Yosef Zelkovitsh (1897–1944)

Josef Zelkowicz was born to a Jewish family in Poland. Although ordained as a rabbi, he worked as a journalist in the Yiddish-speaking milieu that existed in interwar Poland. He became a Yiddish teacher when confined in the Łódź Ghetto after the Nazi invasion of his country in World War II. He also was given the job of Ghetto archivist by the Judenrat (Jewish administration). He was deported in 1944 to the the death camp at Auschwitz, where he died. In 2002, his surviving diary and articles on daily life in the Ghetto were published in English as In Those Terrible Days: Writings from the Łódź Ghetto. Another volume combining eyewitness accounts by Zelkowicz in Łódź with those of another reporter in Warsaw, translated by David Suchoff, appeared in English in 2015 as In Those Nightmarish Days: The Ghetto Reportage of Peretz Opoczynski and Josef Zelkowicz.