The Litwins of Łódź – A Story of an Assimilated Jewish Family
When we think about Jewish Łódź before the Second World War, it is easy to imagine it as a
separate world: Yiddish-speaking families, synagogues and Hasidic courts, Jewish schools, organisations and businesses.
This was certainly an important part of Jewish life in the city. But it was not the only one.
The Jewish population of Łódź was remarkably diverse. Alongside traditional and religious families lived Jews who increasingly identified with Polish language and culture, attended Polish schools and universities, entered the liberal professions and participated in Polish intellectual and public life.
The story of the Litwin family is an interesting example of this process.
Rafał and Justyna Litwin
The family’s connection with Łódź began with Rafał Litwin, born in Nowogródek in 1872, the son of Józef Litwin, and his wife Justyna, born in Tomaszów in 1874. Their two sons were already born in the city: Alfred in 1899 and Józef in 1904.
By the end of the nineteenth century, they had settled in Łódź. The family lived at 108 Piotrkowska Street, on the principal street of Łódź and at the heart of its commercial and
professional life.
Both Rafał and Justyna were dentists. Rafał was not only a practising dentist but also an active member of the professional community. He was involved in dental organisations in Łódź and belonged to the circle of professionals who were developing modern dentistry in the city.
After his death in 1928, notices published by his colleagues reflected the position he had achieved within this professional environment. He was also involved in business connected with his profession. Archival records document a factory at 13 Nawrot Street producing a hygienic preparation for the care of teeth and the oral cavity. After Rafał’s death, the enterprise continued under the name “Stomatol 111” and was owned by his heirs. The rights connected with the business passed to his widow and sons: Justyna Litwin, Dr Alfred Litwin and Józef Litwin.
Rafał remained at Piotrkowska 108 until his death in 1928. Justyna continued to live there until her death in 1934. Both were buried at the Jewish Cemetery in Łódź.
A new generation
The lives of their sons show even more clearly the social and cultural path taken by the
family. Both received higher education and entered prestigious professions. The older son, Alfred Litwin, became a doctor. By the 1930s he was living at 21 Kilińskiego Street in Łódź and practised medicine in the city. His younger brother Józef chose law.
Józef Litwin, born in Łódź on 16 November 1904, attended the Higher School of the Merchants’ Association in Łódź, from which he graduated in 1923. He then left Łódź to study law at the University of Warsaw, receiving his degree in 1927. After his studies he returned to his native city, completed his legal training and eventually became an attorney.
A surviving application for an identity card from 1931 still gives his address as 108 Piotrkowska Street – the family home where Rafał and Justyna had raised their sons.
Polish names, Polish schools and professional careers
Even these few surviving records reveal something about the cultural environment of the Litwin family.
The first names used by the family – Rafał, Justyna, Alfred and Józef – differed markedly from the traditional Hebrew and Yiddish names found in the records of many Jewish families in Łódź at the time.
The sons were educated within the Polish educational system and continued their studies at
Polish universities. Both entered professions that required extensive higher education.
Józef's life became particularly closely connected with Polish academic and public institutions. In 1931, he began working at the Łódź branch of the Free Polish University (Wolna Wszechnica Polska), first as an assistant and later as a senior assistant in administrative law.
Interestingly, his earliest academic interests were connected not with law but with the history of Łódź and the surrounding region. Between 1928 and 1932 he published several historical studies.
There was also another, more personal indication of these interests.
A collector from Piotrkowska Street
In the 1920s, Józef Litwin was an enthusiastic collector.
Notices published in specialist periodicals give his address simply as:
Józef Litwin, Łódź, Piotrkowska 108. His interests included paper money, postage stamps, medals and tokens, posters, proclamations, leaflets, ration cards and other historical ephemera. He corresponded with other collectors and sought contacts abroad, particularly among collectors of paper money.
It is a small detail, but it provides an unusually personal glimpse of the young man before the academic titles and university career that would later define his public biography.
A Polish officer in September 1939
Perhaps the most striking expression of Józef Litwin’s integration into Polish public life came with the outbreak of the Second World War.
Litwin was a reserve officer of the Polish Army.
In September 1939, he fought in the defence of Warsaw as a second lieutenant.
After the capitulation of the city, he was captured by the Germans and became a prisoner of war. He spent much of the war in Oflag II C Woldenberg, one of the principal German prisoner-of-war camps for captured Polish officers.
Woldenberg developed an extraordinary intellectual life behind barbed wire. The prisoners organised lectures, courses, cultural events and educational programmes, and Litwin participated in these activities.
His position as a captured Polish officer also placed him in an unusual situation.
At precisely the same time that German occupation authorities were defining Jews according to racial criteria and destroying Jewish communities across occupied Poland, Józef Litwin was being held as an officer of the defeated Polish Army.
His wartime experience therefore became inseparable from his position within Polish society before 1939.
Jewish and Polish
The Litwin family illustrates why terms such as “Jewish” and “Polish” do not always describe
two separate worlds in the history of pre-war Łódź. Rafał and Justyna belonged to the Jewish community and were ultimately buried at the Jewish Cemetery. At the same time, their everyday lives were firmly situated within the professional world of a modern Polish city.
They were dentists. Their sons were a physician and a lawyer. The children received Polish education and attended Polish universities. Józef became an academic and an officer of the Polish Army. None of this necessarily meant a complete rejection of Jewish identity.
Rather, the surviving records show a family for whom participation in Polish cultural, professional and public life had become an important part of everyday life.
And in this respect, the Litwins were not unique.
After the war
Józef Litwin survived German captivity and returned to Łódź after the war.
He became closely associated with the newly established University of Łódź, where he developed a distinguished academic career. He became a professor of administrative law, served as Dean of the Faculty of Law, and later as Vice-Rector of the University of Łódź. His publications concerned administrative law, administrative procedure and civil registration, and he became a recognised authority in Polish legal scholarship.
He died in Łódź on 11 October 1966.
One family, another side of Jewish Łódź
The history of the Litwins is not a story of one of the great industrial dynasties of Łódź. Nor is it a story of rabbis, Hasidic leaders or prominent members of Jewish communal institutions.
And that is precisely what makes it interesting.
It is the story of an educated, professional Jewish family living in the centre of Łódź.
A father from Nowogródek and a mother from Tomaszów settled in the rapidly developing industrial city. Both practised dentistry. Their sons grew up on Piotrkowska Street, received higher education and became a doctor and a lawyer. One of them went on to become a Polish Army officer and later a professor and vice-rector of the University of Łódź.
Their story represents another face of Jewish Łódź – one that can sometimes be less visible in accounts focused on religious life, Jewish political movements or the great industrial families.
Archival documents make it possible to recover this world in surprisingly precise detail.
A registration card gives us the family home at 108 Piotrkowska Street. Burial cards tell us that Rafał and Justyna remained there until their deaths. An identity card application places the young Józef at the same address in 1931. Business records reveal the family enterprise at 13 Nawrot Street. A burial card connected with Alfred’s family leads us to 21 Kilińskiego Street.
Taken separately, these are small pieces of information.
Together, they tell the story of a Jewish family finding its place in the social, professional and intellectual life of interwar Poland – while remaining part of the history of Jewish Łódź.
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