Lodz Ghetto: A History

In his comprehensive examination of the L dz Ghetto, originallypublished in Yiddish in 1962, historian Isaiah Trunk sought to describe and explainthe tragedy that befell the Jews imprisoned in the first major ghetto imposed by theGermans after they invaded Poland in 1939. L dz had been home to nearly a quartermillion Jews. When the Soviet military arrived in January 1945,

In his comprehensive examination of the L dz Ghetto, originallypublished in Yiddish in 1962, historian Isaiah Trunk sought to describe and explainthe tragedy that befell the Jews imprisoned in the first major ghetto imposed by theGermans after they invaded Poland in 1939. L dz had been home to nearly a quartermillion Jews. When the Soviet military arrived in January 1945, they found 877living Jews and the remains of a vast industrial enterprise that had employed massesof enslaved Jewish laborers. Based on an exhaustive study of primary sources inYiddish, Hebrew, Polish, German, and Russian, Isaiah Trunk, a former resident ofL dz, reconstructs the organization of the ghetto and discusses its provisioning;forced labor; diseases and mortality; crime and deportations; living conditions;political, social, and cultural life; and resistance. Included are translations ofthe 141 documents that Trunk reproduced in his volume.