Chronicle of the Lodz / Litzmannstadt ghetto
The so-called Lodz Ghetto Chronicle is a collective diary in Polish and German that contains records of the life and death of more than 200,000 Jews who fought for survival in the Litzmannstadt ghetto between 1940 and 1944 under the most extreme conditions.
The edition of the Chronicle of the Lodz / Litzmannstadt Ghetto was a project of the Holocaust Literature Unit in collaboration with scientists from the university and the Łódź State Archives (Archiwum Państwowe w Łodzi). A complete German edition was published in 2007; In 2009 the Polish version was published. The last volume of the Ghetto Chronicle has also been available online since June 2011.
The Lodz Ghetto Chronicle
The chronicle was written between January 12, 1941 and July 31, 1944 by around 15 employees, who were mainly employed as scientists, writers or journalists before the war.
The chronicle was written in secret, but on behalf of the “Jewish elder” Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski . This semi-official character of the chronicle makes it an important intertext and a reference slide for many other texts (memoirs, diary entries, but also fictional literature) of the time and the region. The result is a multi-layered picture of life in the so-called Jewish residential district / ghetto (both NS code names of the collective camp within the extermination of the Jews) and the position and self -image of the members of the so-called " Jewish self-administration " so called and appointed by the National Socialists . The chronicle is of inestimable value for historical research: it contains the deportations , it records all relevant daily events, and it shows the connections between the Nazis' ghetto and city administrations.
In the course of time, more and more columnist passages (“Little ghetto mirror”, “One hears, one speaks”, “Ghetto humor”) have been added to the rather dry report passages, which also make the chronicle an important literary text. The chronicle always reports on a daily basis, any errors that may be noticed are always corrected in the subsequent daily reports. An internal censorship commission checked the texts before they were included in the files: On the one hand, it was supposed to protect the authors from attacks by the Germans if the chronicle fell into their hands, and to protect them from reprisals by Rumkowski, the great importance of a positive representation put to his person.
See also
- The so-called Marigold Archive (Oneg Shabbat), an underground archive from the Warsaw ghetto , should be consulted for comparison of the origin of the text and the topics dealt with .
- Authors, etc. a: Alice Chana de Buton, Julian Cukier-Cerski, Bernhard Heilig , Abram Kamieniecki, Józef Klementynowski, Bernard Ostrowski, Oskar Rosenfeld (as editor-in-chief from June 1942), Szmul Rozensztajn, Oskar Singer (as archive director), Peter Wertheimer , Józef Zelkowicz
Text output
-
The Chronicle of the Lodz / Litzmannstadt Ghetto (= series of publications on the Lodz Ghetto Chronicle ). Edited by Sascha Feuchert , Erwin Leibfried , Jörg Riecke . 5 volumes. Wallstein, Göttingen 2007, ISBN 978-3-89244-834-1 .
- Volume 5: 1944 ( scan in Google book search).
- Chronicle of the Ghetto Lodz / Litzmannstadt - The Last Year ( getto-chronik.de ( Memento from March 22, 2016 in the Internet Archive ). In: getto-chronik.de )
- Kronika Getta Łódzkiego / Litzmannstadt Ghetto 1941–1944. Opracowanie i redakcja naukowa Julian Baranowski , Krystyna Radziszewska, Jacek Walicki, Ewa Wiatr, Piotr Zawilski u. a. 5 volumes. Archivum Panstwowe w Łódzi, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, Lodz 2009, ISBN 978-83-906809-2-7 .
literature
- Sascha Feuchert : Oskar Rosenfeld and Oskar Singer. Two authors of the Lodz Ghetto - Studies on Holocaust Literature (= Gießener Papers on Modern German Literature and Literary Studies. Vol. 24). Peter Lang, European Science Publishing House, Frankfurt / M. u. a. 2004, ISBN 3-631-50834-4 (Zugl .: Gießen, Univ., Diss., 2003).
- Hanno Loewy , Gerhard Schoenberner (Red.): “Our only way is work.” The Ghetto in Lodz, 1940–1944. An exhibition by the Jewish Museum Frankfurt am Main. Edited by the Jewish Museum on behalf of the City of Frankfurt am Main, Department of Culture and Leisure, Office for Science and Art. Löcker, Vienna 1990, ISBN 3-85409-169-9 (parallel text in Hebrew script).
- Markus Roth : "Message in a bottle for future readers". The first complete German-language edition of the chronicle of the Litzmannstadt ghetto (online). (PDF) (No longer available online.) Formerly in the original ; accessed on June 2, 2017 . ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )
Web links
- Archiwum Państwowe w Łodzi (State Archives Łódź, Polish homepage)
- Hanno Loewy: Protocol of a slow death . In: Frankfurter Rundschau online. February 15, 2008 (Review)
Individual evidence
- ↑ getto-chronik.de ( Memento from March 22, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) (same editor). In: getto-chronik.de/de, accessed on June 2, 2017.