Sixteen thousand people are offered up on those days in September, handed over for onward transport, according to lists compiled by thirty-eight people working twelve-hour shifts in the offices of the Jewish ghetto administration on the second floor of the building in Kościelny Square, plowing through the nineteen files that contain the ghetto register of inhabitants, copying thousands of family names and exact ages onto individual cards and sorting them by district and address before carrying them up to the Evacuation Committee on the third floor, which picks out the cards of those to be dispatched and sends them on to the Jewish ghetto police for execution.
Yes, this is what Josef Zelkowicz typewrites in Polish in the ghetto diary on September 14, 1942. Outside the diary, handwriting in Yiddish, he notes that everyone seems to have lost their senses. He also notes that the selection cards soon prove redundant because within a day or two the Germans lose patience and send their own people into the ghetto, ignoring the cards and picking the inhabitants out at random, shooting those who try to hide or refuse to obey or have the wrong expression on their faces. In the actions of September 1942, 600 people are shot by the Gestapo. Two of them in the backyard of 7 Żytnia Street, where the residents are ordered to file out for German inspection. Among them a mother and her four-year-old daughter. It’s Zelkowicz narrating. The mother and daughter are holding hands tightly and smiling, the mother to show she’s a viable survivor and the daughter because she’s happy to be out in the sun. The German orders the mother to hand over her daughter. The mother hands nothing over and keeps on smiling. Mother and daughter are taken out of the line and given three minutes to think about it. Three minutes, not a second more. For some reason, the German is smiling, too. The ranks of neighbors are shaking with dread, but as discreetly as possible so as not to draw attention to themselves. When the three minutes are up, the mother and daughter are ordered “against the wall” and the German shoots them both, one pistol shot to each neck.
Zelkowicz tries to find words for what happens in the ghetto on those September days in 1942 but despairs of being believed. He senses that there will be those who, a few decades on, will claim it’s all lies and deception. So at regular intervals, as if to pinch himself, he puts down in writing that this is really happening, that this is “one hundred percent factual,” that it’s happening before his eyes here and now, however inconceivable and preposterous it may sound to those who will one day read what he’s writing. And actually, however inconceivable and preposterous what’s happening may sound even to those who are living through it, here and now. When the only way to go on living is to fail to grasp what’s happening. These are days when the people of the ghetto do not cry like humans, writes Zelkowicz. They bark like dogs, howl like wolves, cry like hyenas, roar like lions. They don’t cry like humans because the pain isn’t a human pain that can be responded to with human tears. These are days when the ghetto is a cacophony of wild noises in which only one tone is missing: the human tone. Humans aren’t capable of bearing such suffering. Beasts perhaps, but not humans.
So people don’t cry.
Josef Zelkowicz strains his vocabulary and hunts for metaphors: people are shot “like mad dogs”; a woman who has just lost her three sons “laughs as wildly as a hyena”; a woman whose husband has just been shot before her eyes “hiccups like a crazed ostrich,” and every hiccup “is a poisoned dart to the heart.” In every apartment “a pocket of pus” is bursting, in every room there’s “a roaring, rumbling, hiccuping, hysterical volcanic eruption,” through every window and broken door “lava pours into the courtyards and streets. One dwelling infects the next, one house the next, one street the next. The whole ghetto quakes, churns, riots, runs amok.”
With the “sacrifice” of the old, the sick, and the young children in September 1942, Josef Zelkowicz’s world ruptures. He can’t understand how the ghetto can live on after such a thing, still less how those responsible for selecting the victims could do so, and he’s genuinely surprised, no, upset, in fact, to see that “the appalling shock” instead seems to transform itself into a kind of detachment. The brutal purge is hardly over before the struggle for survival resumes, as if nothing had happened. “People who have just lost their loved ones now talk of nothing but rations, potatoes, soup, and so on! It is beyond comprehension!”
The next entry in the ghetto diary: “During the first twenty days of September the weather was lovely and sunny, with only a few brief showers.”
I don’t know how you all go on living and perhaps I don’t want to know, but I do know that you’re still alive. That 85,000 people live on after September 1942, and that 73,000 survive until August 1944. That the Łódź ghetto is still in existence in August 1944, whereas the Warsaw ghetto is not.
In the Warsaw ghetto, life does not go on. In May 1943, the Warsaw ghetto is liquidated. In the space of two months, from July 24, 1942, to September 24, 1942, 270,000 people of all ages and conditions, no haggling over the old, the sick, and the young, are transported onward. Warsaw’s Chełmno is called Treblinka. In Treblinka, the diesel engines are bigger and connected to stationary gas chambers in a purposely built block where many more people can be killed in a shorter time. No driving around in trucks through the woods; the bodies are burned in situ. It’s more efficient that way. In the Warsaw ghetto, the chairman of the Jewish Council is Adam Czerniaków, not Chaim Rumkowski. When he’s ordered by an SS-Hauptsturmführer, one Hermann Worthoff (who has just liquidated the ghetto in Lublin, whose Chełmno or Treblinka is called Bełzec), to deliver 10,000 people and a transport of children by July 24, 1942, he takes his own life. “I cannot send defenseless children to their deaths,” he writes in his farewell letter.
Chaim Rumkowski doesn’t take his own life. He lives on, convinced that by sacrificing the sick, the old, and the little ones, he can save the strong, the well, and those fit for work. He makes a calculation in which the survival of some becomes the overriding aim and the sacrifice of others the inevitable means of achieving it. He makes a calculation that he thinks will save the ghetto from something worse. He makes a calculation that is also the calculation of the Germans, which is to turn the victims into accessories to their own liquidation, which unquestionably makes Chaim Rumkowski an accessory.
This is the calculation that likely contributes to the fact that the Łódź ghetto is the only ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland still not liquidated on August 2, 1944, when the Soviet army is only 120 kilometers away and some kind of survival seems conceivable.
Can we say that Chaim Rumkowski sacrifices his soul to save the life of the ghetto?
Can we say that he enters into a pact with the devil?
A lot of things like that have been said about the Jewish leaders who collaborated in the sorting and transport of their own people, and thereby contributed to the degradation and liquidation of the Jews. Much has been said about how they should have refused and resisted (as they did in Warsaw at the end, when it was too late anyway), about how they should have let themselves be killed rather than become accomplices in crime. Hanna Arendt calls their actions “the darkest chapter of the whole dark story.” Primo Levi writes of Chaim Rumkowski, “Had he survived his own tragedy, and the tragedy of the ghetto which he contaminated [yes, this is the word Levi uses], superimposing on it his histrionic image, no tribunal would have absolved him, nor certainly can we absolve him on the moral plane.”
In my view, Primo Levi is one of the few who have earned the moral authority to express an opinion about Chaim Rumkowski’s morality. He immediately declares his reservations, citing the unimaginable moral challenge with which Rumkowski was confronted. The mitigating circumstances. To resist the Nazis’ systematic degradation and debasement of their victims would have required “a truly solid moral armature, and the one available to Chaim Rumkowski, the Łódź merchant, together with his entire generation, was fragile,” writes Primo Levi.