In Those Nightmarish Days ─ The Ghetto Reportage of Peretz Opoczynski and Josef Zelkowicz

This volume sheds light on two brilliant but lesser known ghetto journalists: Josef Zelkowicz and Peretz Opoczynski. An ordained rabbi, Zelkowicz became a key member of the archive in the Lodz ghetto. Opoczynski was a journalist and mailman who contributed to the Warsaw ghetto's secret Oyneg Shabes archive. While other ghetto writers sought to create an objective record of their circumstances, Zelkowicz and Opoczynski chronicled daily life and Jewish responses to ghettoization by the Nazis with powerful immediacy. Expertly translated by David Suchoff, with an elegant introduction by Samuel Kassow, these profound writings are at last accessible to contemporary readers.

Josef Zelkowicz (1897–1944), an ethnographer and professional Yiddish journalist before the war, was deported to Auschwitz in 1944, when he perished.Peretz Opoczynski (1892–1943), a journalist by profession, worked as a mailman in the Warsaw ghetto. He made significant contributions to the archive until he was most likely rounded up in January 1943.David Suchoff is professor of English at Colby College. Samuel D. Kassow is Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College.