BOOK REVIEWS : More Witnesses to the Holocaust

Lodz Ghetto: Inside a Community Under Siege, compiled and edited by Alan Adelson and Robert Lapides (Viking: $29.95, 526 pages.)

Listen and believe this, even though it happened here, even though it seems so old, so distant, and so strange.

These words, fearful and yet elegant, were written by Jozef Zelkowicz, a Yiddish scholar and a chronicler of the agonies of the Lodz Ghetto in Poland during the Holocaust. Zelkowicz perished at Auschwitz, but his eloquent testimony is preserved in “Lodz Ghetto” by Alan Adelson and Robert Lapides: a rich, complex, horrifying but also inspiring document of the Holocaust that gives a human face to some of the 6 million men, women and children who suffered and died at the hands of the Germans.

“Lodz Ghetto” is described as a source book for the documentary film of the same title, now playing at the Beverly Center, and one of the co-editors of the book, Alan Adelson, is also the producer and co-director of the motion picture.

But the book stands on its own and even transcends the motion picture. Adelson and Lapides have carefully selected fragments and excerpts from a vast collection of documentary evidence--proclamations, Gestapo memos, secret diaries, letters, speeches, newspapers, poems and prayers, German archives and ghetto archives, as well as an astounding array of photographs in both color and black-and-white--to create a vast and vivid tapestry of searing words and images.

At the outbreak of World War II, more than 200,000 Jews lived in Lodz, the second largest Jewish community in Europe and a seat of Jewish civilization in Poland. Another 20,000 Jews were sent into the Lodz Ghetto from Austria, Czechoslovakia and Germany--an early deportation order exempted “bearers of the Iron Cross” from the transports to Auschwitz.

By 1944, when the ghetto was finally liquidated, only 800 remained. “Lodz Ghetto” is the tale of their ordeal.

The Lodz Ghetto was a slave labor colony where ghetto-dwellers on starvation rations were put to work at the manufacture of ammunition, knapsacks and shoes for German soldiers on the Russian front until the Nazi overlords finally decided to send the exhausted remnant to the camps.

We are shown men and even young children used in place of horses at hauling wagons; we see Jewish women embroidering the badges and emblems that adorned the Nazi uniforms and so delighted the Nazi eye; we see not only the gallows and the cattle cars, the corpses and the graves, but also the ration stamps, the ghetto currency, the deportation orders, the checkpoints and all the other bureaucratic claptrap that amounts to hard proof of the Holocaust.

The chronicle is literally haunted by the terrifying and yet somehow pathetic figure of Mordecai Chaim Rumkowski, a self-styled “leader” who was anointed by the Nazis as the so-called “Eldest of the Jews” and who presided over the Lodz Ghetto until its final liquidation.

Rumkowski fancied himself the king of an autonomous Jewish state--his signature appeared on ghetto currency (“Rumkies,” as the bills were known) and on the deportation (or “evacuation”) orders, and he even proposed a ghetto postage stamp bearing his image. When the Nazis called for another 10,000 or 20,000 Jews for the transports, it was Rumkowski’s job to draw up the lists; when the Nazis demanded the deportation of children, old people and invalids, Rumkowski issued a call: “Fathers and mothers, give me your children!”

Many of the words and images in “Lodz Ghetto” are truly astounding. We see a strangely modern-looking color photograph of an obsequious Rumkowski, wearing the yellow badge of the ghetto, surrounded by a crowd of Nazi officers, as he is presented to none other than Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS and architect of the Holocaust. Himmler is seated in an opulent touring car with a vanity license plate: “SS-1.”

We see a Gestapo memo, addressed to Rumkowski, that relayed an ominous request from the Chelmno concentration camp for “a bone grinder . . . either with a motor or hand-driven.” And we read the desperate scrawlings of a doomed young man who recorded his hopes and fears in four languages in the margins of a French novel titled “Les Vrais Riches” (“The Truly Rich”)--this unique document was rescued from the ashes of Auschwitz so that we can hear his voice today:

“I dream about telling humanity, but would I be able to?” the young man ponders. “Would Shakespeare be able?”

“Lodz Ghetto,” like so many works about the Holocaust, is harrowing to read, and I felt physically battered when I put the book down. I am tempted to share a thousand little moments of horror and heartache, a thousand scenes of struggle and survival, if only to let you understand how the book seizes and holds the imagination.

And I feel grateful to Adelson and Lapides for rescuing these witnesses of the Holocaust from their mass graves, and allowing us to hear their unique testimony. In that sense alone, “Lodz Ghetto” is an impressive addition to the literature of the Holocaust.

My law partner, whose father was born in Lodz and survived three concentration camps, including Auschwitz, has already asked to see my copy of “Lodz Ghetto”--it is a bittersweet legacy for the children of Holocaust survivors. But it is not a book for survivors alone. Let anyone who still dares to deny that the Nazi genocide took place, let anyone who is still tempted to trivialize the suffering of 6 million Jewish men, women and children, let anyone who allows himself the luxury of forgetting pick up a copy of “Lodz Ghetto” and stare into the human face of Holocaust.