IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE GHETTO

“Who in future times will believe that human beings fought each other over a potato?” So asks this utterly unsentimental, open-eyed, harrowing portrait of ghetto life during the Holocaust.

Born in Moravia in 1884 and long resident in Vienna, Rosenfeld was a modestly successful writer of novels and novellas when the Nazi Anschluss forced him to flee to Prague. Following the German conquest of Czechoslovakia, he was transported the ghetto of Lodz, Poland, where he was put to work in the statistics bureau established by the religious leader known as The Eldest of the Jews. Officially, and with the knowledge and permission of the Nazi overseers, Rosenfeld recorded such matters as deaths, food rations, decrees from the ghetto leadership, and reports from the Jewish police; unofficially, and certainly without authorization, Rosenfeld also kept careful notes on daily life in a makeshift society where “every potato is a building block for tomorrow.” Not surprisingly, Rosenfeld devotes many of his often elliptical entries to the lack of food and the effects thereof on the populace; he takes time, too, to note grim oddities such as the plague of flies that visited the ghetto hospital in July 1942 (“A hallway with seventeen people, one hundred flypapers with two hundred flies in one week, that’s twenty thousand flies. An interesting statistic”) and the general dirtiness of the place owing to lack of water and soap—so that, as Rosenfeld writes, God deserves a new name, “‘The one with washed hands,’ the being that I am not allowed to name because I haven’t washed my hands yet.” Elsewhere he notes the comings and goings of the ghetto’s chief Gestapo informant, an object of strange admiration, and records the rumors that sweep the community—including, ominously, one concerning the extermination in a kind of bathhouse of hundreds of Jews at a time. The rumor was true: Rosenfeld died at Auschwitz in 1944, leaving this extraordinary testimonial.

A singular contribution to the literature and history of the Shoah.