The Past and the Present of Lodz- Batya Bosin’s 1st Prize Essay in MJF’s 2018 Holocaust Essay Contest

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By Batya Bosin, 12th grade, Goldie Margolin School for Girls (pictured above, reading her essay at our 56th Annual Yom HaShoah Commemoration, held April 12 at the MJCC)

 

We used to run, play and laugh. We used to wear our yarmulkes with pride, our tzitzit showing from underneath our shirts, and walking with our heads held high was something we were not ashamed of or afraid to do. All of this, we just did. Now, we wear our Jewish star with embarrassment and fear, we walk the streets quietly and with our heads held down, and we no longer feel at home. Only seven days after the Germans invaded Poland, we have been forced into their living arrangements for Jews, and have become the victims of beatings, burnings, and acts of torture. We have become stripped of our normal, joyous lives.

It was February 1940 when the Germans established the Lodz ghetto, the second largest ghetto following Warsaw, forcing more than a third of the city’s population of Jews to be crowded into the walled area. It became a center for manufacturing war necessities for the German army. The ghetto was comprised of individuals transported from other Polish ghettos, towns and villages that had previously been liquidated. From the Lodz ghetto, the first groups were taken to the Chelmno death camp, while the remaining were deported to Auschwitz. Most were killed immediately upon arrival; others survived the hardships of the camps.

I had learned all of this and I understood it intellectually. But here I was; it was my sixth day in Poland, after a week of visiting concentration camps, mass graves, and death camps. It was day nine of my summer program: Saturday, Shabbat. It was just getting dark out, that evening, when we began our walk around the town. Quickly and quietly, we made our way through the silent and dimly lit streets of Lodz. We had just spent our Shabbat with a maximum of twenty Jews – both men and women, and were now bringing the excitement of Jewry back to the city of Lodz. We ended the night by singing and dancing in the streets, proclaiming, “Am Yisrael Chai” – “the Jewish people live on.”

We heard stories of holidays being celebrated in the ghetto as we stood near a wall that once blocked Jews off from the rest of the city; we sat on stairs beside a church that once sheltered Jews; we looked out onto a street that once used to bring a train in and out of the town; and we sang and ended Shabbat in a cellar where they once killed Jews. My weekend in Lodz was anything but ordinary.

My knowledge of Lodz was enhanced after interviewing Sam and Freida Weinreich, a married couple who survived the Holocaust after spending several years living in the Lodz ghetto. I was personally assigned to interview Sam one-on-one and document his story with a few of my classmates. I saw the emotion in Sam’s tone when he relayed the tragedies the Jews and his family faced while they resided in the ghetto. Now, all that I had learned from being next to the ghetto wall, and spending a weekend on walking the streets of Lodz, became a reality.

I will remember the Jewish community of Lodz from all that I learned in class, from walking the streets, seeing pictures, praying in the synagogues, and, above all, from hearing the personal story of Sam Weinreich. All this will help keep the memory of Jewish community of Lodz alive. We should never forget the vibrant Jewish life that thrived in Lodz.

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