Historian Michal Unger, specialist in the history of Lodz and the ghetto, surveys the “grey areas” of still-controversial figure Rumkowski, “Der Alteste der Juden.” Crude, domineering, aggressive – will history judge him as a traitor who aided and abetted the Germans in liquidating the Jews of Lodz, or should he be seen as a tragic heroic figure who tried to delay death by employing as many children as possible in the workshop system he set up? A scholarly, readable new look at Rumkowski.