Pardonner n’est pas en notre pouvoir : Haïm Mordechaï Rumkowski, doyen des juifs du ghetto de Lodz

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None of the head of Judenrat and Altestenrat created by Germans during the Second World War caused so many contradictions as Chaim Mordechai Rumkowski, the Eldest of the Jews in Litzmannstadt Ghetto.Joanna Podolska presents Rumkowski’s complicated personality using documents, testimonies, diaries and interviews. She remembers what Hanna Arendt wrote about Rumkowski in her book Eichmann In Jerusalem, Isaiah Trunk in his monography on Judenrat or Primo Levi in Grey Zone. But she also presents the point of view of some survivors, who are trying to explain Rumkowski’s position and so called his controversial “strategy of surviving”, like Arnold Mostowicz (a writer who died in 2002, narrator of the film Fotoamator on the Lodz Ghetto) or Abraham Cykiert, living now in Melbourne, who presented his controversal opinion during the conference “Fenomenon on the Lodz Ghetto” in October 2004 in the University of Lodz. For him Rumkowski was a kind of hero who did as he could to save as many Jews as possible.The author tries to present the subject of her research objectively giving different opinions and points of view, including conclusion made by Marek Edelman in 2004 ; for him Rumkowski was just a supporter to the murderers. Thanks to him Germans could send more soldiers to front : the Ghetto all was done by Jewish – like Rumkowski and others – themselves.