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The Ghettos

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The Ghettos

"I remember very distinctly and with great pain. We had some beautiful china. We had a very lovely home. Was't rich but it was beautiful. The Germans would come in and simply at a whim of a wisp, remove the most beautiful china and just throw it against a wall to break it, for fun, and started to taunt and tease. And you didn't have to be old or young to recognize that this was the devil in the flesh."

~Nina Kaleska (born 1929 in Grodno, Poland)

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Why were Jews sent to Ghettos?

"The ghettos played an instrumental role in their 'Final Solution' because by enclosing the Jews within small, confined locations, they were able to control and monitor the Jews and subsequently deport them to the concentration camps in an organized methodical way" (Sterling, xxix).

The Ghettos were critical to the Hitler's Final Solution

- While Jews were in the Ghettos, Nazis could plunder Jewish homes

- By isolating the Jews and cutting them off from their gentile countrymen the Nazi's could spread propaganda and the Jews had no way of protesting, which meant that public sympathy for the Jews decreased severely (many did not protest to the ghettoizatoin of the Jews because it helped them socioeconomically).

- The Ghettos were essentially a holding place, where Jews were placed until concentration camps were fully operational.

A Map of All the Ghettos Located in Nazi Occupied Europe

The establishment of the ghettos

Jews were forced to leave their homes and move into the poorest parts of town. They could only take a few of their belongings.

"So we each got a little bag and put just the bare minimum in there."

~Madeline Deutsch (born 1930 in Berehovo, Czechoslovakia)

Thousands of people were forced to live in the ghettos. They were cramped; usually 10-15 people lived in a space made for two. Each community of Jews was forced to elect a council, the Judenrat.

"But at first it was open (the ghetto), so you could get in and out at certain hours. For example...a Jew could not be in the street after seven o'clock. But all the other times you could get out and mingle, be outside. One day there was an announcement: the ghetto is closed. And there were gates, there were walls built...and you couldn't get out...."

~Emanuel Tanay (born 1929 in Miechow, Poland)

After being moved to the ghettos, barbed wire and stone fences were erected trapping the Jews inside the ghettos - isolating them from the outside world and imprisoning them in their own town. Things quickly went from bad to worse.

Conditions within the ghettos were very harsh. There was little food (the inhabitants of Warsaw ate around 1,125 calories a day), there was limited medicine, poor sanitation, and the winters were freezing cold.

"Temperatures of minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit were common for weeks... eating cold food, washing with cold water, and sleeping in unheated quarters took a toll on the population."

~William Mishell (resident of the Kovno Ghetto in Lithuania)

In Warsaw the population decreased by 1% every month (that is a rate of about 400 deaths per month). Between 1940 and 1942 over 83,000 Jews had died of starvation and disease in the Warsaw Ghetto.

On March 5, 1942 the Nazis issued the Ban on Births, which prohibited the birth of any child which was not delivered by August 15, 1942. All women whose children were due at a later date were expected to have abortions. The penalty for refusing to have an abortion was death.

"A baby in the ghetto was a kiss of death...Our neighbor, Ania, got pregnant and refused to have an abortion...Despite our pleas and threats, Ania was scared to have an abortion. There were no doctors in the ghetto. Soon she was so heavy that she could not pass through the trap door into the bunker. In case of an action, we all would get killed.

It was decided that Ania would slowly descend into the bunker and stay there until she gave birth. So poor Ania stayed alone in the dark, damp hole...the baby who was born miraculously survived and lives in Israel now."

~ Alexander Kimel (Sterling, 38)

"Jews were confined in them (the ghettos) during a pivotal time in their lives - the intermediate period between normal life and the agony of the concentration camps, between hope and despair, between life and death" (Sterling, xxix).

Finally on July 22, 1942 the Final Solution's ultimate dream was realized... mass deportations began taking Warsaw Jews to Treblinka Killing Center. Between July and September of 1942 over 625,000 Jews had been deported to Treblinka...35,000 had been killed in the streets of Warsaw.