Customer Reviews

Lodz Ghetto

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I have been using this video in my courses since it was released. The film tells the story of the Lodz ghetto through a well-crafted mosaic of first-person accounts and archival films and photos. The former include ghetto diaries, chronicles, speeches by Rumkowski, posted SS "announcements," and similar. The latter include occasional images of contemporary Lodz overlaying images from the time of the ghetto. The voices, including Jerzy Kosiniski who "speaks" Rumkowski (what better choice?), are conveyed with power and precision. The selections read are as various and well-chosen as could be imagined. The work as a whole is somewhere between a documentary and a stark meditation, treating the unique complexity of the Lodz ghetto's history with both restraint and clarity.

Very powerful, moving chronicle of one Polish Jewish ghetto in WWII. As we watch,

its population shrinks from 200,000 souls to only 800 left by the liberation.

All the narration is taken from the diaries and writings of those who were actually

there, and the visuals include some amazing film and stills from the time. A few

historical details are frustratingly sketchy, and intense thought it was, in the end

I wasn't quite as emotionally overwhelmed as I expected. But overall one of the more

accessible and unique holocaust documentaries. I'd imagine it's intimate 1st person

narratives would help make the stories more 'real' for students, making this an

invaluable teaching tool.