Bidspirit auction | Lodz Ghetto Food Ration Card

Lodz Ghetto Food Ration Card (Nahrungsmittel-Karte) for Mordchaj Krakowski, with Research Printout - A ghetto-issued ration card printed in German, headed ”Der Aelteste der Juden in Litzmannstadt, Verpflegungs-Abteilung, Nahrungsmittel-Karte, ” numbered 265296, with a grid of coupon numbers 101 through 120 and a printed signature and stamp of the Jewish Council administration. The reverse carries handwritten registration entries in ink, including a name recorded as Krakowski Mordechaj Rosenberg, a birth date of 1936, a residential listing at Matrosen 24, and assorted reference numbers and a bold printed ”6.” Accompanying the card is a printed research sheet summarizing an entry for Mordchaj Krakowski, sourced to ”Lodz-Names: A Record of the 240,000 Inhabitants of the Lodz Ghetto, ” listing his sex, birth year, ghetto address, and associated notation ”AUSG 15.3.42 TR 11/2.” Such cards were part of the rationing and registration system imposed on residents of the Lodz (Litzmannstadt) Ghetto during the German occupation of Poland. The Lodz Ghetto, established in 1940 under the German name Litzmannstadt, was administered through the Jewish Council (Judenrat) led by Chaim Rumkowski, which oversaw internal functions including the distribution of food rations under strict German control. Rationing was minimal and tightly documented, with cards such as this used to track individual entitlements amid conditions of severe hunger and forced labor. The notation ”AUSG” followed by a date typically indicates a deportation record, as thousands of ghetto residents were transported to the Chelmno extermination camp or, from 1944, to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The child recorded here, born in 1936, would have been among the ghetto's youngest and most vulnerable inhabitants, a population targeted early in deportation actions such as the notorious ”Gehsperre” (Sperre) roundup of September 1942. This ration card documents the bureaucratic apparatus by which the Litzmannstadt (Lodz) Ghetto's Jewish Council, under Chaim Rumkowski, administered starvation-level food allotments to a sealed population of over 200,000 Jews confined by German authorities from 1940. The ”AUSG” deportation notation dated March 1942 places this child among the transports sent to the Chelmno extermination camp during the ghetto's early deportation waves, which preceded the larger Sperre action of September 1942 targeting children and the elderly. Such individually numbered cards, tied to civil registration records, formed part of the German administration's system for controlling and ultimately liquidating the ghetto population, most of whom did not survive.