Photo courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Visitors to the museum pass under this gate, a cast taken from the original entrance to the Auschwitz death camp, inscribed with the ironic phrase Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Makes One Free).

Holocaust Museum’s ‘Give Me Your Children’ exhibit chronicles harsh conditions and deaths in Jewish slums

by LAUREN FULBRIGHT

On a typical weekday morning, the lobby of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. echoes with the sounds of life.

Groups of school children chatter endlessly as they wait to enter the museum’s permanent collection, and footsteps echo as visitors from around the world pass quickly through the halls.

In sharp contrast, the basement gallery of the museum’s special exhibit, ”Give Me Your Children: Voices from the Lodz Ghetto,” is remarkably quiet.

The few visitors who do trickle through rarely speak above a whisper, and the only notable sounds come from the audio tapes played throughout the exhibit. Voices read diary passages written by Jewish children who lived in the Lodz Ghetto during the Nazi occupation of Poland in the 1940s.

“When we look at the fence separating us from the rest of the world, our souls, like birds in a cage, yearn to be free,” wrote one anonymous girl diarist on March 7, 1942. Her words echo throughout the exhibit hall as she asks, “Will I ever live in better times?”

The exhibit, which opened on Dec. 15, 2006 and will continue through Sept. 3, 2007, is offered by the Holocaust Museum in association with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. It uses a variety of photographs, journals, letters, drawings and other artifacts to tell the history of the ghetto, particularly as it was experienced through the eyes of children.

The ghetto in the city of Lodz was established on Feb. 8, 1940, when German authorities forced 100,000 Jews to move out of their homes into an area of poor neighborhoods only 3 miles wide. The uprooted families joined 64,000 Jews already living in that area of the city.

German officials appointed Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski as the chairman of the Jewish Council overseeing the new community, and the ghetto was then separated from the rest of the city by a barbed wire fence. In the ghetto, food rations were scarce and living conditions hard. More than 43,500 of the Jews would eventually die, mostly from starvation and disease.

Rumkowski, whom the Germans called “Eldest of the Jews,” established schools, a labor conscription office, and departments for things like public sanitation. He believed that if the Jews worked hard, and produced goods that the Germans needed, they would be able to survive.

Throughout the exhibit, quotes from children are located next to quotes from German officials and prominent Jews in the community. On one wall, 15-year-old Sara Plagier describes a question she was asked by a little girl. If there is no physical difference between Jews and non-Jews, the little girl asked, “Why do they separate us from them?”

On another wall is a quote from German Governor Friedrich Obelhor, who described the establishment of the ghetto as a “transitional measure.”

“I reserve for myself the decision as to when and how the city of Lodz will be cleansed of Jews. In any case, the final aim must be to burn out entirely this pestilential boil,” Obelhor wrote on Dec. 10, 1939.

The exhibit includes a model of the ghetto, built by resident Leon Jakubowicz in 1940, and an album of colorful drawings that students from the ghetto’s 43 schools gave to Rumkowski as a New Year’s greeting.

There is classroom furniture and piles of the cups and bowls that children took to school in order to receive their daily soup rations.

On Sept. 2, 1942, German officials announced that the ghetto was to become a work camp, and ordered Rumkowski to expel 20,000 people from the community, starting with the elderly and children under the age of 10. Members of the community were well aware that this signified deportation to a death camp.

At the end of the exhibit, a taped voice reads excerpts from the speech Rumkowski gave, asking parents to give up their children. “I must cut off limbs in order to save the body itself. I must take children because, if not, others will be taken as well, God forbid,” Rumkowski said. “In my old age, I must stretch out my hands and beg. . . Fathers and mothers, give me your children.”

At the end of the exhibit, visitors learn that on August 2, 1944, the ghetto’s remaining 72,000 Jews were sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. The majority were killed, including Rumkowski.

Breanne Robirds, a visitor from Powell, Wyoming, said that the exhibit was interesting, but unsettling. “It’s a good exhibit. It about makes you sick to be honest,” she said.

Robirds, a student at Norwest University, said, “I liked the quotes and the diary entries. I thought it was interesting to see what they had to say themselves.”