Letter from Lodz

Lodz was a melting pot in the 19th century, a city in Poland’s heartland in which Polish, German, Yiddish, Russian and even English and French were spoken.

Wladyslaw Reymont, in his novel The Promised Land, portrayed Lodz in such rainbow hues.

Before Poland attained its independence in 1918, following bouts of partition and colonization in the  18th century, Lodz was a magnet for German, British and French immigrants.

Germans, in particular, flocked to Lodz, and by 1840, no fewer than 80 per cent of its population was German.

The most successful German newcomer, Karol Scheibler, settled down here in 1848 and proceeded to build an empire spun out of cotton. In short order, he became the city’s most prominent textile magnate and one of Poland’s wealthiest men.

“Ethnic Germans created Lodz’s industrial base,” said Marek Szukalak, a local historian.

Scheibler’s chief rival was a Jew, Izrael Kalmanowicz Poznanski, whose immense red-brick factory employed thousands of workers and whose adjacent neo-baroque palace at 15 Ogrodowa St. was the talk of the town.

Until his death in 1900, he remained unsurpassed as a Jewish entrepreneur. Yet Poznanski had some company. Businessmen such as Markus Kohn, Borys Wachs and Jakub Herszberg also accumulated great wealth,  adding value to Lodz’s economy.

Their prominence notwithstanding, the majority of Jews in Lodz, comprising one-third of its population by the 1930s, barely scraped by, especially during the Great Depression.Typically, they were craftsmen and petty merchants, with a sprinkling of professionals.

By the outbreak of World War II, 230,000 of Lodz’s 672,000 inhabitants were Jewish, while 62,000 were of German stock.

In the face of Germany’s unprovoked invasion in 1939, the Polish army crumbled. One of the soldiers who tried to stem the Teutonic tide was my father, David, who was wounded in a battle and dispatched to Germany for medical care.

The German army conquered Lodz on Sept. 8, smashing the Polish forces commanded by Gen. Juliusz Rommel.  

Proceeding to annex Lodz, Germany renamed it Litzmannstadt and unleashed what would be a reign of terror. Jews were harassed, shops were vandalized and synagogues were burned down.  

Reading the handwriting on the wall, thousands of Lodz Jews, including my aunt, left Lodz, fleeing to the Soviet Union.

In 1940, the Nazis created a ghetto with 160,000 Jews crammed behind its walls.

My father, having recuperated from his wounds, was repatriated to the Lodz ghetto, where he worked as a fireman. My mother toiled in one of its grimy workshops.

The ghetto elder, Chaim Rumkowski, fervently believed that he could save the Jews if they worked hard and kept production lines  humming.

He was wrong, dead wrong.

The ghetto was liquidated in the summer of 1944, the last transport to Auschwitz leaving the Radegast railway station on Aug. 29. My parents were among the deportees. Somehow, they survived the ordeal, along with several thousand Jews from Lodz.

By one estimate, 40,000 Jews returned to Lodz after the war, when Poland was thrown into a spiral of political turmoil.

The 1946 Kielce pogrom prompted most of them to emigrate. As a result of this development and the flight of its German minority, Lodz, for the first time in its history, morphed into a ethnically homogenous city.

Today, Lodz – the hub of Poland’s film industry – is a microcosm of Poland, with more than 90 per cent of its residents being of Polish origin.

Still, the legacy of Lodz’s Jewish past looms large, thanks to the array of luminaries it has produced, from the film producer Artur Brauner and the novelist Jerzy Kosinski to the architect Daniel Libeskind and the poet Julian Tuwim.

By the early 1960s, when Poland was a Communist state with close ties to the Soviet Union, Lodz was home to upward of 3,000 Jews.

But in the wake of the Six Day War, the  Communist government in Poland launched a thinly veiled anti-Semitic campaign couched in anti-Zionist rhetoric.

“It was especially intense in Lodz,” said Szukalak, referring to the fact that one of its masterminds, Mieczyslaw Moczar, the minister of interior, hailed from Lodz.

The slanderous anti-Jewish campaign, rooted in a power struggle in the Communist party, led to the departure of about 30,000 Jews, most of them staunchly secular and thoroughly assimilated, from Poland.

By the early 1990s, when Poland had already shaken off communism in its peaceful transition to democracy, Lodz’s official Jewish population stood at 100.

During this period, a hip young musician from Lodz named Krzysztof Skowronski achieved a measure of fame with his rock ’n’ roll/reggae band.

Until the age of 13, he had no idea he was Jewish. “My parents were secular Jews who didn’t keep Jewish traditions,” he said. “My mother told me, ‘It’s dangerous to be Jewish in Poland.’”

In 1986, after a life-changing trip to Israel,  he dropped his Polish name and began calling himself Symcha Keller.

Keller, whose mother was hidden by Polish Christians during the Holocaust and whose father steadfastly refuses to discuss that era, studied Hebrew and Judaism with two old learned Jews in Lodz.

Having pumped them dry of their knowledge, he continued his studies at an ulpan and at a yeshiva in Israel. He then lived with Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach in New York City.

In 2004, he was ordained as a rabbi. He is still the only rabbi in Lodz.

Now 46 and Orthodox, Keller is also president of the local Jewish community, a title he has held for the past nine years.

There are officially 300 Jews in Lodz, whose current population is 750,000 and is twinned with Tel Aviv. But as far as he knows, an additional 700 Jews remain unaffiliated.

To the best of his knowledge, nearly half of all married Jews in Lodz are in mixed marriages. Last year, by his count, the community registered seven births, seven marriages and three bar mitzvahs. Since the demise of communism in 1989, hundreds of Jews who passed as Catholics in Lodz have come out of the woodwork, while the median age in the Jewish community has dropped to 50.

Last year, 20 nominally Catholic families began identifying themselves with the Jewish community, whose headquarters on Pomorska Street contain a synagogue, a canteen, a youth club, a dairy restaurant, a medical clinic, a hotel and, most recently, a mikvah.

Its activities are funded by the U.S.-based Ronald S. Lauder Foundation.

“It’s a huge challenge to be a Jew in Poland,” observed Keller, whose stentorian voice conveys a sense of authority. “During Communist times, Jewish life was paralyzed. We have to start anew. “

In a reference to the Holocaust, which wiped out 90 per cent of Polish Jewry, he said, “We are living in the biggest Jewish graveyard.” Yet Keller is optimistic.

There were 15 conversions to Judaism in 2008, all performed at an Orthodox ceremony in Monsey, N.J., and Keller expects still more conversions in the future.

In his estimation, there may be as many as 5,000 Jews in Lodz today still masquerading as Catholics.