Events

When Soviet troops entered Lodz on January 19, 1945, they found fewer than 900 Jews alive in a city that had contained one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe. The Lodz Ghetto, sealed by the Germans in April 1940, had held more than 200,000 people at its peak. By the time of liberation, nearly all of them were dead, killed by starvation, disease, or deportation to the Chelmno and Auschwitz extermination camps. The ghetto was unique among Nazi-imposed ghettos for both its longevity and the strategy of its controversial Jewish leader, Chaim Rumkowski. Appointed by the Germans as head of the Judenrat, the Jewish council that administered the ghetto's internal affairs, Rumkowski pursued a policy of "salvation through labor," arguing that making the ghetto indispensable to the German war effort would keep its inhabitants alive. He organized the ghetto into a vast industrial operation, with factories producing textiles, leather goods, metal products, and other supplies for the Wehrmacht. The strategy bought time but could not prevent the deportations. In early 1942, the Germans began transporting ghetto residents to the Chelmno death camp, where they were murdered in gas vans. Rumkowski cooperated with the selection process, delivering the elderly, the sick, and children under ten in a desperate attempt to save the working-age population. His speech of September 4, 1942, asking parents to surrender their children, remains one of the most harrowing documents of the Holocaust: "Give me your children... I must cut off limbs in order to save the body." The ghetto survived longer than almost any other in Nazi-occupied Europe, functioning until August 1944, when the Germans liquidated the remaining 67,000 inhabitants. Most were transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the majority were gassed on arrival. Rumkowski himself was sent to Auschwitz on one of the last transports and is believed to have been killed there, though accounts of his death vary. The fewer than 900 survivors found by Soviet forces had been kept alive to clean up the ghetto. Some had hidden in bunkers and attics during the final liquidation. The industrial complex that Rumkowski had built to save lives had merely prolonged the dying. Lodz stands as evidence of the fundamental futility of negotiating with a regime whose objective was total annihilation.

More Americans watched Lucy Ricardo give birth on television than watched the inauguration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower the following morning. The January 19, 1953, episode of I Love Lucy drew 44 million viewers, representing 71.7 percent of all television sets in the country, a share that no scripted television program has matched since. The episode's extraordinary viewership was driven by a collision of real life and fiction that CBS had been building toward for months. Lucille Ball, the show's star, was actually pregnant with her second child, Desi Arnaz Jr. The show's writers had incorporated her pregnancy into the storyline, a decision that was itself groundbreaking. Television networks considered pregnancy too indelicate for family entertainment, and CBS required every script to be reviewed by a priest, a rabbi, and a minister to ensure nothing offensive aired. The word "pregnant" was banned from the dialogue; Lucy was described as "expecting." The timing was orchestrated with surgical precision. Ball gave birth to Desi Arnaz Jr. by planned Cesarean section on the morning of January 19, the same day the pre-recorded episode showing Lucy Ricardo giving birth to "Little Ricky" aired in prime time. Newspapers ran the fictional and real births side by side, and the convergence generated a media sensation that no publicity campaign could have manufactured. I Love Lucy was already the most popular show on television before the pregnancy storyline. Ball and her husband Desi Arnaz had revolutionized the medium by insisting on filming before a live studio audience using three cameras simultaneously, a technique that became the standard for sitcom production for the next fifty years. They also insisted on owning the show through their production company, Desilu, a business decision that made them enormously wealthy and gave them control over the show's syndication rights. The birth episode demonstrated television's power to create shared national experiences. In 1953, the medium was still young; roughly half of American households owned a set. The fact that nearly three-quarters of those sets were tuned to the same program at the same moment revealed that television could command attention at a scale that radio and film had never achieved. Ball and Arnaz divorced in 1960, but the show they built endures. I Love Lucy has been in continuous syndication since its original run, and the birth episode remains a landmark in American broadcasting.