“Oh How It Sat Lonely” (Lamentations 1:1)

In a few weeks, we will commemorate the 80th anniversary of the liquidation of the Lodz Ghetto. Symbolically, this will happen just when the new book about Lodz will be published; Two volumes of an elaborate and eye-catching book, the first of which brings the story of Lodz, the great city, and its sad end.

One of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who endured the Lodz ghetto until it was destroyed is Rabbi Menachem Oppenheim, who even wrote a diary about the ghetto in his “Derech HaChaim” (The Way of Life) siddur (prayerbook).

Before you is a page from the Kinnot (elegies) in this siddur, on which Menachem Oppenheim wrote his bitter and painful diary. The siddur was found its way to the Land of Israel in an unusual manner, and today it is in the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem.

From the Librarians’ Blog of the National Library, Jerusalem:

With the passing of the years, the more we look back and find it difficult to grasp what happened, and as fewer living witnesses are among us, the diaries that survived and came into our hands hold particular importance.

Such is the diary of Menachem Oppenheim from the Lodz Ghetto. The diary was found among the remains of the ghetto, and in the 1950s it was handed over to the National Library. The uniqueness of the diary is that it is all written on a siddur. Menachem Oppenheim lived in the ghetto from the winter of 1941 until the summer of 1944. He wrote dozens of articles, in Hebrew and Yiddish, on the sides of the pages and between the paragraphs, using the white spaces on the pages of the siddur. As far as we know, Oppenheim perished in Auschwitz like most of the Jews who managed to survive in the Lodz Ghetto, until his extermination by the Germans at the end of August 1944.

On the page for Megillat Eicha (the Book of Lamentations), Menachem wrote the following:

10/3/1942 – “The deportation continues. I saw an old man and an old woman about 80 years old pulling a handcart to the train station to send them off. On the way to the station they will die. People are being taken alive to burial…”