A devastating, day-by-day record of life in the second-largest Jewish ghetto in Nazi Europe—a community that was reduced from 163,177 people in 1941 to 877 by 1944. Compiled by inhabitants of the ghetto and illustrated with more than seventy haunting photographs, the Chronicle is a document unparalleled among writings on the Holocaust.
"A remarkable piece of testimony. To read it is to pay the dead the small tribute of remembrance, and to be devastated by a picture of a particular and terrible hell."—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto tears at the mind and heart and leaves a dark and numbing rage in the center of the soul."—Chaim Potok, The Philadelphia Inquirer
"Fascinating, disturbing."—Elie Wiesel, The New York Times Book Review
"[Dobroszycki] has done a major service not only to historians and students of the Holocaust, but to all those, both Jews and non-Jews, who are interested in how a tyrannical regime can exploit, starve, and deceive tens of thousands of intelligent, articulate people in time of war."—Martin Gilbert, The New York Review of Books
"Sober yet unforgettably vivid."—S.S. Prawer, Times Literary Supplement
"A milestone in Holocaust studies. Its wealth of information and accuracy, and the systematic manner in which it was compiled, makes in an unequalled source on the history of the destruction of European Jewry."—Alexander Zvielli, The Jerusalem Post Magazine
"Well worth reading as a record of extremes of human experience."—Majorie Meehan, M.D., American Journal of Psychiatry
"Dr. Dobroszycki is a survivor of the ghetto. He is also a trained historian with a sophisticated, finely honed mind. No one knows as much about these records as he does. No one understands them better."—Raul Hilberg
Lucjan Dobroszycki is a historian at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and Yeshiva University.
