April 3, 2019 | Xiaohua Li
Middletown, Pa
In a bid to capture the scope and intensity of genocides, a history professor has dissected the Łódź Ghetto established by the Nazi German for Polish Jews in 1939 and found its dark heart by “quantifying” the specific experiences and conflicts of the Jews.
The professor took a song with the “aging process in the Jewish community in Łódź” as a “metaphor of destruction” in the Jewish Holocaust.
“She is just ‘like an old person,’ who must face the reality that ‘tomorrow death will come,” Elizabeth C. Strauss, Ph.D. said.
Dr. Strauss mourned for the 18-year-old Miriam Goldberg’s lyrics for the sad song written in the winter of 1942.
“Left with only her hunger and her misery, Miriam no longer had the connection with her past and saw no viable possibilities for her future,” Dr. Strauss said.
The Center for Holocaust and Jewish Studies presented a lecture by Dr. Strauss titled, “‘And Tomorrow Death Will Come’: Individual and Collective Aging in the Łódź Ghetto, 1939-1944” on Thursday, Mar. 28, at Mukund S. Kulkarni Theatre, Student Enrichment Center.
Elizabeth C. Strauss is an assistant professor of history at Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, MD. Before joining the Mount’s faculty full time in fall 2016, Dr. Strauss worked as a contributor to the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies’ Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Miriam’s matter-of-fact lyrics and haunting melody spoke to the grief that engulfed the Jews that remained in the ghetto and led out the theme of the lecture speech. “In particular, the final verse of Miriam’s song reflected the particular nature of Nazi persecution of the Jewish community in Łódź from 1939 to 1944, which culminated in the process of forced and rapid collective aging,” Dr. Strauss said.
The Germans conquered and occupied Łódź, Poland’s second largest city, on September 8, 1939, and quickly set to the task to transforming Łódź into a model German city in line with the National Socialist ideology of race and space.
“First, they renamed the city Litzmannstadt and gave all of the city’s street German names,” Dr. Strauss said.
In this next phase of the occupation, Jews of all ages were subject to terror, abuse and public humiliation. Elderly Jewish men were prime targets for German terror, who shaved their beards and forced them to perform demeaning activities.
“Most of whom under the age of 10 and over the age of 60 were gone. No family was left untouched, and the community transformed overnight,” Dr. Strauss said.
Local German authorities carried out the murder of thousands of Jews in a series of so-called actions. Jewish police and the Germans went building by building collecting those inhabitants designated for manslaughter.
The story had spellbound audiences, moved by the simplicity of the cruelness and facts of the German violence at the Łódź Ghetto, people listened and winced in absolute silence.
“‘I walk around like an old person, my eyes, moist and red. The sky is cold and dark, and tomorrow death will come,” Dr. Strauss read the lyrics aloud in Germany during the speech, breathing lightly yet steadily. The words were dancing in the air softly to the audience. People’s lips parted and closed with emotional resonance. The audiences were moved.
There were 50 people present at the audience during the event, most of them were professors and students, and some were residents nearby. Dr. Strauss stood upright, and such reserve was a more calmness of manner. But it was possible that her reserve concealed a very deep feeling.
“The song is a cry, and afterward you feel free,” Dr. Strauss said.
The lyrics Miriam wrote in the winter of 1942 captured the hopelessness and senescence of the Jews.
Now everything and everyone within the ghetto walls were gone. However, under the thick historical fog, there were Jews wandered through their ghetto existence with the devastating knowledge that
“tomorrow death will come.”
Comments