In the Beginning Was the Ghetto: Notebooks from Lodz. Este artículo no está disponible.In the Beginning Was the Ghetto: Notebooks from Lodz

From February 1942 to July 1944, Oskar Rosenfeld served in the Statistical Office of the Lodz ghetto. A Jewish playwright and journalist from Vienna, he kept his own records - meticulous and harrowing notes on life and conditions in the ghetto - storing observations for the historical and fictionalized account he hoped to write someday. Upon the liquidation of the Lodz ghetto, he and the nearly 80,000 remaining inhabitants were deported to Auschwitz, where he perished. Rosenfeld's notebooks offer a wrenching view of life in the ghetto, the day-to-day struggle for survival of what was, in the beginning, a population of more than 100,000, cramped into a narrow space, ringed with barbed wire and sealed off completely from the outside world. The diary pages are filled with descriptions of ever-present hunger, forced labour, disease, degradation and deportations juxtaposed with those describing attempts to maintain a cultural, social and religious life and to preserve human dignity. Writing in an often fragmentary style that underlines his sense of urgency to record this crime against humanity, Rosenfeld's keen observations and his vivid narration of the stories of his fellow sufferers have the haunting immediacy of eyewitness testimony. Again and again, he ponders the question of what human mind could create such horrors. He is driven to recast all of human history because what he sees and lives is something unprecedented, something so completely new that he concludes ironically, ""In the beginning God created the ghetto"". This English translation of Oskar Rosenfeld's notebooks projects his voice to a wider world, as he had hoped; it also marks one of the most important new publications documenting the unspeakable cruelty and inhumanity of the Holocaust and the indomitable spirit of its victims.

OSKAR ROSENFELD was born on May 13, 1884, in Korycany, Moravia. A founder of the Jewish Stage, the first Jawish theater in Vienna, he was a novalist, playwright, journalist, and editor of the Zionist Wianer Morgenzaitung and the weekly Die neus Welt. With the annaxation of Austria to the German Reich in 1938, Rosenfald fled with his wife to Prague, where he worked as a correspondent for the Jewish Chronicle in London. In November 1941, he was deported to Lodz and later died at Auschwitz. BRIGITTE M. GOLDSTEIN is a historian who works as a writer, editor, and translator, and is a production editor at Rungers University Press. Among her many translations are Years of Estrangement, and Shayndl and Salomea: From Lamberg to Berlin, both published by Northwestern University Press. HANNO LOEWY was born in Frankfurt/Main, Germany in 1961. He is a literary critic and also the publicist and director of the Fritz Bauer Institute Documentation Center for the Study of the Holocaust and its Consequences. He is the author and editor of numerous writings on the Holocaust.