(Conclusion)
Most of the testimonies published in Preserved Evidence were, seemingly gathered in recent years. Decades earlier, the same survivors were reluctant to testify about their sufferings and experiences during the Holocaust.
The author, Annna Eilebenberg- Eibeschitz, explains in the preface of her book that after the war the survivors had the alternative “to remain in the past and wallow in their memories or to begin life anew.” The survivor who wanted to live a normal life and be active in society had to suppress his memories, “both for his own sake and for the sake of his children, so that they should grow up healthy undisturbed by his own tragedy.”
If so, why did these survivors choose now, after decades of silence to reveal what they had buried in their hearts? The author says that it was a question of “If not now, when?” In the evening of their lives, these survivors felt that they were duty -bound to acquaint their children with the life and fate of their grandparents, uncles and aunts whom they had never known. They wanted to tell them how these relatives sacrificed their lives for their dear ones, how they manifested their loyalty on the threshold of death.”
An added powerful instinctive to speak out was the last request of our martyrs, “Remember! Tell the world what the Germans did to us.” Mrs. Eilenberg-Eibeschitz writes. The survivors have always been conscious of this request and they want to fulfill it at least now, in the last years of their lives.
Reviewing the latest book about the Lodz Ghetto, one must write a few words about the role of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the Judenalteste, the head of the Judenrat.
Opinions about him are divided.
According to some he was a collaborator in the full sense of the word.
The Germans invested him with absolute powers over the Jews of the Ghetto and he behaved like a dictator, refusing to tolerate any opposition. Rumkowski and the Judenrat were forced by the Germans to collaborate with them in the deportation of the Jews to the death camps. The Jewish police helped the Germans round up the Jews. During the round-up of children and old or sick people in September 1942, Rumkowski made an appeal to the parents to give up their children so that the other Ghetto Jews might be spared. Rumkowski always defended himself by claiming that he bargained with the Germans, asking them to lower the number of people they had asked him to hand over for deportation.
There are others who have a different view of Rumkowski:
It was due to Rumkowski’s efforts that the Lodz Ghetto became a gigantic labor camp producing goods for the Germans. Because of its supplies to the Germans, this Ghetto remained in existence longer than any other in Poland. In the summer of 1944, when the Ghetto was liquidated, the Red Army was only 75 miles away from Lodz. Had the Russians taken the city then, more than 70,000 Jews might have been saved.
Mrs. Eilenberg-Eibeschitz, herself a survivor of the Lodz Ghetto cites both views about Rumkowski in her book but seems inclined to accept the first view. She notes at one point: “The tragedy of the Lodz Ghetto would span four and a half years with Jews being forced to cooperate in their own downfall. The Nazis would find their greatest source of aid in one man: Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski.”
When the Ghetto was liquidated in the summer of 1944, the Germans selected several hundreds Jews to remain to clean up the area. Rumkowski was allowed to remain in the Ghetto, but he preferred to stay with his family and was sent with them to Auschwitz. He carried with him a letter by Hans Biebow, the German commander of the Ghetto and apparently thought he would share the fate of the other Jews. He too, was killed in Auschwitz.
For years there have been rumors that Rumkowski didn’t die in the gas chambers, but was killed in the camp by Jewish inmates from Lodz.
This rumor was recently confirmed. In an article entitled “Thus was Killed Chaim Rumkowski, the King of the Ghetto of Lodz,” which appeared last April in the Mizrachi daily HaTzofe, Meir Hovav gives details about the killing of Rumkowski. In a book by an Auschwitz survivor published last year in London, the author, Mendel Steinmetz relates that Rumkowski was permitted to take his personal belongings, furniture and carpets with him to Auschwitz. Ostensibly, the Germans fooled him into believing that he would be able to continue living there in luxury. However when some members of the SonderKommando– these were Jewish inmates who worked in the crematoria— who had been in the Lodz Ghetto saw Rumkowski, they decided that death in the gas chambers was too good for him. They brought him into the camp of the gypsies in Birkenau and there in the presence of the Jewish inmates explained the death sentence against him. He was told that on account of his crime against the Jews he was not worthy of dying like other Jews– martyrs who had died for the sanctification of the Name of the L-rd– but deserved a “special death. He was killed on the spot by two members of the SonderKommando.
Hovav was told by Steinmetz that he had been an eyewitness to the killing of Rumkowski.
The Jewish Press, Friday, September 24, 1999