Encyclopedia of the Ghetto. The Unfinished Project of the Łódź Ghetto Archivists

The communal life of a group of people brought together by external coercion with no deliberate intention of forming a common destiny gradually took forms over time that were only possible on the territory of the ghetto. Everyday life requires certain norms of working and existing. It developed its own structure, its language, its terminology. No community anywhere in the world could be comparable to that of the ghetto. […]

A collection of these linguistic and lexical resources forms part of the ghetto’s cultural history. In a later period of history, one to which research on the ghetto will belong, such a collection, such an encyclopedia, will be able to provide elucidation where a bare description of the conditions does not suffice. In the history of humankind, words and language – scholarship long ago proved this thesis – have been more credible witnesses and sources

of truth than other, material memorials.

The present encyclopedia makes no claim to be exhaustive and an unambiguous definition of terms. But it believes it has come close to this targeted goal. […]

Oskar Rosenfeld, December 1, 1943.