Katz Fellow Christine Liu presents on hunger and space in the Łódź Ghetto in Poland

On November 13, 2025, Christine Liu, a PhD candidate in History at the University of Maine and the Center’s 2025-2026 Robert J. Katz Research Fellow in Genocide Studies, delivered a talk at USC on hunger and space in the Łódź Ghetto in Poland. Her dissertation research examines how hunger fundamentally shaped survivors’ experiences of space in Holocaust ghettos. Rather than focusing on famine conditions or food distribution, she investigates the intersection of space and hunger and its impact on the Łódź Ghetto’s social relations and territoriality.

Liu began by situating the talk within her broader research on the digital visualization of Holocaust ghettos and how people interacted with built space in the ghettos. As she listened to survivor testimonies about daily life during the Holocaust, she was struck by accounts describing the risks people took and the spaces they had to navigate in order to obtain food. She shared one such story in which a survivor’s mother baked a makeshift cake for a guard so that she could sneak out to purchase items on the black market while he was distracted. Recognizing how central hunger was to these acts of risk-taking, Liu identified the need for further study on hunger and its impacts on survivors’ spatial experiences.

Before proceeding, Liu outlined how she would be defining the concepts of hunger, space, and place. Although she is not studying famine conditions per se, she noted that she would use terms such as hunger, food deprivation, and starvation interchangeably throughout the talk to describe the broader conditions shaping life in the ghetto. To clarify her approach to space, she referenced geographer Yi Fu Tuan’s distinction between space and place to explain how locality functions differently depending on social context. Liu briefly addressed how the Łódź Ghetto could operate as either space and/or a place depending on one’s relation to it.

The Łódź Ghetto has been considered one of the most isolated Holocaust ghettos, with almost no communication occurring between the people of the ghetto and the residents of Łódź. However, the two communities encountered each other regularly. It would have been nearly impossible for the residents of Łódź to deny the ghetto’s presence; tram lines carrying Poles and Germans ran along two major roads that cut directly through the ghetto. People in the ghetto were required to cross those thoroughfares by utilizing wooden bridges that were raised roughly 25 feet above street level. The bridges had a significant impact on the residents’ daily lives. Beyond physically reinforcing the separation of the ghetto from its surroundings, use and perception of the bridges shifted as hunger intensified. Liu showed a map of the ghetto’s plan and a photograph of a footbridge before sharing a quote from Frank-Harry H. Schiller, who described the mounting difficulty of climbing the bridges as he grew weaker from hunger.

The social stratification within the Łódź Ghetto also structured these spatial encounters. One’s status determined privilege and access to scarce goods. Liu invoked Robert Sack’s conception of territoriality as a means of making power visible and enforceable to discuss the role of the Jewish Order Service. The Jewish Order Service was responsible for managing the borders of the ghetto and justified the quarantine of Jews as a public health measure intended to protect the general population from disease. Yet the forced isolation of the ghetto’s residents only contributed to the problem. As food, heat, and other essential resources dwindled, epidemics grew more frequent and severe.

Other social structures – namely the Jewish Council and the German ghetto administration – also significantly impacted who had access to food. The Council was responsible for managing the ghetto and coordinating food distribution with the German ghetto administration. Under the Council, the privilege of food access depended on one’s place within the hierarchy. Further complicating access were the German ghetto administration’s request refusals, late deliveries, and inadequate shipments. Access to food became drastically more dire in September 1942 when the German ghetto administration gained increased control and initiated a mass deportation of children, the elderly, and the ill. The ghetto was transformed into a forced labor camp, and access to food was largely restricted to top workers.

Liu then shifted to a discussion of her methodology and her approach to reading and listening for space and hunger in her sources. She highlighted the influence of carceral geography, a subfield that has prompted her to consider the importance of time in thinking about the intersection of space and hunger. In particular, she noted the duration of train journeys to and from the ghetto, time spent in queues waiting for food and rations, daily schedules that revolved around food distribution, and the lengths of time that families attempted to stretch scarce resources.

Liu also reflected on the work of Leonard Baer and Bodil Ravneberg, whose studies on Norwegian and English prisons have encouraged her to rethink the notion of the ghetto as a “total institution.” She argued that complete isolation or confinement is impossible even in settings marked by extreme confinement such as prisons and Holocaust ghettos. In fact, so-called total institutions could not exist without external social conditions structuring life on the inside. Acknowledging this interdependence, Liu considered what it means to study the Łódź Ghetto not as an isolated entity but as a space embedded within the broader context of German-occupied Poland, shaped both by internal hierarchies and external structures of power.

The talk concluded with Liu acknowledging some areas of her research that require further exploration, including labor and the spaces of labor, as well as historical images that depict the activities addressed in her study. She closed by reiterating the broader goals of her work and her hope of contributing to scholarship about the impact of hunger on social ties, communal relations, and the spaces in which these have emerged.

The audience engaged in a lively Q&A concerning Liu’s methodology and raised questions about hunger as an analytical category, archival biases in representations of space and geography, and the role of labor in the production and acquisition of food. The Q&A ended with Liu commenting on the challenges of researching the understudied topic of space in a historical context as extensively documented as the Holocaust.