Next stop Auschwitz: The Łódź ghetto
Unusually for a tale of the Holocaust, The White Factory is not mainly about interactions between Jews and Nazis. The play, performed at London’s Marylebone Theatre until 4 November, focuses instead on tensions between victims. As a result — and even more unusually for a Holocaust tale — it is a not a clear-cut story of good and evil.
The action is set in Łódź, a Polish city that was home to the first closed ghetto established by the Nazis. Its tragedy, which is not as well-known as that of the Warsaw ghetto, is highlighted by the Łódź Holocaust memorial , which I happened to visit just before seeing the play.
When Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, he took over the country with largest Jewish population in the world. In Łódź, Jews accounted for a third of the residents, including many professionals as well as textile magnates. Creating a Judenfrei zone there was a challenge but the Nazis were up to it.
In early 1940 they expelled Jewish families from their homes and confined them to a fenced-off area of the city — now renamed Litzmannstadt. About 160,000 people were crammed into 4km2.
The Łódź ghetto, like other such sites across the Reich, functioned as a slave labour camp. Its workshops supplied German firms and the Wehrmacht, notably with uniforms. Conditions were appalling: hunger and diseases killed more than 43,500 residents.
A train station, Bahnhof Radegast, stood on the edge of the ghetto. The building, with its signs in German typeface, now hosts the Holocaust memorial.
Initially the station was used to move fuel, food and goods manufactured in the workshops. From late 1941 it had another purpose. When the invasion of the USSR thrust even more Jews into their lap, the Nazis found that putting millions behind barbed wire was not the answer to the Judenfrage. Radegast became major hub for transports to extermination camps.
On 16 December 1941, German authorities announced their decision to “resettle” 20,000 Jews from Łódź. A special commission was established to determine those deemed unfit to work. People selected for deportation could take 12.5 kg of luggage and were walked to the Radegast Station.
Further waves followed. Radegast was also used as a transit station for 40,000 Jews from ghettos that were being closed down in Poland and other countries, as well as 5,000 Roma. From January 1942 to August 1944, a total of 200,000 people passed through the station on their final journey, mostly to Auschwitz 230km to the south.
In June 1944, with the Red Army closing in, the Germans decided to liquidate the Łódź ghetto. Over the next two months 67,000 of its last labourers were deported. By then, many suspected what “resettlement” meant: a year earlier people in the Warsaw had chosen to die resisting it.
In Łódź, German officials were keen for the process to go smoothly. A display at the station features this record by a resident, dated 23 June 1944: “Gestapo commissioner Fuchs said a few calming words to the people leaving. He explained that they were going to work in the Reich, and that they would receive decent food there. Due to lack of passenger cars, they would have to go by freight cars, but they would transfer to passenger cars along the way. So no one should be afraid. Naturally, his words spread like wildfire all over the ghetto and, to some extent, calmed people down.”
Over 1,000 Jews stayed behind to help take goods of value to the Reich. They were marked for extermination but the Germans were unable to kill them off before the Red Army entered Łódź in January 1945. Nearly 900 survived.
No essay or work of fiction can make you feel what going through such an experience feels like. But The White Factory gives the audience an idea. That is a great achievement.
The main character is a (fictional) lawyer who starts by refusing to have anything to do with the Jewish council appointed by the Nazis to deal with the ghetto. Hard choices force him to progressively drop his defiance. In the end he has to choose between active collaboration with genocide and the survival of his family.
A central protagonist is the leader of the Jewish council, Chaim Rumkowski, a historical figure who felt that the only way for Jews to survive under the Nazis was to make themselves indispensible through hard work.
His moral complexities, which have been debated at length, are remarkably explored here. The centrepiece of the play is Rumkowski’s infamous speech on 4 September 1942, in which he tells the Jews under his care that they must give up all their children under 10 for deportation.
The Germans, he pleads, had requested 24,000 victims but he haggled them down to 20,000 and spare the older children. His first thought, Rumkowski tells his appalled flock, was not
about ‘How many will perish?’ but ‘How many is it possible to save?’ And we reached the conclusion that, however hard it would be for us, we should take the implementation of this order into our own hands.
This stance is reminiscent of Sophie’s Choice, but with a key difference: William Styron’s reader can understand why, at the last minute and in sheer motherly desperation, Sophie gives up one of her children to save another. She has our full, horrified sympathy. Rumkowsky chooses to go along not out of gut instinct but rational calculation.
This is profoundly unsettling. On an emotional level, the viewer cannot help regarding him as a monster — and a foolish one at that. The idea that safety lay in collaborating with the Nazis had been exposed as delusional by the deportations: what was the point of playing the numbers’ game with people who were hell-bent on mass slaughter anyway?
But the play doesn’t let you get away with easy outrage. We have history on our side and we know what happened next. Had the Soviet advance been more rapid and liberation come sooner, you wonder, would Rumkowski’s calculus have been at least partially justified? Perhaps he would have been heralded as the saviour of thousands.
His words echo uncomfortably long after you’ve left the theatre: “Put yourself in my place, think logically, and you’ll reach the conclusion that I cannot proceed any other way. The part that can be saved is much larger than the part that must be given away.”
