A few years ago I wrote a political autobiography, Participant Observer. In the preface I claimed that the experience it set out was not only my story but provided insight into the story of a generation, my generation. This was because I found myself present at important times and places, Quebec in the late 1960s and 1970s and Scandinavia in the next decades – a rare combination, especially as I was close enough at times to be a participant, yet even then distant enough to be an observer.

I was spurred to write my political memoirs by a planned move out of our house where I had kept filing cabinets full of correspondence and printed material going back 40 years. Little further research was needed as the basic content of the book lay in those files.

For a long time, however, I never seriously considered going further back to tell the story of the generations that preceded mine, a story that for my grandparents and all my uncles and aunts ended in a Nazi death camp. I didn’t pursue this story in part because it was too painful for my parents – the only survivors – to share their experience with my brother Arthur and me.

My father died of cancer at the age of 71. Near the end of his life I persuaded him to tell his story, beginning in late September 1939 when he and his fiancée, my mother, fled their home near Łódź, a city in western Poland that was a centre of clothing and textile production. More than one third of the Łódź region’s 800,000-plus population was Jewish.

In the summer of 1939, Stalin and Hitler had secretly agreed to divide Poland once the European war began. In early September the Germans took over the western half, and two weeks later the USSR occupied the eastern half. Łódź was under German occupation, and most of the Łódź Jews died in the camps. The division of Poland held until June 1941 when Hitler decided to conquer the USSR. My parents escaped by moving eastward, initially into Soviet-occupied Poland and then deep into the USSR when the Germans invaded.

My father wanted to tell of his contribution to Zionism after the creation of the state of Israel. I hired a writer to work with him on an “as told to” version, but it was too late. After his death our mother would sometimes talk about her family – of her older sister who was like a mother to her, and her brother whom everyone expected to become a brilliant scientist. I hoped to take up their story in some way, but I realized that it meant starting almost from scratch. In any case, I was too busy with my own research and publications.

The situation changed recently when I began to take my distance from political science research. My academic discipline seemed to me unable to adequately adapt to the reality that has emerged in the Trump era of how a regime can alter the “facts” to suit its interests. The pandemic was an additional impetus for a new kind of project. And I was motivated to find out more about my family history by a book that my wife Frances and her sister Betty wrote several years ago in which they traced their family history for the next generation. They were able to take advantage of rich sources of that history, family stories about previous generations handed down by their parents combined with genealogical information, letters, documents and cemetery explorations.

To do something comparable about my family presented, since there is nothing in the way of a comparable family history on which I could base my research. But from what I could see, recent technological developments potentially opened a way toward carrying out such an investigation. Every day, AI is making existing information available electronically in a scannable format. In my initial foray into that world, I have found no specific information about my uncles and aunts, but much about the circumstances surrounding their lives growing up as Jews in the Łódź region in the 1930s.

The ghetto

Unexpectedly, there was a second development which added a dimension to the story. When I recently described my project to Swedish friends, they drew my attention to Steve Sem-Sandberg’s book The Emperor of Lies, first published in Sweden in 2009 and a prize-winning bestseller in that country (an English translation¹ appeared in 2011). Sem-Sandberg based much of his book on the “ghetto encyclopedia” of Łódź, which has recently – finally – been printed, catalogued and made available. The Emperor of Lies is a novel but there is nothing fictional about the story it tells.

It is a beautifully written book about terrible suffering and extraordinary evil. The book is a long and hard read and a deeply personal experience for me – I admit I could only skim certain parts. It tells the story of the Łódź ghetto from 1939, when the Germans arrived, to 1944, when the last of the Jews were transported to Auschwitz. What I had come upon was thus the story of the final years of both my father’s and my mother’s families (though I could find no direct reference to them in the book’s 600 pages).

My mother’s family lived in Brzeziny; my father’s in a village nearby. Sem-Sandberg describes “the Jews from the neighbouring towns of Brzeziny and Pabianice … arriving in the (Łódź) ghetto”:

Brzeziny, too, had had a ghetto. But it had been an open ghetto, from which people could come and go … Almost all the Jews in Brzeziny had worked for one German company, Günther & Schwartz.

But then, without warning, the evacuation order was issued. The SS commando unit blocked off district after district. They had been promised an allowance of eleven kilos of luggage each. But once they had formed themselves into lines with their scanty baggage, black-coated SS men stepped forward and started sorting people. Young, healthy men and women were put into one group, designated A. Others, children, the old and the sick, were allocated to a group B.

Group B had to stand to one side, and group A was ordered to set off to the station at a run. Before they even got there, they could hear the Germans shooting everyone they had left behind.

The systematic elimination of those unable to work began not long afterwards. One week in 1942, trucks came and took away the elderly, those with artificial limbs and all children under 14, emptying the orphanage and three hospitals. The workers faced constant pain, existing almost entirely on a watery liquid, but were kept alive to feed German production demands.

What makes the Łódź story so unbearably distressing is that the orders were carried out by the Jews themselves.

The “emperor of lies” of the title was Mordecai Chaim Rumkowski, a Jew who ran the ghetto like a medieval lord. The Nazis created a system in which the ghetto was administered by the Jews under Rumkowski’s control. Rumkowski and his 17 fellow elders ran it efficiently for them, and it soon became a major source of supply for the German war machine. My mother’s family had been involved in Łódź’s textile industry, and they were no doubt kept alive working to supply the German military until they were no longer productive.

Rumkowski, whose rule was law, was an obsessive egomaniac – apparently also a pedophile and abuser of women. He ran a Jewish state within a state, protected by “four hundred police officers and three jails.” There were banks, shops, schools, hospitals, music and theatre, an orphanage, a meticulously maintained archive and a chronicle so that Rumkowski’s “achievements” would be remembered. Rumkowski’s factories and workshops produced everything the German army might require, from boots and uniforms to building supplies. The workers were paid in food. Those at the top of the pyramid fared well; the rest faced slow starvation.

Among the characters the author brings to life are the “chosen few,” notably Dawid Gertler, the Jewish police commander who lived like a gangster, and Rumkowski’s sister “Princess” Helena, with her chandelier and flocks of caged birds, who “arranges food and wine for the elite, while her brother rides in a carriage, pulled by a white horse”:

In 1943 and the early part of 1944, the commandant, Hans Biebow, could look out over an empire that was the closest a ghetto could get to a fully functioning city of workers. Ninety per cent of the population worked in the factories and workshops Rumkowski had established on Biebow’s orders. Production was efficient, proceeds were high … a net profit of almost ten million Reichsmarks, a prodigious sum.

In 1944 systematic deportations to Auschwitz recommenced. By now news of the “final solution” was widespread; no one believed that the workers were being sent for “manual labour outside the ghetto.” The Łódź Jewish police went from house to house, violently forcing pleading men and women into the transports. In the end they too were sent; Rumkowski and his family were the last to go.

Ultimately, the reader is left with a question: Was Rumkowski, the worst among Jews in similar positions, not just serving himself but also trying to hold at arm’s length the monstrous Nazi machine, bent on exterminating every single last Jew on earth?

The generation gap

The story of the Łódź ghetto will constitute a chapter in the wider project I am working on, starting with an account of what we know about that community when my parents, uncles and aunts were young. Antisemitism was a fact of life as they were growing up in prewar Poland. There was no question thus as to their identity: like the vast majority of Jews in Poland, they were Polish Jews, not Jewish Poles, both in the choices they made and in their place in Polish society. (Ironically, a larger proportion next door thought of themselves as Jewish Germans, especially among scientists, intellectuals and revolutionaries.)

Antisemitism was largely absent in Canada by the time my parents settled there, something they appreciated, but their relationship to the gentile world around them reflected their earlier experiences. Their Jewish identity remained at the core of the choices they made: they were Canadian Jews, not Jewish Canadians. Beyond business and family, efforts went toward supporting the Jewish community at home and, increasingly, in Israel.

Jewishness has been a quite different matter for their sons. Arthur and I grew up with a very different view of the world from the one my parents brought with them from Poland. Like many second- and third-generation Jews in North America, we were spared any expectation to identify with our parents’ experiences. Moreover, we were nonbelievers, something we expressed in our life choices upon leaving home. And despite an interest in Israel, we were not Zionists, if Zionism is taken to mean what it meant for my parents and their friends: understanding the world and making choices from the perspective of what’s good for Israel.

Having been brought up in a Jewish environment, we were more attuned than others to Jewish history and culture. But in itself, that does not constitute the basis of an identity. There is a point where one’s life as a full participant in a welcoming wider community can create an identity that transcends one’s background. As I recount in my political autobiography, I found key elements of my emerging identity in my experience as a participant observer in Quebec and Scandinavia.

Life choices, family, community play their part but, like it or not, so do events in the wider world. Ironically, what is happening in Palestine makes it harder to take our distance. In making our voices heard in opposition to those acting in our name, we are reasserting our Jewish identity.

Note

¹ Translated by Sarah Death. Toronto: Anansi.