Rumkowski’s Scapegoat: The Honor Court Trial of Łódź Ghetto Functionary Maks Szczęśliwy in Helsinki

• In Event: Jews on Trial after the Holocaust

Abstract

Only a tiny fraction of the Łódź Ghetto Jewish leadership survived the Holocaust, and even fewer were tried by Jewish courts after the war. Among the survivors was the head of the ghetto's Food Supply Department, Maks Szczęśliwy (1887-1962), who immigrated to Finland in 1946 and thus avoided being brought to court in Poland. It would take three more years before the Central Council of Jewish Communities in Finland was forced, under growing pressure from Łódź survivors, to establish a court to deal with the case. Finally, after a process that took four years, Szczęśliwy was acquitted.
In January 1940, Chaim Rumkowski, whom the Nazis made the head of the Łódź Ghetto, commissioned his close friend and prewar business associate Maks Szczęśliwy to establish and lead the Food Supply Department, which at its height had over five thousand employees. According to the Ghetto Encyclopaedia composed by ghetto administrators, he ran the department in an “unrestrained way,” enjoying Rumkowski’s full trust. Szczęśliwy held his position until November 1943, when the Germans took more control over the food supply.
With Szczęśliwy’s case the Jewish community in Finland, which itself had survived the Holocaust intact, was confronted with an impossibly difficult task. Being a traditional East European Orthodox community, it established a court led by the chief rabbi of Finland. In Yiddish the court was referred to as “beth din,” but in Swedish documents it was called an “honor court”. The court had to decide whether Szczęśliwy had caused the death of thousands of ghetto inmates through his alleged misconduct and negligence, and thus whether he was guilty of “crimes against humanity”. Ultimately, conflicting testimonies and inadequate access to wartime documentation led the court to decide that is was “better to acquit than to condemn.”
In the light of current research on postwar Jewish courts, the involvement of rabbinical authority—most honor courts were secular—and Szczęśliwy’s central role in the second largest ghetto under Nazi occupation makes the case exceptional. Since Rumkowski did not survive the Holocaust, there seems to have been a strong desire among Szczesliwy's fellow survivors to make him Rumkowski's scapegoat.

Author

• Simo Muir, University College London