Primo Levi writes this in 1986, in his final book before apparently taking his own life, and he asks himself what the rest of us would have done in Rumkowski’s place. What today’s Europeans would do, if they were put in Rumkowski’s shoes. He finds the question still disturbing, and pertinent. He feels that something menacing is emanating from the Rumkowski story. That he can see in Rumkowski’s ambivalence the ambivalence of our Western civilization, descending “into hell with trumpets and drums.” That we all are like Rumkowski: “willingly or not, we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by the train is waiting.”
Primo Levi doesn’t explain what he’s alluding to.
Perhaps he’s just expressing his growing sense of powerlessness in the face of amnesia and indifference. The powerlessness of those who have seen hell on earth but are able to find no words for it and still less able to convince posterity that hell is among us.
That powerlessness which in time will be yours.
No, too soon to write about your powerlessness.
In September 1942, Chaim Rumkowski, chairman of the Council of Elders in the Łódź ghetto, is presented with a choice for which I can find no historical equivalent and makes a decision that I lack the authority and ability to say anything about. So I say nothing, I merely observe that in August 1944, the Łódź ghetto is still standing, whereas the Warsaw ghetto is liquidated. I merely observe that until August 25, 1944, or it could be August 21, 1944, or whatever date at the end of August 1944 it actually is when you board the train of enclosed cattle cars at the station in Radogoszcz (why am I so obstinate about these dates?), most of the people in your immediate circle are still alive. Your father Gershon is dead, as are your brother Salek and your brother Marek, but your mother Hadassah is alive, and your brother Natek and his wife Andzia, and the pretty young girl from apartment 3 whom you’re in love with and whose name is Hala or sometimes Haluś or Halinka, and both her parents, Jakob and Rachel, and her sisters Dorka, Bluma, Bronka, and Sima, and even Dorka’s son Obadja, who’s now five and has survived the great sacrifice of the ghetto children. Five thousand children under the age of ten survive the sacrifice of the ghetto children in September 1942 through being hidden away in attics and under double floors and lowered into earth closets and moved from place to place and, I assume, through connections within the Jewish police, or through bargains of some kind, or through luck.
Mainly luck, of course.
Is it Rumkowski’s pact with the devil that’s brought you this far?
That is to say, this far but no farther.
In June 1944, the devil terminates the pact.
No, of course he doesn’t.
No pact exists, and obviously no devil either. A pact has its conditions. As has the devil. A pact with the devil is something you can understand. In the Łódź ghetto, the conditions of the pact are capricious, accidental, and couched in euphemisms in order not to be understood.
So what exists is a new euphemism: “ghetto relocation.” Verlagerung des Ghettos. What exists is a decision at the highest German level that the whole ghetto is to be liquidated and all its inhabitants murdered. No exceptions this time, no arguments about the economic value of the ghetto workshops, no calculations about the advantages of enslaving strong and healthy Jews instead of killing them. Here there remains not even the illusion of a pact. On June 16, 1944, the ghetto diary notes that the German commandant of the ghetto, Amtsleiter Hans Biebow, has stormed into the office of seventy-year-old Chaim Rumkowski at five in the afternoon and struck down his “pact brother” with a solid punch. No one understands why. Rumkowski is taken to the ghetto hospital but says nothing. Biebow presents himself at the same hospital, having damaged his hand. That day, Rumkowski has signed yet another proclamation, no. 416, dealing with “voluntary registration for work outside the ghetto.” As usual, the headline, in heavy capitals: ACHTUNG!
No, no one understands it. Perhaps not even Rumkowski this time.
On June 23, 1944, the transports to Chełmno are resumed. On July 14, 1944, the Germans cease operations at Chełmno for fear of being caught in the act by the approaching Red Army.
At the start of August 1944, the first train runs from Łódź to Auschwitz.
As the proclamations become ever more threatening and the euphemisms ever more transparent, you all try to hide.
Statement by Hans Biebow on August 7, 1944: “If you force us to use violence, people will be killed or injured.”
Bekanntmachung Nr. 426, August 15, 1944, signed Ch. Rumkowski: Juden des Gettos!! Besinnt Euch!! “Jews of the ghetto!! Consider!! Go voluntarily to the transports!”
Bekanntmachung Nr. 429, August 23, 1944, signed Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo): “Anyone found after 07:00 on August 25,1944, in those areas [of the ghetto] previously evacuated WIRD MIT DEM TODE BESTRAFT.”
On one of those last days in August 1944, as the Gestapo patrols have begun searching one building after another and anyone found is shot on the spot, you all come out of your hiding place for fear that the babies among you would give you away and you head toward the decreed assembly point outside the central jail at 3 Krawiecka (Schneidergasse). I don’t know exactly who is accompanying you on this last walk through the emptied districts of the ghetto, how many of you there are, or whether you make it there on your own or whether you’re “escorted” by the Gestapo, but I do know that among all those being gathered on this day for the transport onward are the last remaining links to that world you once made into your own. Had time stopped on this very day in August, I think to myself, and had the train at Radogoszcz never departed, and had the ghetto not been liquidated but instead liberated by the Red Army, which after all is only 120 kilometers away, then perhaps your world could have been brought back to life. Maybe then I could have had your journey start amid the fragrant smell of a meaty stew, slowly cooked in the oven in your mother Hadassah’s kitchen, or in the warmth of the spring sun, shining on the blossoms in the cherry trees outside the house in Widawa where you were born on May 14, 1923, or in the noise and smoke from the heavy-brick textile factories around the vocational high school in Łódź where in the autumn of 1939 you began your studies to become a textile engineer.
Or perhaps even earlier, in the reflection of those people and places and events that preceded you in life and made you into who you are, and that I could have made contact with through the widening root system of memories and stories that has grown together with the people still surrounding you at the station in Radogoszcz.
You’re sixteen years old when the Germans invade Łódź and you’re forced into the ghetto and the world closes behind you. Sixteen years is a long time in a person’s life, the first sixteen arguably the most important, for that’s when we become the person we’ll have to live with for the rest of our life. That’s when we make our first connections with the world and have our strongest experiences and develop our deepest memories. A human being’s story isn’t complete without the story of what made him into what he is, or in your case, of what he’s had the time to become before the world that made him is liquidated.