In February 1940, the Nazis established the second-largest Jewish ghetto in the Polish city of Lodz. They appointed Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski to be ghetto administrator. For the next four and a half years Rumkowski controlled the lives of over a quarter-million Jews and sought to make the ghetto a productive industrial complex. Did he hope to save lives by doing this or did he have other motives? This novel brings to life what it was like to live in the ghetto during that time.
In telling the story of Sophie, a Holocaust survivor, William Styron was able to approach the Nazi atrocity obliquely, and thus personalize and dramatize a horror so monstrous that the human component is usually lost.
