In the Beginning Was the Ghetto: Notebooks from Lodz

From February 1942 to July 1944, Oskar Rosenfeld served in the statistics department of the Lodz ghetto. A playwright and journalist, he kept his own notes on life and conditions in the ghetto for a fictionalized account he hoped to write one day. Though Rosenfeld eventually perished at Auschwitz, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto projects his voice at last to the wider world.

"[O]ne of the most important and lasting works documenting the horrors of the Holocaust." --Booklist

"'Who in future times will believe that human beings fought each other over a potato?' So asks this utterly unsentimental, open-eyed, harrowing portrait of ghetto life during the Holocaust." --Kirkus Reviews, starred review