‘Chairman’s Best Child’ – Mail Delivery in the Łódź Ghetto (1939–1944) Cover Image

„Najlepsze dziecko Prezesa” – poczta w getcie łódzkim (1939–1944)
‘Chairman’s Best Child’ – Mail Delivery in the Łódź Ghetto (1939–1944)

Author(s): Adriana Bryk
Subject(s): Local History / Microhistory, WW II and following years (1940 - 1949), History of the Holocaust, History of Antisemitism, Source Material
Published by: Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów & IFiS PAN
Keywords: post office; mail delivery; correspondence; postcards; Łódź ghetto;

Summary/Abstract: Following the announcement of the decision to establish the ghetto in Łódź, in February 1940 the German post office stopped delivering mail to Jewish addresses. The Eldest of the Jews, Mordechaj Chaim Rumkowski, established the Department of Mail within the framework of the administration in order to ensure uninterrupted delivery of correspondence to Jewish addresses. This article discusses the Department’s operation in as many dimensions as possible and systematizes our knowledge on its topic. It characterizes the rules which regulated the post office’s operation, the types of mail and addressees. It also discusses the censorship, that is the rules and criteria which the censors used when withholding ghetto residents’ correspondence. The reflections on the topic of the censoring practice are based on an analysis of annotations placed on mail and their relation to the content of the mail. This text is not a study on correspondence as a source for Holocaust research. It only signals the topic of treating correspondence in the form of postcards as a source for Holocaust research, as a testimony to the living conditions in the ghetto, to how people communicated with one another, and to how and what about ghetto residents informed others, and predominantly as a testimony of the victims. An important part of the article is a description of unsent postcards stored at the State Archive in Łódź in the fonds called “Przełożony Starszeństwa Żydów w Getcie Łódzkim” (Eldest of the Jews in the Łódź Ghetto).

  • Issue Year: 2020
  • Issue No: 16
  • Page Range: 523-553
  • Page Count: 31
  • Language: Polish