In These Nightmarish Days

Josef Zelkowicz grew up in a wealthy Hasidic family and was ordained as a rabbi. A professional journalist before the war, Zelkowicz took a keen interest in urban poverty, Jewish ethnography, and Hasidic lore. These interests stood him in good stead as a key and extremely productive member of the Łódź ghetto archive. His most sustained piece of writing was his hour-by-hour description of the Szpere, the great deportation from the ghetto in September 1942. He was deported to Auschwitz in August 1944.