Customer Reviews

Ghettostadt: Lodz and the Making of a Nazi City

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A unique and highly descriptive volume on the ghetto in Lodz. This book gives both the Jewish and German perspectives of the creation of the ghetto, and goes into excellent detail of the Nazi intentions in regard to the city and region itself. The setup and functioning of the Chelmno death camp are vividly covered, and the section on the dissolution of the camp and attempts to erase evidence of the crimes committed there is excellent in its detail and description. One of the best narratives that I have read on the Lodz ghetto.

Gordon Horowitz, an Associate Professor of History at East Wesleyan University, has written a marvelous book. Achieving what is extremely rare in Holocaust Studies, Horowitz has written an unbiased history of the 4 year existance of Litzmannstadt, the Germanized City of Lodz, Poland, and it's Jewish Ghetto. This is not to say the German efforts towards the debasement and annihilation of the Jews is whitewashed or downplayed; quite the opposite. By pointing out the simple tactics of the Nazi overlords their own evil is made manifest with a passion that polemic cannot provide. With the possible exception of Browning I have not any other historians of the period who can write such a fascinating and fact filled work without exhibiting their own biases. This is a classic of the genre.

The tragic facts of the Lodz ghetto, even if carefully documented in great detail, don't by themselves make a good book. That takes more insight, more narrative shaping, better selection and emphasis of the materials, than this book offers. The Nazi creation of their ideal new city, scrubbed and healthy and all-German, at the same time they were starving and murdering 200,000 Jews within it, is an obvious irony that gets tedious with repetition. And the author's few timid attempts at interpretation--that, for example, the Jewish ghetto leader Rumkowski really wasn't so bad--are not convincing. There's an anthology of primary sources that a film about Lodz was based on that's far more vivid and revealing. Some of the best parts of this book are drawn from it--the diary kept by Poznanski, for one.

The daily cruelties inflicted on the Jews who were forced hurriedly out of their apartments in Lodz to make room for ethnic Germans into the Lodz ghetto is described in meticulous detail. The documentation for these events is thoroughly cited. For anyone interested in the life of the Jews living under brutal conditions imposed by the Nazis during World War 11, this is a must read. It is not just another book on the Holocaust.