The Utter Heartbreak of Voices From the Past
By Michael O'Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, Dec. 22, 2006
With the recorded voices of actors giving life to the words of some the Holocaust's youngest victims -- along with the voice of one grown-up who faced an agonizing decision -- " 'Give Me Your Children': Voices From the Lodz Ghetto" is something of a departure for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. That's because the museum has traditionally shied away from what exhibition co-curator Jacek Nowakowski describes as an admittedly "theatrical" experiment. Fortunately, it works quite powerfully, telling the story of the roughly 230,000 Jews who came through the Lodz ghetto between 1939 and 1942 in German-occupied Poland in a way that artifacts and wall text alone could not.
At the heart of the show are two areas in which visitors can simply sit and listen to young actors reading from the words of some of the children of Lodz. Why children? Their fate in Lodz -- after Warsaw, the second-largest Jewish ghetto -- was, as the show points out, unexceptional, especially when compared with the fates of the children in the many other ghettos throughout Europe. Month after month of deep fear and hunger, punctuated by occasional moments of joy, followed by, for the most part, liquidation in a death camp, was typical.
Central to the show, however, is a single artifact out of the many to come out of the Lodz ghetto: an album of hand-drawn New Year's greetings containing signatures representing about 14,000 schoolchildren from Lodz, presented on the occasion of Rosh Hashanah 1941, to a man named Mordecai Chaim Rumkowski. Previously appointed by the Nazis as "Eldest of the Jews," or administrator, for the Lodz ghetto, Rumkowski was stuck in the uncomfortable position of being both servant (of the Nazis) and master (of the ghetto's ad hoc bureaucracy).
You'll find his voice -- or, rather, his words, movingly embodied by actor Robert Prosky -- at the tragic climax of the show. You'll also find them in the show's title.
"I reach out with my trembling hands and beg," Rumkowski began, announcing on Sept. 4, 1942, the general curfew that had just been announced by the Nazis. Its fallout? Hand over some 20,000 ghetto residents -- all those younger than 10, older than 65 and the infirm -- for immediate extermination by the Nazis, or risk death yourself. "Give me your children," Rumkowski continued.
Prosky's voice breaks slightly while reciting these monstrous words, and it's hard not to feel heartbroken yourself, not only for the children and their parents but, yes, even for Rumkowski, the state of whose conscience at that point, if not his soul, is hard to fathom.
As the exhibition makes clear, this paradox was emblematic of life in the Lodz ghetto. Just as Rumkowski was both despised for his power and respected for his (probably) genuine desire to save the largest number of lives, life in Lodz was fraught with contradiction.
"I must cut off limbs," Rumkowski said that day, "in order to save the body itself." Previously, parents had been known to steal food from their own children; children turned their parents in to authorities for hoarding rations. The brief semblance of normalcy created by Rumkowski's school system (until its dismantling in late 1941, the only place children could expect a regular bowl of soup and medical care) stood in sharp contrast to the social upheaval and chaos of dislocation all around it.
If " 'Give Me Your Children' " is theatrical, it is theatrical in the way that "Sophie's Choice" is. In the voices of the most vulnerable, we hear, among the reminiscences of atrocity, moments of transcendence (e.g., the thrill of puppy love) that make the horror of what happened all the harder to bear.
