Oskar Rosenfeld

1884–1944

Oskar Rosenfeld, a novelist, journalist, translator, and diarist, was born in Korycany, Moravia, and studied in Vienna, where he became an active Zionist. Rosenfeld wrote about literature, art, and theater for several Jewish newspapers and published his first novel in 1910. In 1927, he was one of the founders of the Jüdische Künstlerspiele, a theater that presented Yiddish works in German. Rosenfeld was also editor in chief of the weekly Die neue Welt. In 1938, he fled to Prague, where he was a correspondent for a Jewish newspaper until he was deported to the Łódź ghetto in 1941. In the ghetto, he worked in the statistics department. Hoping to expose the conditions under which Jews suffered, he kept copious notes in school notebooks. He died in Auschwitz.

Entries in the Posen Library by This Creator

Primary Source

Encyclopedia of the Łódź Ghetto

Restricted
Text
A group of people living together under extreme coercive conditions without the conscious intent of forming a community of common fate created forms that were only possible on the basis of the ghetto…

Primary Source

Chanukah in the Ghetto

Restricted
Text
“The living faith has vanished. . . . All that remains is poetry!” A superficial observer of life in the ghetto might come to more or less the same conclusion about the way…