Once There Was a Town

When discussing their departure, they never said, “I left Poland in such and such year.” The phrase they used was “got out,”

Work on the Lodz yizkor book began in 1941. By the time it was published, American Jews were fully aware that a wholesale extermination of European Jewry was underway. At the same time, a gap had opened between the facts and the ability to absorb them. Despite the overwhelming nature of the evidence, hope persisted, fueled, inadvertently, by the Jewish press. A study of Yiddish-language newspapers shows that articles on the war were seeded with caveats about the unreliability of the papers’ own sources. Newspapers also questioned whether the Nazi death machine could operate with such amazing efficiency. The number of dead seemed logistically impossible. Finally, readers were reminded that estimates of the Jewish death toll were just that, estimates, providing a loophole for dreams of a surviving remnant. American Jews seized on that possibility, including the Lodz landsmanshaft, which finally came up against reality: There would be no rebuilding because there was nothing left to rebuild

During the High Holy Days, shtetl homemakers baked challah in the shape of ladders, a symbol of life’s ups and downs