I note down the exact figures and dates, in fact I scour the archives and sources for the exact figures and dates, because I want to reconstruct your world as you see it before it’s liquidated, and I need something to build it with, and I don’t know what else I can understand. But I soon notice that the exact numbers and dates merely reconstruct the widening gulf between what’s happening around you and what can be understood. The ghetto’s enclosed inside a wall of lies and euphemisms that no reason can penetrate.
Between January 16 and 29, 1942, 10,003 people are dispatched from the ghetto for onward transport and relocation. They’re permitted to take 12.5 kilos of luggage each and are promised that they’ll be able to exchange their ghetto currency for up to ten German Reichsmarks at the assembly point. Between February 22 and April 4, 1942, 34,073 people are dispatched from the ghetto. Between May 4 and 15, 1942, 10,914 are dispatched. Altogether, from January 16 to September 12, 1942, 70,859 people are dispatched from the ghetto in Łódź to be suffocated to death in the airtight compartments of the trucks that shuttle to and from the docking wall of a manor known as “the castle” in a small village sixty kilometers northwest of Łódź called Chełmno in Polish and Kulmhof in the language of the new masters.
I could have filled the rest of this book with figures and dates from lists detailing the dispatch and delivery of people who will never be heard from again, but apart from the fact that nothing can be understood from those lists, I also don’t trust them. The figures are too precise, of course, and the abbreviations too arbitrary. Ausgeliefert is sometimes written ausg., sometimes a.g., sometimes just ag. Precise figures and arbitrary abbreviations are the crowbars of Nazi euphemism. They break up the established links between word and experience, between what happens and what is possible to understand. Why is 12.5 kilos of luggage the permitted amount? Why not ten, or fifteen? Why does the labor deployment, in a Sonderaktion (special action) for the “dejudification of the Warthegau” (die Entjudung des Warthegaus), require 1/8 liter of spirits per man per day? Why not a half liter, or a quarter? Amtsleiter Hans Biebow, the Nazi commandant of the Łódź ghetto, writes to the Herrn Reichsbeauftragten für das Trinkbranntweingewerbe beim Reichsnährstand, Kleiststrasse, Berlin W32, to request extra spirit rations and extra cigarette rations for the extra staff required to dejudify Warthegau — that is, the part of Poland now belonging to the German Reich, with its center a city now called Litzmannstadt, whose Jews are now being gassed to death in a small village called Chełmno, situated on the banks of the River Ner. The staff deployed for such a Sonderaktion, Biebow emphasizes, must unconditionally, unbedingt, be allocated an extra ration of spirits.
All this is somehow reassuring from a purely linguistic point of view: the fact that a man with the power to hire people for a Sonderaktion whose object is to dejudify Warthegau lacks the power to give them an extra ration of spirits. The fact that he repeatedly has to approach the high command of spirit allocations in Berlin and bow and scrape and attach certificates from the health authorities in Litzmannstadt testifying to the workers’ need of spirits while on duty. Reassuring, because the long-winded sentences hint at some kind of meaning and the long-winded bureaucracy at some kind of order, but all of it, of course, entirely incomprehensible, since the words have been detached from their significance and the bureaucracy from its logic. Anyone with permission to transport 70,000 or 80,000 or, were it technically possible, 100,000 individuals to the gas vans in Chełmno ought not to have to concern himself with permission to dispense 1/8 liter of spirits a day to the extra staff that must be recruited to carry out the disgusting (yes, that’s what it says, ekelerregend) work.
Not in the world as it has been understood until now.
A man named Josef Zelkowicz is listening to Chaim Rumkowski in front of the fire station at 13 Lutomierska on that hot afternoon of September 4, 1942, and as usual takes notes on what he sees and hears. Zelkowicz’s notes will survive the liquidation of the ghetto and the liquidation of Zelkowicz himself (in Auschwitz in 1944). Mortifying sobbing erupts, he notes, after the exhortation to mothers and fathers to deliver up their children. Piteous wailings erupt, he writes, after the declaration that the limbs must be cut off to save the body. Ice in every heart, he writes. Despair in every eye. Hands clenched convulsively. Faces rigidly contorted.
They all know. Little by little, the decrees have become brutal and the euphemisms have been stripped bare. Already in the second wave of transports, in February 1942, the promised exchange of money into German Reichsmarks is abandoned, and the travelers are brusquely told that the 12.5 kilos of minutely itemized luggage they’ve been urged to take with them to the assembly point are to be left behind when they board the train. The ghetto lies sleepless over the luggage left behind. And over the luggage that’s sent back.
Everyone knows, but no one understands.
“The fact is,” Josef Zelkowicz notes in September 1942, “that no one has even a vestige of doubt that the deportees from the ghetto are not being taken to any other location. They are being led to perdition, at least the elderly.… They are being thrown on the garbage heap, as they say in the ghetto.… If so, how can we be expected to accept the new decree? How can we be expected to live on after this?”
I don’t think anyone has the right to ask that question in retrospect, but Zelkowicz asks it there and then. How can you go on living once you’ve been commanded to “sacrifice” your old, your sick, and your small children as a price for doing so? How can you go on living in a world where such a decree can be conceived and formulated? Let alone a world in which such a decree can be organized and implemented.
Many cannot live on. After each wave of dispatches comes a wave of suicides. People throw themselves from the windows, or hang themselves from beams and doorposts, or cut their arteries, or use poison, or take an overdose of some sleeping drug they’ve been fortunate enough to have access to, or get themselves shot by the German guards at the ghetto fence. That last one doesn’t require much effort. The German guards readily shoot even those who don’t want to be shot. All suicides are noted in the diary or daily chronicle maintained by the Jewish ghetto administration, without German knowledge, in premises on the third floor at 4 Kościelny Square. Thousands of typewritten diary pages, sometimes in Polish, sometimes in German, filled with observations and details of daily life in the ghetto, of deaths and births (!), of reductions in rations, of consignments of turnips and potatoes, of the lack of matches and fuel, of production quotas and actual production, of the weather, and of an old man, clearly ill, standing with an emaciated boy on a street corner, trying to sell something that looks like an onion. An escalating number of entries about starvation, transports, and suicides. Faced with the transports of September 1942, parents attempt to kill their children and themselves. Not all succeed.