Bidspirit auction | ?ód? Ghetto Ration Card Issued

?ód? Ghetto Ration Card Issued to Chaskiel Bender, a Child Born 1936 - ?ód? Ghetto Ration Card Issued to Chaskiel Bender, a Child Born 1936 A printed ration registration card in yellow card stock, issued in the ?ód? Ghetto (Litzmannstadt) to Chaskiel Bender, listed with the ghetto address Franz 36/50 and a stamped date of December 1940. The card bears the printed heading ”Ernährungsamt der Ältesten der Juden” with a numbered grid of ration coupon fields along the lower portion, several of which are cancelled with a purple handstamp. Accompanying the card is a printed research page identifying the recipient as Chaskiel Bender, male, born 31 October 1936, occupation listed as ”KIND” (child), sourced from the reference work ”Lodz Names: A Record of the 240,000 Inhabitants of the Lodz Ghetto.” This card documents an individual child registered within the ?ód? Ghetto's rationing bureaucracy, one of the largest Jewish ghettos established under German occupation in Poland, where the Ältestenrat (Jewish Council) administered food distribution through such numbered coupon cards under conditions of severe and deliberate scarcity. The ghetto's ”Ernährungsamt” (food office) issued these cards to track and ration meager allotments to residents, with cancellation stamps marking each coupon as it was redeemed. The accompanying research page ties this particular card to a named child, Chaskiel Bender, born October 1936, drawing on the published ?ód? Ghetto population records that document the fates of its inhabitants. This card is a fragment of the administrative apparatus through which the Litzmannstadt (?ód?) Ghetto's Jewish Council, the Ältestenrat under Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, distributed severely restricted food allotments to the ghetto's confined population between 1940 and 1944. The Ernährungsamt issued and stamped such numbered coupon cards to control and record each individual's meagre rations amid conditions of engineered starvation imposed by the German occupation authorities. That this particular card was issued to a child born in 1936 places it within the documented civilian population later catalogued in postwar research works reconstructing the identities and fates of the ghetto's roughly 200,000 inhabitants, the great majority of whom perished in the Che?mno and Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camps or died of starvation and disease within the ghetto itself.