Life in the Ghettos

There has been many stories on how cruel the victims of the Holocaust were treated, especially in the concentration camps. The Auschwitz concentration camps, out of many other camps is where this all occurred.The victims were abused and put through forced labor, it was physically and mentally hard for them to live in the camps knowing in the matter of days they will die. The prisoners in the camps were forced to work, the sick and disabled prisoners were killed as they were seen as “useless” since they were not capable of working. The labor consisted of digging ditches, leveling the ground, laying roads, and constructing new blocks and buildings for a tough 11-14 hours a day. During the tiring and inevitable hours of working, the prisoners had small rations of food.The meals were

What happened to the Jews during the Holocaust was unthinkable; millions of people were persecuted. Jews were asked to vacate their homes and were shifted to specific areas in cities known as ghettos. In these ghettos, several families had to live under one roof in cramped and unhealthy manner. About 6 million Jews were sent to concentration camps. Jews were transported in freight trains to these camps under inhumane conditions, and many perished on the way. They were hardly given any food. They were also made to work long hours, some times 12 to 14 hours without a break. The Nazis did not spare women or children. According to estimates, the Nazis killed 1.2 millions Jewish children and thousands of gypsy and disabled

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.

When people think of the word ghetto today they think of an impoverished area of a city. The ghettos of World War II have a similar but nonetheless different definition. The ghettos of World War II were small parts of cities sectioned off to keep Jews in a confined area before eventual extermination. The Jews held there were more than just impoverished like today’s residents of ghettos. They were starved, beaten, and overworked. Ghettos were seen as just a step to Hitler’s final solution, or the extermination of Jews from Nazi occupied territory. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest ghetto in Nazi occupied Europe. It held 400,000 Jews in 1.3 square miles. From the Warsaw Ghetto only 11,500 Jews survived. The Warsaw Ghetto was a place that

Jews in the Ghetto were punished for rule breaking. They would be deprived of food, taken to do hard labor, or beaten. When Jews were taken from their homes, they were forced out of their professions. ("Warsaw Ghetto")

“Jewish civilians offered armed resistance in over 100 ghettos in occupied Poland and the “Soviet Union”(Jewish resistance). The holocaust lasted from about 1939-1945. In that time frame, jews were forced to wear stars that labeled them as jews, lived in ghettos, and did labor. Many tried to escape this way of living but ended up being killed. During the Holocaust, Jews used armed, spiritual and unarmed forms of resistance in order to retain their humanity.

Very few, if any, don't recall the events of the tragic killing of millions of Jews. The story and historically event we call the Holocaust. What was it like in the places the resided and what were their conditions? Were ghettos anything like how the are today?

Two major ghettos, Warsaw and Lodz were the biggest and msot dirty and packed ghettos. Warsaw held at least 400,000 jews children and adults. Lodz carried about 160,000 jews. Both ghettos were crowded many jews slept in the streets and had nothing of their own possesions, they survived in very bad living conditions. Jews were not allowed to leave these "cities", this was an order by hitler so these cities had gates up and guards to ensure they didn't leave. They had to buy food and were only allowed a certain amount of food and the only things they could get is bread and potatoes. The apartments were overcrowded and the plumbing was broke so waste and garbage ended up in the street.

They are very over populated and there is barley any room for any person that would have to live there. A lot of the time the people were forced to give up expensive items that were in their home. The houses were also surrounded around the perimeter by sharp barbed wire. And were also forced to stay within their own houses with strangers for days on in at points. Living in the ghettos would be a very demoralizing thing, somehow though the people in the village still kept their hopes up.

2). The ghettos were in awful condition, they were located in run down sections of town, surrounded by walls, and the buildings were in bad shape, often about to collapse (Rogasky 38). Warsaw was a ghetto located in Poland (Altman 21) it was the largest ghetto with 500,000 Jews living on 840 acres (Warsaw par. 2). Warsaw was surrounded with 10 foot high wall made of bricks (Altman 21) that was 11 miles long (Warsaw par. 2). Warsaw had no housing and those who did were often crowded in a room and many died from starvation and disease. This quote explains what a survivor thought about living in the ghettos. “Beautiful, sunny day. When the sun shines, my mood is lighter. How sad life is. When we look at the fence separating us from the rest of the world, our souls, like birds in a cage, yearn to be free. Longing breaks my heart, visions of the past come to me. Will I ever live in better times?” (Anonymous par.

In the Warsaw Ghettos surviving was nearly impossible. The Jews lived in very confined spaces that were around 1.3 square miles and seven to eight people resided in each incredibly compact room. 146,000 people were forced into one square kilometre. Due to the lack of food and diseases, from 1940 to the middle of 1942, 83,000 Jews passed away. In April 1941, the mortality rate reached 6,000 deaths per month. The illnesses spread mostly because of the small spaces and lack of sanitation. Typhus, spread through the dirty water and food; it was a very common cause for death in the Warsaw ghetto. The dead naked bodies were thrown out similarly to garbage, with no respect. In the winter, none of the Jews had any source of warmth, as the Germans

The cramped conditions, meager food rations and general lack of cleanliness caused rampant disease throughout the ghettos. Persistent hunger, intense labor, and constant fear of deportation caused an inflated number of heart and circulatory system diseases among the ghetto Jews. The ghettos lacked adequate amounts of medicine to treat the thousands of Jews suffering from typhus, dysentery, tuberculosis, diphtheria, scarlet fever, trachoma, meningitis, and other diseases, and many of them perished as a result. In the Lodz ghetto alone, 7,269 people died from tuberculosis (Dobroszycki). In the Warsaw ghetto, it was estimated that 100,000 Jews contracted typhus in the first 18 months of the ghetto's existence.

In the ghettos, there were many things happening that shouldn't have happened to any human. Jews that were still living, looked almost dead, there was only little skin covering their bones. Nazis gave no mercy to the Jews and punished Jews for the food they might’ve had that was not given by them. They were put to work and fed minute portions of food, not enough to keep them healthy. The Jews that were taken to the ghetto had it rough, they had to hide to survive and had to find someone willing to give them food in exchange for what they had.

Massey and Denton argue that following the Kerner Commission report and the civil rights movement, the US passed the fair housing act of 1968, then largely abandoned policymaking on segregation: “by the end of the 1970s, residential segregation became the forgotten factor in American race relations.” Through the 1970s and 1980s, four causes for the persistence of poverty in urban ghettos were argued: culture, racism, economics, and welfare. All of these causes were debated extensively, but none of them considered segregation as a root cause of the problem of urban poverty. Massey and Denton reject the “culture of poverty” argument in favor of a “culture of segregation” - which enables all forms of racial oppression. “Until the black ghetto

Throughout American History the influence of race has been pervasive. In the post WWI period, people of color experienced immense discrimination and racism in their consumption. Due to the systematic racism, divergent economies arose in the ghetto and the suburbs. The term ghetto does not only represent the inner city, but rather intentional state policy that subjected blacks to inequalities of consumption, labor and the economy. Often, people of color were of lower socioeconomic class, but they paid more for the goods and services they consumed. Despite the lower income in black households, they had to pay two hundred and fifty-five dollars for an item that costs one-hundred and fifty-nine dollars in the suburbs. The Federal Trade Commission