Reviews for In the Beginning Was the Ghetto: A Journal of 890 Days in the Lodz Ghetto

The average rating for In the Beginning Was the Ghetto: A Journal of 890 Days in the Lodz Ghetto based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-04-05 00:00:00 Bryan Knowles Oskar Rosenfeld was a writer before the war, though during the war he and many others were forced into Ghetto Litzmannstadt, the second largest Jewish ghetto in Poland after the German occupation. The Lodz ghetto was turned into an industrial center to provide goods and supplies for Nazi Germany. Rosenfeld worked in the statistics department, keeping record of supplies coming in and out of the ghetto, the numbers of deaths and the kinds of deaths. On his own time he kept notebooks detailing his experiences in the ghetto, the people, the extent of the details surrounding their deaths (being shot while trying to escape the neighborhood in a rather complicated form of suicide), his concerns for his wife and other family and friends, the constant worry. I was impressed by the "beauty" of Rosenfeld's words, sort of ironic considering the subject matter of a disgusting, dirty neighborhood in one of the most horrifying periods of history. The notebooks here (edited and abridged where necessary) cover most of 1942 until the July of 1944, a month before he was taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau where he was murdered in the gas chamber.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-11-22 00:00:00 Frank Riley This is in many ways similar to Korczak's Ghetto Diary; though the latter is much shorter and less detailed, both provide a haunting and vivid picture of life and death in their authors' respective ghettos. As for Rosenfeld's notebooks, never before have I been so enlightened as to what the Lodz ghetto was really like. Like Korczak, Rosenfeld was an established writer before the war with plenty of sterling talent, put to good use here. It's a shame that he died before he could turn his notes into a proper novel or history of the ghetto.