Fresh Light on Life within the Walls of the Warsaw and Łódź Ghettos

Nearly three million Jews passed through Hitler’s ghettos between 1939 and 1945, most of them on the way to their deaths. Yet the ghettos are much less familiar than the extermination camps. Even Warsaw is known primarily because of its famous 1943 uprising; few Western readers have a fuller grasp of what happened there, or a picture of daily life within its walls.

The publication of In Those Nightmarish Days, a collection of eyewitness reportage by Peretz Opoczynski and Josef Zelkowicz, is therefore a most welcome event. The two men, Yiddish-language journalists in prewar Poland, found themselves, respectively, in the Warsaw and Łódź ghettos and worked with clear eyes to chronicle what they saw. Some of their writings survived the war. Translated by David Suchoff with an excellent introduction by Samuel Kassow, they make riveting reading, bringing the reader into the brutal realities of everyday ghetto life.

A little background might help set the context. When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, he had no plan as yet for the two million Jews who came under German rule—except that they should be treated cruelly. Among the haphazard measures undertaken by Nazi officials were segregation and confinement, which soon became standard practice. By 1941, nearly all Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland were either forced into ghettos or were actively hiding outside of them.