Life During The Holocaust: Life In The Ghetto

In the year 1941, Lithuania was invaded and many Jewish families fled from Lithuania. Margarets family didn't leave because her brother Alik was at a children's holiday camp. Margaret was never sent to a camp, she lived in the ghetto. Margaret's description of the ghetto years as “dreadful”. The people were forced to do hard labour and were deprived of their food.

The feeding of the prisoners was a major issue in the concentration camps during the holocaust. The jewish prisoners were fed three times a day in the concentration camps, those three times were morning, noon, and evening. (living conditions, labor and executions) It wasn’t the amount of food given a day that was an issue the nutritional value that the Nazis had for the concentration camps. (living conditions, labor and executions) When the Nazis would feed the prisoners they gave the less physically demanding workers one thousand three hundred calories per day and gave the ones who engaged in hard labor one thousand seven hundred calories per day. (living conditions, labor and executions) This was an issue because after several weeks on such starvation in the camps, most prisoners began to experience what is called organic deterioration that led to the well known “Muzulman” state. (living conditions, labor and executions) This was when the prisoners ended being so tiny, extreme physical exhaustion, and soon ended up in death. (living conditions, labor and executions) In march 31, 1942 the WVHA established a minimum working day of 11 hour in all concentration camps. Labor in some concentration camps was the way of destroying prisoners, they worked them until they died. (living conditions, labor and executions) The prisoners usually labored in various sectors of

Children were orphaned everyday, and many of the older orphaned children were forced to take care of the younger orphaned. In order for the children to survive, they needed to make themselves useful. Small children would crawl through narrow openings and smuggle food into the ghettos for their friends and families. They did this with great risk, because if they were caught they would be punished severely. Jerry Koenig continues, “The only way you could survive was by supplementing your diet with the things bought through the black market. But you can imagine that if the sellers were risking their lives to obtain these things, then the price is going to be extremely high” (Remembering: Voices of the Holocaust).

and the ghetto was to be destroyed. They did not know where they were going ,

In the book, Night, the two reasons why Jewish people would not accept their fate because they were surrounded by loved ones and their community. Self-consciously denying they're fate, in the ghetto everything was the same as before, children playing, running, neighbors having joy, and fun.

​According to dicitonaity.com, a ghetto is “a section of a city, especially a thickly populated slum area, inhabited predominantly by members of an ethnic or other minority group, often as a result of social or economic restrictions, pressures, or hardships” (“Ghetto”). The five major ghettos were established in Warsaw, Lodz, Krakow, Lublin, and Lvov (“Holocaust Timeline: The Ghettos”). The Nazi Party used three different types of ghettos to isolate Jews from society. The three types were closed, open, and reconstruction ghettos (“Types of Ghettos”). Closed ghettos were the most common and often had high mortality rates as they were closed off with stone or brick walls, wooden fences, and barbed wire. The largest ghetto, Warsaw, was a closed ghetto and had over 400,000 people in an area of 1.3 squared miles (“Holocaust Timeline: The Ghettos”). Open ghettos had no physical barriers, but restrictions on entering and were often only in small towns used for temporary housing before relocating to a larger, often closed, ghetto. The majority of open ghettos were located in small towns, and in the countries of Poland, the occupied Soviet Union, and Transnistria. Lastly, deconstruction ghettos were tightly sealed off and only

According to Merriam-Webster a ghetto is, “ a part of a city in which members of a particular group or race live usually in poor conditions (ghetto).” This paper will focus, however, on what daily life was like in the ghettos, what Jews did or didn’t do to prevent their fate, and how Holocaust survivors are doing now. I chose this topic because when Elie and his family were living in the ghetto in the beginning of Night, it seemed as though they had plenty of opportunities to escape that they didn’t take. It also seemed much closer to pleasant than I imagined, and I was curious to see if that was completely true.

During the Holocaust, the living conditions for the Jewish population were horrifying and unthought of. The lack of sanitary facilities meant they had to remove dirt and pests from clothing by waiting in a line that took up most of the day. The barracks that the prisoners slept in was in terrible conditions and the rooms were damp with leaky roofs (“Auschwitz…”). The health and how the jewish lived was no concern of the Nazi soldiers.

Tenement life was tough in New York City at the turn of the nineteenth century, as portrayed in the historical novel, City of Orphans. This portrayal depicted an immigrant family that was living hand to mouth in a tenement. This depiction is very accurate to the harsh reality that many families had to come to face. It was tough from the conditions, lifestyles, and space. Maks ' family was barely living off their earnings and was susceptible to disease and fraud. The immigrants were easy targets for poverty and sickness, and all too often fell through cracks in the floor. Their lives, as bad as they were, were not as bad as the ones they led in the countries they fled from to escape prosecution and to seek a better life.

Living conditions were horrible. People lived in buildings called tenements, that up to ten people could live in. There was no indoor plumbing or heat, and families had to share a bathroom.

The ghettos are the first form of Alienation we see in the novel. The ghettos were places that the jews were forced to live in. Elie’s home

¨ The Ghetto was not guarded . One could enter and leave as one pleased. Maria our former maid, came

85 years ago, over a 12 year period, nearly six million Jews were killed in a genocide called The Holocaust. The Holocaust was led by the Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler was their leader. The mass murders took place at concentration camps throughout Europe. The majority of concentration camps resided in Poland and Germany. Many people believe there were only a few concentration camps. “However, researchers found that the Nazis had actually established 20,000 camps between 1933 and 1945” (“How Many Camps,” n.d.). In this paper I will be discussing the largest concentration camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Housing was deemed a necessity as people were living in poor conditions, families were overcrowded and there was families living in tenements that shared toilet amenities. Also there were homeless people living in the streets.

The lowborn workers toiled away for hours in physically exhausting jobs only to afford apartments that were sterile and cold. “There were some nine cots in the place . . . he was sick of the bareness and privation connected with his venture” (Dreiser, 304). The pay affected the men and woman’s own mode of life. They were forced to share living spaces with other families and more often than naught, had to bunk with complete strangers. The very comforts associated with a home, such as wood and furniture, were often too large of an expense. Even with Governmental/ Charity handouts the citizens had no money in which they could afford better living conditions. The rooms they were given to stay in were cold and sterile, and they were not guaranteed a place to stay every night.