This highly acclaimed new Swedish documentary, narrated in English, chronicles the destruction of the Jewish community of 300,000 in the Polish city of Lodz, and the ultimately misguided efforts of their leader, Chaim Rumkowski, to halt the process. Rumkowski headed the Jewish Council of Lodz--one of many such councils, set up by the Nazis in the Jewish communities of occupied countries, through which Jewish elders were forced to collaborate in controlling the ghettos in hopes of saving the community. Rumkowski, a charismatic and strangely megalomaniacal figure, established a vast bureaucracy of social services within the Lodz ghetto. He also attempted to convert the ghetto into an industrial center, thus making the community indispensible and insuring its survival until Allied victory. His strategy failed, and Rumkowski was one of the last Jews of Lodz to be carted off to Auschwitz, where he died at the hands of Jews who felt he had betrayed them.
In a recent review, Variety notes, “This extraordinary work is one of the best documentaries on the Nazi Holocaust.... The Jews of Lodz is a heroic tragedy of misguided genius--forcing us to ask ourselves what we would have done, what other alternatives were at hand? It is a horror tale and a history, little known except to scholars of