In his comprehensive examination of the Lodz Ghetto, originally published in Yiddish in 1962, historian Isaiah Trunk sought to describe and explain the tragedy that befell the Jews imprisoned in the first major ghetto imposed by the Germans after they invaded Poland in 1939. Lodz had been home to nearly a quarter million Jews. When the Soviet military arrived in January 1945, they found 877 living Jews and the remains of a vast industrial enterprise that had employed masses of enslaved Jewish laborers. Based on an exhaustive study of primary sources in Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, German, and Russian, Isaiah Trunk, a former resident of Lodz, 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 of the 141 documents that Trunk reproduced in his volume.

The first English translation of Isaiah Trunk's monumental study of Lodz Ghetto

About the Author

Isaiah Trunk (1905-1982) was Senior Research Associate and Chief Archivist at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. He is author of Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation.

Robert Moses Shapiro is Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies, Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He is editor of Holocaust Chronicles: Individualizing the Holocaust through Diaries and Other Contemporaneous Personal Accounts.

Reviews

A monumental work.

* Financial Times *

Trunk's essential volume provides invaluable material for yet more objective 'appreciations' of the terrible plight of the Jewish leaderships and inhabitants in the 'ghettos for Jews' set up by the Nazi authorities in the East. Vol. 89, no. 1, January 2011

* Slavonic and East European Review *

This translation . . . makes available an invaluable resource for English-language readers. . . . The book is handsomely produced and, in addition to 141 original documents (in translation), an extraordinarily detailed index, and period photographs, contains informative essays by translator-editor Shapiro and two renowned Holocaust scholars, the late Joseph Kermish and Israel Gutman. An indispensable tool for Holocaust research. . . . Essential.

* Choice *



Book Information
ISBN 9780253219930
Author Isaiah Trunk
Format Paperback
Page Count 560
Imprint Indiana University Press
Publisher Indiana University Press
Weight(grams) 1080g