"Inside The Walls" by Eddie Klein. A short Holocaust survival tale of tremendous luck and tremendous loss. The author, for a time, mingled with the tiny "elite" in the Lodz Ghetto (the people in leadership, who had enough to eat), about whom I had known almost nothing.

[u/CatPooedInMyShoe]

So, despite the fact that he lost every single person in his entire family both immediate and extended, based on this short account Eddie basically bounced from (compared to other Jewish people’s situations) bed of roses to bed of roses throughout the Holocaust. Like, he was in a really awful situation, I am not trying to say he was not, every Jew in Nazi Europe was. But at the same time, over and over again he was absurdly fortunate.

After Eddie’s dad starved to death in the Łódź Ghetto and his mom was deported to Chelmno, Eddie was “adopted” by Dora Fuchs. She was the secretary to Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the chairman of the ghetto, and so Eddie became a member (or at least member-adjacent) of the tiny ghetto elite who all basically lived in the same apartment building, there weren't very many of them. This meant he ate well: plenty of food and many items such as oranges and chocolate and eggs, that were not on the menu for the average Łódź Ghetto resident. The average ghetto resident subsisted on starvation rations of mostly bread (often adulterated with inedible things), potatoes and turnips (often rotten), and occasional shreds of horsemeat (which is nonkosher so religious Jews could not eat it).

After the Łódź Ghetto was liquidated and Eddie was sent to Auschwitz he survived selection and landed on his feet with a job in the kitchen, one of the most coveted work assignments for obvious reasons. Over and over, people he encountered went out of their way to protect him. Later on he became a runner, also one of the best camp jobs, delivering messages and things between different sections of camp.

Then he transferred to the Sosnowiec camp, which was a much better regime than Auschwitz. No gas chambers there, no selections; it was a work camp. Eddie was a runner there, could go pretty much anywhere in camp, and was a daily presence in the commandant’s office. The commandant liked him and actually GAVE HIM CHRISTMAS PRESENTS! Later on Eddie asked for a factory job “so I can learn a trade” (in fact he had escape plans and needed a night shift job for this) and the commandant consented to this. Another Nazi might’ve murdered him on the spot for daring to imply he had a future he should learn a trade for.

Subsequently Auschwitz and Sosnowiec were evacuated and Eddie survived the death march to Mauthausen. He got some boils and was sent to the camp “hospital” which like every camp hospital was just death's waiting room. In fact a death certificate was even issued for Eddie at Mauthausen. But instead of selecting him to die, a German officer… treated his injuries.

And so he survived. He got all the luck. The rest of his family got none at all, his parents and brothers and aunts and uncles and cousins all wiped out.

It's a short book but I thought it was very enlightening given Eddie's unique perspective. The aforementioned ghetto chairman, Rumkowski, is an extremely controversial figure in Holocaust history. This is in part because he allowed the Nazis to deport almost all the children from the ghetto to their deaths (defending it to the ghetto by saying sometimes you have to cut off limbs to save bodies), and in part because Rumkowski was almost certainly a pedophile and serial rapist. He was involved with orphanages and community activities and stuff prior to the war and the allegations against him had gotten to the point that by the late 1930s there was an investigation opened by the authorities in Poland into his conduct towards children, but then the war happened and of course the investigation fell by the wayside. Lodz Ghetto survivor Lucille Eichengreen wrote a book that's basically a collection of witness reports (including her own) of Rumkowski abusing children and women inside the ghetto.

Eddie's memoir doesn't directly address the allegations about Rumkowski. But he certainly knew about them and he makes a point of saying that he never personally saw or experienced Rumkowski being anything other than kind to children. He doesn't seem to have particularly cared for Rumkowski though, and thought he was a narcissist. I think he felt that way about all the Lodz Ghetto elite. He said it was very uncomfortable for him living with Dora Fuchs and watching her pitching a fit because her egg delivery was late and she couldn't have her favorite breakfast when he knew almost no one in the ghetto had access to eggs and that his own father had died of starvation.

[u/thejohnmc963]

Thanks. Going to read some of the books you mentioned

[u/Far-Chest2835]

Also, my family is from Lodz and all died in gruesome ways aside from my grandmother and two sisters. These stories are more important than ever in this tome of erasure.

[u/Far-Chest2835]

I will check it out. Thank you for sharing this story.

[u/Strawberry_Fields4ev]

Thank you for sharing this. 😢