuanians who committed murder on a
mass scale and seemed to revel in the Jews’ final destruction. They had to fight
against the wealthy among the Jewish community who had a stranglehold on
money in the ghetto such that regular people starved to death. They had to fight
against the Jewish administration and police who, for any number of reasons, also
made life incredibly difficult for the victims. To those in the ghetto without
resources, these persecutors’ activities all appeared destructive.
When we look at emotional moments of anger, hostility, sadness, and despair in
the diaries, we find the persecutors. When we examine the moments and places of
danger, like labor round-ups, shootings, beatings, arrests, thefts, death by starvation
and disease, and round-ups for deportation, we see a host of characters who were
involved. By viewing the world as it was seen by the ghetto diarists living through
their suffering every day, we get a new and quite complex picture of ghetto life.
This begins to get us to the question at the heart of this study—conceptions of
humanity, and how victims saw them shift and change under duress in the ghettos.
I hope that my sincere wish to better understand regular Jewish victims of the
16 Introduction
Holocaust during the ghetto period will shine through this study. I do not wish to
humanize the Nazis or to dehumanize Jewish collaborators. Instead, I want to
recover the experiences of those caught between them both.

Notes
1 Yitzhak Rudashevski, The Diary of the Vilna Ghetto, June 1941–April 1943, trans. and
ed. Percy Matenko (Tel Aviv: Ghetto Fighters’ House, 1973), 39.
2 These dates are somewhat ambiguous, as the “diary” dated June 1941–September 1942
reads more like a retrospective of those events, while the writing beginning in September
1942 reads more like a daily accounting of events that is traditionally considered essen-
tial to the genre of diary writing.
3 Emanuel Ringelblum wrote about the number of people who kept diaries in the
Warsaw ghetto and about particular friends and acquaintances whose writing he knew
about and that was lost. Emanuel Ringelblum, Last Writings & Polish–Jewish Relations:
January 1943–April 1944 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1994), 19.
4 Rudashevski, Diary, 39.
5 For some of the classics that present these theories, see Lucien Febvre, A New Kind of
History: From the Writings of Lucien Febvre, ed. Peter Burke, trans. K. Folca (New York:
Harper and Row, 1973); Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1973); William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A
Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
2001), and more recently, Rob Boddice, The History of Emotions (Manchester, UK:
Manchester University Press, 2018).
6 Barbara Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History,” The American Historical
Review 107, no. 3 (June 2002): 842.
7 Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), 8.
8 Lyndal Roper, “History of Emotions Forum,” German History 28, no. 1 (March 2010): 70.
9 For examples, see Ewa Jaskóła, “Emotions in Narratives of Holocaust. The Example of
‘The Journey’ by Ida Fink; Emocje w Narracjach o Zagładzie. Przykład Powieści Idy
Fink ‘Podróż,’” Annales Universitatis Mariae Curie-Sklodowska, Sectio N – Educatio Nova
no. 2 (2017); Monika Schwarz-Friesel, “Giving Horror a Name: Verbal Manifestations
of Despair, Fear, and Anxiety in Texts of Holocaust Victims and Survivors,” in Emotion
in Language: Theory – Research – Application, ed. Ulrike M. Lüdtke (Amsterdam and
Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2015), 289–304; Gail Ivy Berlin,
“Once there was Elźunia’”: Approaching Affect in Holocaust Literature,” College English
74, no. 5 (May 2012): 395–416; Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer. 2009. “The Witness
in the Archive: Holocaust Studies/ Memory Studies.” Memory Studies 2, no. 2 (2009):
151–70.
10 Gustavo Corni, Hitler’s Ghettos: Voices from a Beleaguered Society, 1939–1944 (London:
Arnold, 2002); Gordon Horwitz, Ghettostadt: Łódź and the Making of a Nazi City
(Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008); Alon
Confino, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014); Nikolaus Wachsmann, “Lived Experience
and the Holocaust: Spaces, Senses and Emotions in Auschwitz,” Journal of the British
Academy, 9 (Jan., 2021): 27–58. A recent international workshop brought together over
twenty scholars currently engaged in studying in emotions within Holocaust studies,
“Emotions and Holocaust Studies,” September 13–14, 2022, Goethe University,
Frankfurt, Germany.
11 Thomas A. Kohut, Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past (London
and New York: Routledge, 2020), 40.
12 Kohut, Empathy, 39.
13 Kohut, Empathy, 4.
 Introduction 17
14 Kohut, Empathy, 20. For a rare example of a Holocaust history that consciously does
this, see Anna Hájková, The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2020).
15 Kohut, Empathy, 4.
16 The scholarship on the history of the ghettos over the past decades is vast. For some of
the major contributions, see: Rachel Auerbach, Der Yidisher oyfshṭand: Ṿ arshe 1943
(Varshe: Tsent ̣ral ḳomit ̣et ̣ fun di Yidn in Poyln, 1948); Mark Dvorzshetski, Yerusholayim
de-Liṭa in kamf un umḳum (Paris: Yidisher Folksfarband in Franḳraykh un Yidisher
Natsionaler Arbet ̣er-Farband in Ameriḳe, 1948); Samuel Gringauz, “The Ghetto as an
Experiment of Jewish Social Organization (Three Years of Kovno Ghetto),” Jewish
Social Studies 11, no. 1 (Jan., 1949): 3–20; Philip Friedman, “The Jewish Ghettos of the
Nazi Era,” Jewish Social Studies 16, no. 1 (Jan., 1954): 61–88; Yitzhak Arad, Ghetto in
Flames: The Struggle and Destruction of the Jews in Vilna in the Holocaust (New York:
Holocaust Library, 1982); Ruta Sakowska, Ludzie z dzielnicy zamknietej: z dziejów
zydów w Warszawie w latach okupacji hitlerowskiej, pazdziernik 1939–marzec 1943
(Warszawa: Wydawn. Naukowe PWN, 1993); Corni, Hitler’s Ghettos; Eric J. Sterling,
Life in the Ghettos During the Holocaust (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005);
Andrea Löw, Juden im Getto Litzmannstadt: Lebensbedingungen, Selbstwahrnehmung,
Verhalten (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006); Isaiah Trunk, Łódź Ghetto: A History, trans. and
ed. Robert Moses Shapiro (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006); Pawła
Samusia, and Wiesława Pusia, ed. Fenomen getta łodzkiego 1940–1944 (Łódź: Wydawn.
Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2006); Horwitz, Ghettostadt; Barbara Engelking, and Jacek
Leociak, eds. The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City, trans. Emma Harris
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our
History?: Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto (New York: Vintage
Books, 2009); Dan Michman, The Emergence of Jewish Ghettos During the Holocaust, trans.
Lenn J. Schramm (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Andrea Löw, ed.,
Lebenswelt Ghetto: Alltag und soziales Umfeld während der nationalsozialistischen Verfolgung
(Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2013); David E. Fishman, The Book Smugglers:
Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis (Lebanon, NH:
ForeEdge), 2017; Hájková, The Last Ghetto.
17 Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945 (New
York: Aaron Asher Books, 1992).
18 For the most famous and most fascinating discussion of this psychological suffering and
questioning in the camps, see Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond
Rosenthal (New York: Vintage Books, 1988).
19 For studies that investigate this issue, see Rachel Feldhay-Brenner, Writing as Resistance:
Four Women Confronting the Holocaust: Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Anne Frank, Etty Hillesum
(University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 1997); Berel Lang, Holocaust
Representation: Art Within the Limits of History and Ethics (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2000); Dorota Glowacka, Disappearing Traces Holocaust Testimonials,
Ethics, and Aesthetics (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2012).
20 Amos Goldberg, Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing During the Holocaust (Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 2017), 258.
21 Boddice, Emotions, 7.
22 For a discussion of the value of and methods for interpreting Holocaust diaries that
focuses on perception rather than facts, see James Young, “Interpreting Literary
Testimony: A Preface to Rereading Holocaust Diaries and Memoirs,” New Literary
History 18, no. 2, Literacy, Popular Culture, and the Writing of History (Winter 1987).
On Holocaust diaries more generally, see Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff,
eds. Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1996); Robert Shapiro, ed., Holocaust Chronicles: Individualizing the
Holocaust through Diaries and other Contemporaneous Personal Accounts (Hoboken, NJ:
Ktav, 1999); David Patterson, Along the Edge of Annihilation: The Collapse and Recovery of
18 Introduction
Life in the Holocaust Diary (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1999);
Zoë Waxman, Writing the Holocaust: Identity, Testimony (Oxford; New York: Oxford
University Press, 2006); Jacek Leociak, “Literature of the Personal Document as a
Source in Holocaust Research,” Holocaust: Studies and Materials, 1 (2008): 31–52.
23 Robert A. Fothergill discusses different types of diaries, including the “public diary” in,
Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries (London and New York: Oxford University
Press, 1974), 16. Amos Goldberg produces an entirely new categorization of subjects in
Holocaust diaries, including the “documenting subject” who wrote these types of pub-
lic diaries. See Amos Goldberg, “Holocaust Diaries as ‘Life Stories,’” in Search and
Research: Lectures and Papers v. 5 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2004), 19. Jacek Leociak
suggests that writings from the Warsaw Ghetto require a new type of reading and cate-
gorization in Text in the Face of Destruction: Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto Reconsidered
(Warsaw: ZIH, 2004).
24 Alexandra Garbarini, Numbered Days: Diaries and the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2006), 17.
25 For a full-length study on the effects of trauma on diary writing during the Holocaust,
see Amos Goldberg, Trauma in First Person.
26 RG 15.083M, Der Aelteste, Reel 256, file 1103. For a current translation see
“‫ ”באלאגאן‬in Modern English-Yiddish, Yiddish-English Dictionary, ed. Uriel Weinreich,
(New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and Schocken Books, 1977), 710.
27 Yisrael Kaplan, Dos Folḳs-moyl in Natsi-ḳlem: reydenishn in geṭo un ḳatseṭ (Minkhen:
Tsent ̣raler hist ̣orisher ḳomisye baym ts. ḳ. fun di bafrayt ̣e Yidn in der Ameriḳaner zone
in Dayt ̣shland, 1949); Kaplan, ed., Zeev W. Mankowitz, trans. Jenny Bell and Dianne
Levitin (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2018).
28 Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1996), 123.
29 For one of the foundational analyses of the limits of understanding the Holocaust, see
Saul Friedländer, Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution”
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
30 Abraham Lewin, Cup of Tears, Antony Polonsky, ed. (Waukegan, IL: Fontana Press,
1990), 197.
31 Josef Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days: Writings from the Łódź Ghetto, ed. Michal Unger,
trans. Naftali Greenwood (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2003), 355.
32 Zelkowicz, Terrible Days, 355.
33 The topic of rumors in the ghettos has been well researched in Isaiah Kuperstein,
“Rumors: A Socio-Historical Phenomenon in the Ghetto of Łódź,” The Polish Review
18, no. 4 (1973): 63–83; Garbarini, Numbered Days, 58–94; Amos Goldberg, “Rumor
Culture among Warsaw Jews under Nazi Occupation: A World of Catastrophe
Reenchanted,” Jewish Social Studies 21, no. 3 (Spring/Summer 2016): 91–125.
34 Hersh Wasser, Diary, December 26, 1940, RG 225, Folder 32.1, Hersh Wasser
Collection, YIVO, New York.
35 Bono Wiener, Diary, January 1, 1944, RG 1452, Bono Wiener Papers, YIVO Institute
for Jewish Research, New York.
36 Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, ed. Benjamin Harshav, trans.
Barbara Harshav (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 185.
37 Alan Mintz, Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2001), 39.
38 David Roskies, The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe (Philadelphia:
Jewish Publication Society, 1988).
39 I am including Vilna as a Polish city here, though the identity of the city is much more
complicated than that. It changed hands several times among Poland, Lithuania,
Germany, and the USSR in the first half of the 20th century before World War II. See
chapter 2 for a more detailed history of these developments and their impacts on Jewish
experiences and perceptions of violence in Vilna.
 Introduction 19
40 For examples of studies representing the “spatial turn,” see, Tim Cole, Holocaust City:
The Making of a Jewish Ghetto (New York: Routledge, 2003); Geographies of the Holocaust,
ed. Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 2014); Stephan Lehnstaedt, “Jewish Spaces? Defining Nazi Ghettos
Then and Now,” The Polish Review 61, no. 4 (2016): 41–56; Tim Cole, Holocaust
Landscapes (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2016).
41 Mark Smith, The Yiddish Historians and the Struggle for a Jewish History of the Holocaust
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2019), 20.
42 Chone Shmeruk, “Hebrew–Yiddish–Polish: A Trilingual Jewish Culture,” in The Jews
of Poland Between two World Wars, ed. Israel Gutman (Hanover, NH: For Brandeis
University Press by University Press of New England, 1989), 287.
43 Karolina Szymaniak, “On the Ice Floe: Rachel Auerbach—The Life of a Yiddishist
Intellectual in Early Twentieth Century Poland,” in Catastrophe and Utopia: Jewish
Intellectuals in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, eds. Ferenc Laczo and
Joachim von Puttkamer (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2018), 333.
44 Szymaniak, “Ice Floe,” 323.
45 Jeffrey Shandler, Yiddish: Biography of a Language (New York: Oxford University Press,
2020), 153.
46 Szymaniak, “Ice Floe,” 342–4.
47 Shandler, Yiddish, 4.
48 Garbarini, Numbered Days, xii.
49 Smith, The Yiddish Historians; Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust
Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
50 Sierakowiak, The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak: five Notebooks from the Łódź Ghetto, ed.
Alan Adelson, trans. Kamil Turowski (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
51 For the diaries surveyed for this study, see Rachel Auerbach diary, Sygn. 230 The
Underground Archives of the Warsaw Ghetto: Ringelblum Archives, I/405, Emanuel
Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw, Poland; Mary Berg, The Diary of Mary
Berg: Growing Up in the Warsaw Ghetto, ed. S. L. Shneiderman (Oxford: Oneworld,
2006); the anonymous diary of a girl in the Lodz ghetto, as published in Alexandra
Zapruder, Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2002), 226–42; Havi Ben-Sasson, “Hell Has Risen to the Surface of
the Earth: An Anonymous Woman’s Diary from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising,” Yad
Vashem Studies 36, no. 2 (2008): 13–43.
52 Garbarini, Numbered Days, 104.
53 Mary Berg, Warsaw Ghetto: A Diary by Mary Berg, ed. S.L. Shneiderman (New York:
L.B. Fischer, 1945), 25, 27, 31, 41, 43, 45, 46.
54 Auerbach, Diary, September 9, 1941; May 9, 1942; May 30, 1942; June 6, 1942.
2 The Cities and Their People

Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna, though located less than four hundred miles apart, have
radically different histories. At the same time, generalizations can be made about
how changes in Poland-Lithuania affected Jewish life in the cities’ region before
the start of World Warr II. An introduction to both the regional and local histories
of Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna will help us understand the contexts that influenced
the perceptions of Holocaust diarists, many of whom were born at the end of the
nineteenth century and experienced many of the advances and upheavals that
characterized these years.

Regional Commonalities Up to World War II

From 1569 to 1795, Vilna, Warsaw, and Lodz were all part of the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth: Vilna, the traditional capital of Lithuania; Warsaw, a Polish polit-
ical capital from the 1500s and cultural capital from the 1700s; and Lodz, a farming
town until the late nineteenth century. In the late 1700s, the commonwealth,
which had been religiously tolerant to a degree, was partitioned three times, divid-
ing it among Russia, Prussia, and Austria-Hungary. Soon after, Napoleon—
considered a friend by the Poles—won the Prussian-held portion of the territory.
In its short existence, the Duchy of Warsaw that Napoleon established ended serf-
dom, established a modern legal code, and raised hopes—unfulfilled—of Poland’s
resurgence as an independent nation. In 1815, when Napoleon’s attempt to con-
quer Russia failed, Congress Kingdom of Poland was created, controlled by the
Russian tsars—as Vilna had been all along. All three cities became part of Russia’s
Pale of Settlement—the western area of the empire to which Jews were confined.
Thus, Jewish life in all three cities developed under the heavy influence of Russian
authorities, while Jewish life in Warsaw and Lodz was also shaped by Polish cul-
ture, politics, and national identity.
Jewish life in the former area of Poland-Lithuania transformed radically between
1881 (marking the assassination of Tsar Alexander II) and the outbreak of World
War II in 1939. The overarching story that follows is one of modernization, polit-
ical radicalization, cultural development, and antisemitic violence alternating with
greater liberties for Jews.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003369981-2
 The Cities and Their People 21
Beginning in 1855, Tsar Alexander II brought many reforms to the Russian
Empire, including freedoms for Jews. After his assassination on March 1, 1881,
there followed a series of widespread pogroms. Three years of anti-Jewish violence
throughout the Tsarist Empire left approximately fifty Jews murdered, many more
injured, and a large amount of material damage. Jews themselves were blamed for
the violence, alternately because of their suspected role in the assassination and
because of their supposedly predatory business practices against the Russian popu-
lace. This series of pogroms, the continuing anti-Jewish legislation enacted under
the new tsar, Alexander III, and economic distress caused the Jewish population to
seriously reevaluate their future in the Tsarist Empire.
Antony Polonsky has suggested that Jews reacted in several new ways—through
emigration, Zionism, Autonomism, and Socialism.1 Up until then, Jews had gen-
erally attempted to assimilate in accordance with the Tsarist authorities’ integra-
tionist agenda.2 The new Jewish perspectives that arose after 1881 ranged from
those of the radical socialist parties, which worked for world revolution and
eschewed both Jewish and diaspora culture, to those of the Zionist parties, which
strove for mass emigration to Palestine. In between were parties like the Bund (the
General Jewish Workers’ Alliance, founded in 1897), which promoted socialism in
the diaspora, and the Poalei Zion (Labor Zionists, founded in 1906), whose plat-
form called for Marxist Zionism to be carried out both in Palestine and in Eastern
Europe.3
The massive pogroms that erupted on the brink of the Russian Revolution of
1905 continued to impact Jewish political life, dividing some parties and creating
others as they attempted to understand and ameliorate for the Jewish community
the violence and antisemitism demonstrated by the Russian population and
authorities.4 The anti-Jewish brutality of the pogroms, coupled with economic
troubles endemic to Eastern Europe (which hit many Jews especially hard because
of anti-Jewish legislation), led millions of Jews to leave the Russian Empire. Those
who remained continued seeking increasingly radical nationalist and/or socialist
solutions to the problems they faced as Jews living in a generally hostile environ-
ment. The 1917 revolutions further complicated matters, as some Jewish political
parties became even more divided. For example, the Poalei Zion party became split
between left and right, the left largely supporting the Bolsheviks and promoting a
Yiddish-speaking version of Bolshevism in Palestine, and the right supporting
more of a socialist, Hebrew-speaking, rather than communist version of a Jewish
state. During the interwar period, Jews in all three of these cities maintained active
political lives, belonging to a rich variety of political groups, including the Bund,
a multitude of Zionist organizations, and the Orthodox Agudas Yisroel. Repre­
sentatives of these parties were elected to the Polish Sejm (parliament) as well as to
local and municipal governmental positions.

Religious Life
While the Jewish intelligentsia carried out active secular political agendas, the
majority of Jews living in the Tsarist Empire remained devoutly religious through
the end of the nineteenth century.5 Jewish life consisted of a majority of Jews who
22 The Cities and Their People
belonged to the Hasidim or Mitnagdim camps of orthodox religious observance.
The Hasidic movement had developed from the teachings of the eighteenth centu-
ry’s Ba’al Shem Tov, who hailed from what is modern-day Ukraine; it focused on
spirituality and spread rapidly and widely throughout all of Eastern Europe. The
Mitnagdim (whose name means simply “opponents”) hailed from the rabbinic tra-
dition popular before Hasidism erupted; its most important advocate was the Vilna
Gaon (1720–1797), who emphasized intensive and serious Torah and Talmud
study in special schools (yeshivot) in opposition to the seemingly heretical joyful
form of worship among the Hasidim, which often included dancing and drinking.
Within the religiously observant community, there was another divide, between
those who wanted to engage in the modern world and those who wanted to
remain insular, while reformed groups were making inroads by the end of the
nineteenth century and forming Progressive temples throughout the empire.6
Although observant groups developed in the interwar period that incorporated
more aspects of modern and secular study, they continued to heatedly resist the
assimilationist and integrationist tendencies of Jewish elites living in major cities;
50 percent of Jews still lived in small towns on the eve of World War II.7
A minority of more assimilated integrationist Jews, mostly living in urban areas,
adhered to the Haskalah movement of Jewish Enlightenment or disdained religious
observance altogether. Jews in Poland, Lithuania, and Russia were, by and large,
slower to adopt the Haskalah than those in Western Europe. Though major shifts
toward secularization had started taking place, especially among younger Jews after
World War I, many Eastern European Jews on the eve of World War II remained
more religiously observant than their West European neighbors. As we will see in
the diarists examined here, even Jews who chose a more assimilationist lifestyle had
often been educated in traditional ways, some even studying in yeshivot and becom-
ing rabbis before moving on to secular pursuits.

Cultural Life
Urbanization, modernization, and the freedoms permitted by Alexander II in the
1860s facilitated the entrance of Jews into the press, and the major cities of Poland
and Lithuania saw a multitude of Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, and Polish newspa-
pers and printed books.8 Jews belonging to a variety of political groups made their
opinions known through these papers and journals and addressed a completely
Jewish reading audience.
Concurrently, modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature expanded, and the pro-
ponents of each language could be proud of the development of a modern Jewish
literature exemplified by authors such as Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Sholem
Aleichem, I. L. Peretz, Hayim Nahman Bialik, and Yehudah Leib Gordon. These
authors and their colleagues helped to build the common cultural foundation on
which authors relied in their writing during the Holocaust period.
The creation of modern Yiddish newspapers, theaters, poetry, and prose in the
years before World War I demonstrated the new value the Jewish intelligentsia
placed on their own cultural heritage. After the pogroms of 1881 to 1883, it
seemed more appropriate to many Jews to celebrate Jewish heritage than to
 The Cities and Their People 23
criticize that heritage in favor of the cultural achievements of the local populace.9
Jewish creativity and commitment to developing a modern culture gained further
momentum after World War I.
Because of the division of the Tsarist Empire after World War I, important
differences appeared in the output of Polish and Russian Jews. Yiddish cultural
production in the new Soviet Union was sanctioned but heavily censored, while
Yiddish belles lettres in the new Poland enjoyed more official freedom.10 In contrast
to earlier years that had been characterized by forced Russification laws, the inter-
war period saw the development of Jewish schools in the Yiddish language.11
Warsaw became the Jewish cultural center of Poland, with its multitudes of Jewish
daily newspapers and presses, and a plethora of Jewish literary organizations and
theaters, and YIVO was founded in Vilna in 1925.
The major cities, with their large concentrations of Jews (352,659 in Warsaw,
202,407 in Lodz, and 55,006 in Vilna according to the 1931 census), also founded
important organizations for youth.12 Youth groups were formed based on language,
religion, and/or political affiliation and members participated in literary events,
sports, lectures, and outdoor activities. Both Hebrew and Yiddish schools existed in
Poland, alongside the Polish public schools which most Jewish children attended. A
number of the lending libraries that offered both original and translated works in
Yiddish and Hebrew catered specifically to younger Jewish students. In this way, they
hoped to maintain the Jewish youth’s connection to their Jewish culture in a period
of acculturation that had intensified by the beginning of the twentieth century.13

Interwar Antisemitism
In the post-World War I period, Jews struggled to find their place after the found-
ing of the Second Polish Republic and an independent Lithuania. The economic
ravages of war, the loss of tens of thousands of fighting men, the Jewish refugee
problem resulting from the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Jews from their
homes in the western part of Russia, and the redrawing of countries along eth-
no-national lines made life difficult for the Jews in Eastern Europe. Furthermore,
the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 lent credence to the fears of political groups that
opposed the Bolsheviks. The appearance of Jews in a number of Bolshevik leader-
ship positions led to a general linking of Jews and communists which fueled the
fires of antisemitism, especially among non-Jewish Poles and Lithuanians.14 These
hostilities led to a wave of pogroms across Eastern Europe in the immediate post-
war period. These pogroms, taking place all across modern-day Ukraine, Poland,
and Lithuania, saw the worst violence toward Jews to date and left tens of thou-
sands of Jewish men, women, and children murdered.15
Despite the minorities’ rights clauses included in the Treaty of Versailles that had
ended World War I, the majority of countries in Eastern Europe, including Poland
and Lithuania, quickly moved away from the liberal democracies that were sup-
posed to safeguard minority rights and toward more authoritarian regimes which
fostered ethnic pride to the exclusion of the Jewish “other.” The continued fight-
ing over territory and politics meant the unrelenting upheaval of the Jewish peo-
ple. Vilna, for example, after having been declared the capital of independent
24 The Cities and Their People
Lithuania in 1918, fell into the hands of the Poles in 1920. This inclusion of the
largest Jewish population of Lithuania into Poland instead of Lithuania changed
the nature of the community there. The Jews there had few links to other Jewish
communities in Lithuania and more association with the Jews of Poland. As in the
remainder of the new Polish republic, tensions between Jews and non-Jews inten-
sified in Vilna in this period. From the immediate postwar until the 1926 ascension
of Josef Piłsudski to head the Polish government, Jews faced violence, economic
instability, and Poland’s numerus clauses, a restriction on the numbers of Jews able to
access education.16 Piłsudski’s stance against antisemitism relieved hostilities for a
short time, but the renewed hatred of Jews that the Polish people demonstrated
after his death in 1935 revealed that antisemitism remained not far beneath the
surface. The political and economic situation became worse and worse for the
Jews, a deterioration that was ongoing at the outbreak of World War II in Poland.17

Language
In Lodz, Warsaw, and Vilna, language played an important role in Jewish culture
and identity. Unlike in the majority of nation-states today, Jews in Eastern Europe
faced a multilingual reality in which a variety of languages played different roles in
their lives.18 The majority of Jews in Eastern Europe spoke Yiddish as their first
language which changed and evolved based on time and region throughout the
modern period.
However, Jews always had the option of speaking Hebrew, as well. The language
of the Bible, Hebrew predated Yiddish and served as the language of religion to
Yiddish’s vernacular. The choice among Jews to converse and write in Hebrew,
however, had both religious and political overtones. Jews who spoke Hebrew in
Eastern Europe before the advent of Zionism and modern Hebrew literature were
by and large Jews involved in the most religious circles (although some orthodox
groups refused to speak of secular topics in the holy language). Starting in the
nineteenth century, there began a push to make a modern form of Hebrew into
the official language of the Jews settling in Palestine, particularly by Eliezer Ben-
Yehuda, who eventually made his dream a reality in Palestine.
There also began the creation of a new secular Hebrew literature. From this
period, Jews dedicated to Zionism and an eventual return to the Jewish homeland,
as well as those culturally attracted to modern Hebrew, began declaring Hebrew
their language of choice. However, Hebrew did not take the role of the favored
vernacular language of the Jews until the Holocaust destroyed the majority of
native Yiddish speakers in Eastern Europe and the remainder of the Jews moved,
in large part, to Israel, whose official language by that time was Hebrew.
The third major language spoken by Jews in Eastern Europe was that of the local
populace. Jews in Poland often chose or were forced to speak Polish, and Jews in
the Russian empire often chose or were obligated to speak Russian or sometimes
Ukrainian. This, naturally, had a practical component—one had to speak the lan-
guage of the external society in order to engage in commerce with the local
population. Conversely, many non-Jews in towns in which the majority popula-
tion was Jewish also learned Yiddish for the same reason.
 The Cities and Their People 25
Practically speaking, Jews also had little choice, at times, as to where to send
their children to school. Various waves of Russification and Polonization required
the closing of Jewish schools in favor of local public schools in which Jewish
schoolchildren would learn secular subjects and the language of the people around
them.19 Children schooled in this way often claimed Polish or Russian as their first
language. These policies, in conjunction with new freedoms for Jews to attain all
levels of Polish and Russian education after World War I, led to a decline in
Yiddish identification.20 Furthermore, Jews of the upper classes who were heavily
involved in local politics and economics, such as bankers and factory owners, often
spoke the local language as part of their role in the politics of the big cities. Jews in
favor of acculturation in Warsaw and Lodz, for example, also established Polish
presses for an exclusively Jewish reading audience. The success of these papers
underscores the importance of the Polish language for a large portion of Polish
Jews. The loyalty that many of these Jews felt to Poland could be seen in their
dedication to the Polish language.21
The situation in Vilna was slightly different because of its long history as part of
the Russian empire. Instead of Polish, Jews in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries who aspired to intellectual life outside the Jewish community adopted
Russian. (They almost never embraced Lithuanian, as Lithuanian was another of
the minority languages and cultures of the empire.) This was due in part to forced
Russification policies, but also in part to an attraction to Russian culture and
politics. As in Poland, however, Jewish schools existed (when they were not out-
lawed by the Russian authorities) in both Yiddish and Hebrew, and the majority
of Jews spoke Yiddish as their first language. Because of the takeover of Vilna by
Poland in 1920, many more Jews turned inward and back to Jewish languages, so
that by the time of World War II, language in the Vilna ghetto was much less of a
political issue than it became in Lodz and Warsaw. Instead of switching to Polish,
Jews relied on their Jewish cultural heritage, and there emerged a much more
homogeneous group of Yiddish speakers in Vilna than in other parts of Poland.22

Divergent Histories of the Three Cities

As already noted, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was partitioned among
Russia, Prussia, and Austria-Hungary in the late 1700s. Areas that fell under the
auspices of these different empires had distinct experiences as a result. Besides the
partitions, different wars and economic and cultural developments affected each
city. Furthermore, World War II and its forms of Jewish persecution, including
ghettoization by the German occupying forces, reached each city differently.

Lodz
Of the three cities, Lodz was the latest to develop into a major metropolitan area.
However, with the Congress of Vienna in 1815 came plans to improve and enlarge
the city, and by the end of the century, Lodz’s population had grown dramatically,
from 430 to approximately 315,000.23 Industrialization brought in large numbers
of immigrants, primarily from Germany, though large numbers of Jews also moved
26 The Cities and Their People
to Lodz. Many Jews became important owners of small and mid-size factories,
while many more came to Lodz to work in the factories.24 Because of the large
number of factory workers, Lodz also became a center for socialist politics, with
strikes occasionally paralyzing the city. And because of working-class antipathy
toward the factory owners, a fair amount of antisemitism plagued Lodz from the
nineteenth century onward.
However, Lodz’s prosperity ended with World War I. Its population decreased
by nearly 40 percent as a result of disease, the large numbers of men drafted for the
war, and the loss of the German population, which was forced back to Germany
after the war.25 Further troubles mounted with the loss of the Russian market
following the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and the Great Depression of the
1930s. On the verge of World War II, Lodz was still ravaged by economic hardship
and reeling from population upheavals. The 1931 census, which determined eth-
nicity by mother tongue, revealed a majority Polish population, followed by Jews
at about 34 percent and Germans around 9 percent.26
When the Germans marched into Poland on September 1, 1939, Lodz had the
second-largest Jewish population in Poland next to Warsaw, at approximately
223,000.27 It was one of the cities in the western part of Poland immediately
annexed to the Reich as part of the Warthegau region. The plan for this region was
to destroy much of the Polish population, subjugate the remainder, and eradicate
all of the Jews.28 Because of the plans to make Lodz Judenrein—“cleansed” of
Jews—the ghetto was created and sealed relatively early (February and April 1940
respectively), allowing less time for interaction between Jews and the local popu-
lation than in Warsaw and Vilna. Furthermore, because the Germans were certain
that they wanted to immediately rid the Warthegau of Jews to build a “model”
German city in the town of Lodz (or Litzmannstadt, as they renamed it), a no-man’s
zone was established around the ghetto to make sure the Jews were isolated.29 It
was well known that anyone breaching the area from either side would be shot.
This meant that, once the Jews were trapped in the ghetto, there was less oppor-
tunity for them to interact with Poles and ethnic Germans or to escape either to
the “Aryan” side, as many did in Warsaw, or to the partisans, as happened in Vilna.
Because the Poles were treated in Lodz only slightly better than the Jews, they also
played less of a role in guarding the ghetto and assisting the Germans in theft and
robbery than they did in Warsaw; “anxious about their own situation, the Poles
hardly concerned themselves with the fate of the Jews in the ghetto.”30
As part of their plan to assert control over the Jews of Lodz, the German author-
ities quickly appointed an “Elder of the Jews of the city of Lodz,” Mordechai
Chaim Rumkowski.31 While he was ultimately “totally dependent on the good-
will” of local Nazi functionaries, Rumkowski was given an unusual amount of
control within the Lodz ghetto.32

At first Biebow [German head of the ghetto administration] gave Rumkowski

carte blanche in organizing internal life, provided that the measures taken by the
Elder of the Jews did not interfere with Biebow’s main goals—the mainte-
nance of order and quiet in the ghetto and the exploitation of the ghetto’s
assets and labor force for the Reich and Biebow’s personal interests.33
 The Cities and Their People 27
Unlike in other ghettos, Rumkowski worked without the input of a council or
Beirat, making the Lodz ghetto an autocratically ruled zone for most of its exist-
ence.34 He did form a bureaucratic organization, occasionally meeting with other
Jewish leaders, but he ultimately had the power to choose how and when to do so.
From the very beginning, Rumkowski approached the German occupiers with
plans to create workshops that would produce goods for their needs.35 He believed
fervently in the idea of survival through work, pushing men, women, and children
ever harder to deliver more for the Germans. This strategy, he thought, would
ensure the survival of the ghetto. He motivated workers with food, ensuring that
those who did not work did not eat. Non-workers were also the first people sent
for deportation when the deportations began in January 1942.36
To ensure his power over the ghetto, Rumkowski fought personally against
various potentially threatening political groups such as communists, also ordering
their early deportation.37 His self-interest in maintaining authority over the ghetto,
as well as his firm belief that order and work would save ghetto inhabitants, made
him especially hostile to those who might cause disruption or resistance.
Though he founded orphanages for children and a Culture House that presided
over orchestral concerts and theater performances, Rumkowski banned all indi-
vidual cultural activity. All that took place in the ghetto needed his stamp of
approval. As best as they could under the limited circumstances imposed both by
the Germans and by Rumkowski, ghetto inhabitants organized lectures, gave choir
performances, and founded lending libraries.38
The Lodz ghetto faced rampant hunger and disease. Because of its isolation
from the outside world, it could not supplement the food allocated to it by the
Germans. Inequalities in the distribution of food, as well as the general lack of
quality and quantity of food, left the majority of ghetto inhabitants starving and
vulnerable to hunger-related diseases. The Germans did not allow in enough food
for everyone, and the lack of individual self-help organizations and smuggling
under Rumkowski’s strict policies did not help. Classes became divided between
the privileged laborers and those unable to work. Those who worked in the
ghetto offices, the Jewish police, and the Sonder group of ghetto strong-arms with
David Gertler at its head received more food and resources than the typical ghetto
inhabitant.39 Also, ghetto and workshop leaders often used their influence to
acquire jobs primarily for friends and family. For a person with no money or
contacts, life in the Lodz ghetto was virtually impossible. Thirty-five percent of
the Jewish population in the ghetto died from hunger and disease alone between
May 1940 and August 1944.
Working toward the Nazis’ ultimate aim of a “final solution” to the “Jewish
question,” during 1942 approximately 75,000 people from the Lodz ghetto—more
than half the population who had survived thus far—were deported to the killing
center at Chełmno. The ghetto then continued on in relative peace until August
1944, when all but a few thousand were finally deported to Auschwitz.40 Included
in this final group of deportees were Rumkowski and his family. Ultimately, what
was meant to be a very temporary holding place for Jews became, at nearly five
years, the longest-running ghetto in Poland, with one of the most controversial
Jewish figures of the Holocaust at its head.41
28 The Cities and Their People
Lodz’s “Archives of the Eldest of the Jews” and Diaries
A variety of intellectuals from different cultural backgrounds took part in Lodz’s
enormous archival project, part of that ghetto’s official record and therefore not
hidden from the Nazis. Begun in November 1940 and initiated by council chair-
man Mordechai Rumkowski, the project continued for the duration of the
ghetto.42 Contributors to this “Archives of the Eldest of the Jews” in the Lodz
Ghetto not only collected copies of decrees, speeches, correspondence, statistical
information, and photographs, they also created a lexicon of ghetto personalities
and life and detailed daily entries which made up the “Chronicle of the Lodz
Ghetto.”43 Of the three ghettos discussed in this study, Lodz was the only one with
such an extensive official documentation project spearheaded and approved by the
head of the Jewish council. Not surprisingly, some of the major contributors also
wrote private diaries where they left for posterity their personal, rather than com-
munal, responses to ghetto life.44
The archive survived the war largely through the efforts of Nachman Zonabend
(born 1918), an inhabitant of the ghetto but not an archive contributor, who was
by chance assigned by the Germans to stay behind after the final liquidation of the
ghetto to help clean up.45 The documents created as a part of this archive were
written primarily in German and Polish because of their official nature and could
always be read by the authorities. Perhaps because of these restrictions, most of the
surviving Yiddish diaries from Lodz were in fact written and collected wholly
separately from the archival project. After the war, the newly formed Jewish
Historical Commission gathered all types of Jewish Holocaust testimonies, both
those written during the war and others written or given orally afterward.46 The
majority of Yiddish diaries that have survived from wartime Lodz were collected
in this way.47
Among them are those of Josef Zelkowicz, one of the most important Yiddish
diarists of the Lodz ghetto. Born in 1897, he was already an established writer
entering the height of his career at the outbreak of World War II. Zelkowicz
belonged to an affluent Hasidic family. He was ordained as a rabbi at the age of
eighteen and later graduated from a teacher’s college and became an educator. He
also studied for a time at the University of Berlin, crossing the boundaries between
religious and secular Jewish learning.48 Because of his religious training, his diary
includes the most references to religious stories and characters of any of the diaries
examined in this study. Unfortunately, Zelkowicz’s fate was the same as most
ghetto inhabitants, and in 1944 he was deported to Auschwitz, where he was
killed.49
For a number of the other Lodz diarists who did not survive, we have scant
biographical information. Tobiasz (this name and his age, “30 years old,” are the
only identifiers we have for this author) was a relatively unknown Bundist who
worked as a shoemaker in the ghetto. His diary runs over one hundred handwrit-
ten Yiddish pages in dated entries from 1940 to 1941.50 Leon Hurwicz, an engi-
neer and Folkist before the war, was fifty-two when the war began. His diary
complicates the genre, existing of entries dated only occasionally, as well as reports
on a variety of ghetto subjects and personalities.51
 The Cities and Their People 29
Other diarists from Lodz survived the war and some published their diaries later
on. It is difficult to assess the authenticity of these diaries, because the authors had
the opportunity, and often the motive, to change and edit their diary entries. A diary
of this sort is that of Leon Korman, written in 1942. Korman was twenty-
seven years old at the outbreak of war. He was a tailor who survived the war and
lived in Lodz in the immediate postwar period. He would not part with his diary
after the war, so we have only copies, calling into question the faithfulness of the
diary to its original.52 The diarist Jakub Hiller, thirty-four at the start of the war, was
a poet who worked in the food department during the ghetto period.53 Almost
every one of his entries begins with a mundane accounting of the weather and ends
with a report on the all-important topic of dinner. He survived the war, with the
assistance of his sister, Esther Jukubowitz, and emigrated to the United States in
1951. He had become paralyzed through his time in the camps and never fully
recovered his voice; his diary was never published. The final Yiddish diary from Lodz
used in this study is that of Bono Wiener, a man in his early twenties who was an
ardent Bundist and metalworker in the ghetto.54 His diary was written in a date book
in such hurried script that it is difficult to read. Even when legible, the entries are
often still incomprehensible because of their short length and lack of context. Wiener
was designated to remain in the ghetto with a group of 800 workers when the ghetto
was finally liquidated in August 1944, but he refused to leave his aunt and left the
ghetto with her in a transport heading for Auschwitz. From there he was sent on to
Mauthausen and Güssen camps, which he survived. He buried his diary, part of
which was recovered after the war and ended up in the YIVO archive in New York.
It was never published. Unlike some of the diaries discussed here, this diary exists in
its original form (as far as we can tell) without alteration. Wiener went on to become
a socialist and Jewish community activist in Australia until his death in 1995.55

Warsaw
In contrast to Lodz, Warsaw’s history was one of a political center almost from its
inception and also became a cultural capital in the 1700s, hosting the first public
library in the world as well as a major university.56 At the same time, Warsaw became
home to major factories and large numbers of rural immigrants. Alongside these
advances, Warsaw faced continued violence, especially on the Russian front. Despite
the cultural upheaval and continued violence of the nineteenth century as a result of
tensions with Russia, Warsaw further industrialized in the nineteenth century, seeing
the installment of railways and electricity. By 1897, the population of Warsaw was
approximately 34 percent Jewish.57 The role of Polish and Jewish culture remained
strong despite forced Russification. Warsaw continued in its role as capital when the
independence of Poland was declared after the end of World War I, during which it
had been occupied by German forces. With over one million inhabitants in 1931,
Warsaw remained the center of Polish political life and was finally free to develop an
intense Polish cultural life.
After the onset of World War II, Warsaw became part of the central area of
Poland (the General Government), which was occupied by the Germans, not
annexed to the Reich. The plan for the General Government changed over the
30 The Cities and Their People
course of the war, based on the shifting ideology of Nazi rulers. As of late sum-
mer/early fall 1940, months after Germany conquered France, Nazi plans centered
on evacuating Jews to French-colonized Madagascar. However, by December of
that year, the Nazi leadership began speaking of the General Government as a
holding place for Polish forced laborers and the ghettos there as temporary fixtures
to contain Jews while they awaited deportation to an unnamed territory (likely
Soviet).58 When Warsaw’s ghetto was established on October 12, 1940, it was
becoming clear to the Germans that Jewish deportation would be eventual rather
than imminent, and that the ghetto would serve as an isolated living area for Jews
that would produce for the German war effort.59 Warsaw’s ghetto would eventu-
ally become the largest in Poland, with a population of 445,000 inhabitants at its
highest point.
With the help of the local ethnic German population (the so-called
Volksdeutsche—people of German origin living outside of Germany on whom the
Nazis conferred privileges during the occupation), the German soldiers who ini-
tially entered Warsaw immediately began to humiliate, beat, and rob Jews. As had
happened earlier to the Jews of Germany, a series of anti-Jewish laws was enacted
against the Jews of Warsaw, ultimately depriving them of their economic liveli-
hood, places of residence, and basic freedoms.60 The occupiers also relied on the
assistance of the previously existing Polish “Blue” Police, which it ordered back
into service at the end of October 1939. The group was responsible for keeping
law and order, including upholding the new anti-Jewish laws. This police force
participated, in Warsaw as across Poland, in guarding the ghetto, carrying out
executions, and rounding people up for deportation.61
One of the first measures the Nazi authorities enacted in Warsaw was to create
the Jewish council. Adam Czerniaków, a prewar Jewish leader, was approved by
the German authorities as Jewish council chairman on October 7, 1939.62 In
general, he wielded much less power over daily life in the ghetto than did
Rumkowski in Lodz. Much of what we know about Czerniaków’s activities in the
ghetto comes from the diary he left behind. This document chronicles Czerniaków’s
busy schedule of meetings with various German officials during which he
attempted to lessen their ever more destructive decrees.63 His relatively short ten-
ure (compared to Rumkowski’s) as head of the Warsaw ghetto ended on July 23,
1942, when he committed suicide rather than agree to the mass deportations of
Jewish children from the ghetto. The authority of his successor, Marek
Lichtenbaum, was severely restricted and the council’s numbers murderously
diminished: 7,000 Jewish council workers and family members were deported
during the Great Deportation of summer/fall 1942.64
While he lived, Chairman Czerniaków supported the ghetto’s rich cultural life.
Warsaw did not desert its long-time attachment to culture under difficult circum-
stances. As in the other ghettos, theater, music, libraries, and literary evenings
prevailed. Schools were founded and students learned in Yiddish and Hebrew.65
Although the ghetto was officially sealed in November 1940, many Jews went
to work outside it; motivated ghetto inhabitants struggled (often successfully) to
permeate its walls. The ghetto was situated in the center of the city and had many
Polish neighbors. Throughout the war, many Jews inside the ghetto could
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