Encyclopedia of the Łódź Ghetto

Oskar Rosenfeld

1943

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. Everyday life required certain norms of work and existence. It created its own structure, its own language, its own terminology. Nowhere in the world…

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Creator Bio

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.

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