“Remember our mutual promise when we parted.”

For a time, postcards were the only legal way available to contact the outside of the Litzmannstadt ghetto. The Germans forcibly held more than 160,000 Jewish people there between 1940 and 1945. Writing postcards was of great importance to those imprisoned in the ghetto. Not only was this the single available way to ask for money or food so essential for survival. Rather, the messages on the postcards offered emotional support to those that found themselves in an altogether hostile environment. At least for a while, they gave people the feeling that they were not completely cut off from the outside world. In the Litzmannstadt ghetto, the German occupiers held Jewish people, mainly from Poland and German-speaking countries. Tens of thousands of those imprisoned perished either due to the disastrous conditions, the process of deportation to other places and subsequent forced labour, or murder in the Kulmhof extermination camp or in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The Łódź State Archives hold 22,100 postcards that were written by those detained in the Litzmannstadt ghetto but never reached their intended destination. Since 2012, the collection has been available in digitalized, freely accessible form.¹ The majority of these cards are addressed to the places of origin from where the people were forcibly removed. They were deported to the ghetto from the so-called Altreich, Vienna, Prague and Luxembourg from October 1941 onwards. The postcards are mainly dated between November 1941 and February 1942. A two-year embargo on mail came into effect in January 1942. As a result, legal contact with the outside world was not possible for those detained in the ghetto until May 1944.² In some cases, those deported from the “German Reich” were subject to different regulations than the far larger number of Jews of Polish origin, who were also detained in the ghetto.

Two cards from the 49-year-old teacher Henriette Arndt have been preserved in the collection of unsent postcards in the Łódź State Archives. Arndt was deported from Hamburg to the Litzmannstadt ghetto, on October 25, 1941. It was one of the first systematic deportations of Jews from the Reich to German-occupied Eastern Europe. Born on May 15, 1892, in Regenswalde in Pomerania, Henriette Arndt moved to Hamburg in 1914. She worked there as a public-school teacher until the NSDAP came to power.

Being banned from her profession in 1933, Arndt’s life became progressively more difficult due to intensifying persecution. She repeatedly had to change her job and place of residence. From 1938 onwards, she worked at a Jewish elementary school in Lübeck, to which she commuted daily from Hamburg. However, this school also closed in April 1940. Henriette Arndt decided to emigrate to England, but the Hamburg authorities prevented this. Until her deportation, Arndt worked at the Israelite Girls’ School in Hamburg, which had already been merged with the Talmud Torah School.³ After receiving the deportation order on October 25, 1941, Henriette Arndt embarked on the transport without relatives to a destination unknown to her. By this time, her short marriage to the Hamburg merchant Friedrich Kirchhoff had long since ended in divorce.⁴ Torn from her old life, Arndt found herself in the ghetto in a completely alien and life-threatening environment. In overcrowded, unhygienic conditions and without adequate sanitary facilities, she had to organize her everyday life. Language barriers and mutual prejudices made living together in the Polish-German-Jewish community of the ghetto difficult.

When the Hamburg transport arrived in October 1941, the Litzmannstadt ghetto had already been in existence for two years. The postal system was part of the ghettos history from the very beginning, and the Jewish self-administration made great efforts to organize it effectively.⁵ The postal system not only played a central role in the internal organization of the Jewish self-administration.⁶ It also enabled the Polish Jews in Litzmannstadt to make contact with relatives and acquaintances outside the ghetto and gave the possibility to request urgently needed money and food supplies. The organization of the postal system of the Jewish administration always dependent on the directives of the German ghetto administration.

The 20,000 people who were deported from Germany, Austria, Luxembourg and former Czechoslovakia to the Litzmannstadt ghetto from October 1941 were at first completely excluded from using the postal service.⁷ This also affected Henriette Arndt, who reached the ghetto together with 1,033 other children, women and men from Hamburg. Immediately after their arrival, they – and thus also Henriette Arndt – were unable to contact relatives and acquaintances.

The German ghetto administration only lifted this mail embargo on December 4, 1941, more than six weeks after her arrival. Postal traffic was subsequently subject to strict conditions. Only postcards were allowed to be sent to those deported to the ghetto from October 1941. Personal messages were permitted, but any descriptions of the hostile conditions of their place of residence were strictly forbidden. The postcards had to be written in German and, according to the German ghetto administration, had to be written clearly and legibly. A comprehensive control system reviewed compliance with these strict requirements.⁸

The postcard from Henriette Arndt does not appear to have met these requirements. It may also have exceeded the permitted quota of outgoing mail from the ghetto. Various numbers on the card indicate that it was handled by employees of the ghetto post office. However, the postcard was not franked and therefore never made it into outgoing mail. Arndt probably never knew that the postcard had not reached its destination.

The postcard was addressed to her non-Jewish friend Charlotte Beug in Hamburg. It impressively shows Arndt’s longing for a loved one who had been forcibly left behind: “Remember our mutual promise when we parted. Look up at the stars every evening and think of me. That’s what I’ve done every evening until now, around nine o’clock. My thoughts are always with you and that remains.“⁹ The message testifies to a deep connection between the two women, who were not only both teachers, but also lived together in Hamburg at times and went on vacation together. The two women also spent one of these vacations in Arndt’s hometown of Regenswalde.¹⁰

The unsent postcard thus probably reveals evidence of a queer Jewish perspective, which has only recently received more attention in the historiography of the Holocaust.¹¹ “I am writing another card to you and hope to find peace of mind. […] I want to hear from you every day. I am always with you” ¹², Arndt wrote in another card to her friend. However, this too never arrived in Hamburg. It is the last written sign of life from Henriette Arndt. Members of the German SS murdered her in the Kulmhof extermination camp in May 1942. However, Arndt’s presumed partner Charlotte Beug only found out about this after the war.

In Holocaust studies, postcards have so far received little attention as testimonies. Most historiographical analyses in this context come from the field of philately, which is generally organized outside the University and primarily deals with components of postal documents such as stamps, postmarks or envelopes.
In addition to numerous surviving forms of personal testimonies from the Litzmannstadt ghetto, such as diaries, postcards are a separate type of text with specific characteristics and meanings for their authors.¹³ Due to the limiting format, the messages to be sent had to be kept brief. The knowledge that the censorship offices of the Jewish and German administrations could read the postcards was another factor that shaped the writing practice of the individual cards. Nevertheless, in the ghetto it was – at least temporarily – a legal way of communicating with family members or friends. The collection of postcards from the Łódź State Archives thus reveals intimate insights into the feelings and perceptions of their authors, their fears and longings. This has yet to be analysed systematically and on a larger scale.¹⁴

Translation: Nils Bergmann

References

Archiwum Państwowe w Łodzi (APŁ), Sig.39/278/0/30/2316 to 39_278_0_30_2323.
Cf. Manfred Schulze; Stefan Petriuk: Unsere Arbeit – unsere Hoffnung. Getto Lodz 1940–1945. Eine zeitgeschichtliche Dokumentation des Post- und Geldwesens im Lager Litzmannstadt, Schwalmtal 1995, p. 65.
Cf. Christiane Pritzlaff: Henriette Arndt. Eine jüdische Lehrerin in Hamburg, in: „Den Himmel zu pflanzen und die Erde zu gründen.“ Die Joseph-Carlebach-Konferenzen. Jüdisches Leben. Erziehung und Wissenschaft ed. by Miriam Gillis-Carlebach and Wolfgang Grünberg, Hamburg 1995, pp. 225–237, here p. 230.
Ibid., p. 226.
Cf. Andrea Löw: Juden im Getto Litzmannstadt. Lebensbedingungen, Selbstwahrnehmung, Verhalten, 2nd ed., Göttingen 2010, p. 146 f.
Cf. Schulze: Unsere Arbeit – unsere Hoffnung, p. 23.
Ibid., p. 38.
Cf. Hannelore Steinert, „Ich bin noch immer ohne Nachricht von Dir …” Beschlagnahmte Post im Getto Litzmannstadt 1940–1944, in: Angelika Brechtelmacher/ Bertrand Perz/ Regina Wonisch (Hrsg.): Post 41. Berichte aus dem Getto Litzmannstadt: ein Gedenkbuch, Wien 2015, pp. 161–184, here p. 167.
Postcard from Henriette Arndt to Charlotte Beug, 5.12.1941, APŁ, Sig. 39_278_0_30_2318.
Cf. https://www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de/?&MAIN_ID=7&BIO_ID=1473. The authors would like to thank Dr. Alexander Reinfeldt (Bickenbach) for the exchange; see Pritzlaff: Henriette Arndt. Eine jüdische Lehrerin in Hamburg, p. 230.
See Anna Hájková: Menschen ohne Geschichte sind Staub. Homophobie und Holocaust, Göttingen 2021; Anna Hájková, Den Holocaust queer erzählen, Sexualitäten Jahrbuch 2018, pp. 86–110.
Postcard from Henriette Arndt to Charlotte Beug, 9.12.1942, APŁ, Sig. 39÷278÷0÷30÷2318.
See Angelika Brechtelmacher: Postkarten aus dem Getto Litzmannstadt, in: Angelika Brechtelmacher/Bertrand Perz/Regina Wonisch (Hrsg.): Post 41. Berichte aus dem Getto Litzmannstadt: ein Gedenkbuch, Vienna 2015, pp. 185–220, here p. 187.
For Hamburg, this was last done by the authors. See the exhibition project (letzte) Lebenszeichen – Postkarten aus Zielorten nationalsozialistischer Deportationen aus Hamburg und Norddeutschland (Last Signs of Life – Postcards from Destinations of National Socialist Deportations from Hamburg and Northern Germany) by the Hamburg Memorials and Learning Sites Foundation to Commemorate the Victims of Nazi Crimes (Letzte) Lebenszeichen (gedenkstaetten-hamburg.de) and Sarah Grandke/Johanna Schmied: (Letzte) Lebenszeichen – Vom Recherchieren und Ausstellen “Hamburger Postkarten” aus dem Ghetto Litzmannstadt, in: Isolation – Koncentration – Deportation. Regionale Studien zur Verfolgung der jüdischen Bevölkerung, ed. Erinnerungsort Alter Schlachthof, Berlin (forthcoming).

Sarah Grandke, historian, curator; doctoral project on displaced persons, University of Regensburg. Most recently she was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Sydney Jewish Museum. She has worked in the “denk.mal Hannoverscher Bahnhof” Documentation Centre project and previously at the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Memorial and the Munich Nazi Documentation Centre. She is a founding member of the support network for survivors of Nazi persecution in Ukraine, which was established in March 2022 [https://hilfsnetzwerk-nsverfolgte.de/].

Johanna Schmied, M.A., historian; since 2022 she has been working as a curator in the “denk.mal Hannoverscher Bahnhof” Documentation Center project of the Foundation of Hamburg Memorials and Learning Centres Commemorating the Victims of Nazi Crimes. The project is developing a permanent exhibition dedicated to the deportations from Hamburg and northern Germany during the Nazi era and their aftermath up to the present day.