Have you ever been in a room so crowded you thought you might implode? Or been so sick you questioned if you were still alive? How about so hungry you felt as though you would shrivel up and simply cease to exist? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then you may almost be able to imagine what life was like in the Jewish ghettos. There were ghettos before the Holocaust, the first being in Venice in the 16th century, there are ghettos today, and there will be ghettos in the future, but the Jewish ghettos of the Holocaust are by far the most prominent.
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.
When I started this project I was hoping to find personal survivor stories about what the conditions of the ghettos, how people transitioned into life in them, and what they did to try and keep life as normal as it could be. I was expecting a bounty of examples of indifference because in Night the Jews
The article, “Teens Who Fought Hitler,” by Lauren Tarshis describes many hardships Ben,a teenage Jew who with his family, faced, just like thousands of other Jews who were forced to move into the Warsaw Ghetto by the Nazis. The Jews were terribly treated everywhere in the ghetto. Each person was allotted only one tenth of food a day that they should be eating. Many diseases including typhus spread. Before the Warsaw Ghetto, no Jew could be at libraries or public parks and were not allowed out of their house after five o'clock.
Conditions in the ghettos were quite bad with lots of overcrowding. Soon these people will be taken on a train to a place that is gruesome and horrible. Elie Wiesel's life has changed drastically from before to after the Holocaust. To
Furthermore, the ghettos were set up to segregate Jews from the overall population. An immense majority of Jews in the ghettos had died from diseases, starvation or were killed. Initially, the last major ghetto was destroyed during the summer of 1994. “I speak of my first night over there. The discovery of the reality inside the barbed wire. The warnings of a “veteran” inmate, counseling my father and myself to lie about our ages: my father was to make himself younger, and I older. The selection. The march toward the chimneys looming in the distance under the indifferent sky. The infants thrown into fiery ditches…”(Night, 67) wrote Elie. Particularly, life wasn’t always the easiest for Elie and his father along with the ones with them in the concentration camps at this time. In particular, the term “Holocaust” originally came from the Greek word "holokauston" which means to "sacrifice by fire," refering to the Nazi's persecution plan to slaughter the Jewish people. Although, many refer to all Nazi camps as a “concentration camp”, there were numerous different kinds of camps, including concentration camps, extermination camps, labor camps, prisoner-of-war camps, and transit camps. Additionally, within the year 1940, the Nazi’s invaded Denmark, Poland, France, Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg within the same year. The following year the
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.
The holocaust was a very horrific event that took place in the early 1930s that most people still remember to this day. Yet most people don’t know about the Ghettos and what happened behind there gated homes. The ghettos were first made in October of 1940 so germans established the ghettos just to keep jews in a place where they can be watched constantly. Diseases were one of the main reasons that made the Ghettos such a dreadful place to live. Most of the diseases in the ghettos were causes of poor living conditions.
One day, word went around the neighborhoods that they would be transported. People started to worry. No one knew where they were going. Rumors spread about going to Hungary to work in the “brick factories” there. People began to pack all they could. When the day came for people to start leaving people had to leave their belonging behind that they couldn’t carry. The streets were full of the things that had to be left behind. They were forced to leave pieces of themselves behind. Memories, Valuables, and everything else that help make them human. Homes were abandoned, left open like an old deserted warehouse. The ghettos started to resemble graveyards. Full of the ghost of who they once were. Taking away the objects that were most important to them helped to dehumanize them by taking away the things that represented their lives as humans.
The provision of food in the ghettos was inadequate, causing many people to starve or become harshly ill. Source One discusses experiences from life in the Lodz ghetto. It describes the way of how ‘it is hard to get bread; Jews are driven away from all the “queues”.’ This quote reveals that the Jews were treated harshly and prevented from receiving food. The level of sanitation and hygiene in the ghettos was appalling. Many Jewish men, women and children died from starvation and diseases such as typhus and typhoid. These diseases were a result of the Final Solution procedure and majorly impacted the lives, not only of the ones who died from them, but their families too. Jewish people were also beaten and forced to work while living in the ghettos. Source One talks about how ‘they were seized, hauled off to labour, and beaten to a pulp.’ This quote shows that the Jewish men, women and children were forced to do whatever the German officers wanted of them and if they disobeyed, they were severely punished. Women in the ghettos were often abused sexually. The German men would rape the Jewish women, and then generally kill them with the unborn child inside. This shows that Jewish men, women and children had their physical wellbeing impacted during the Final
The Jewish people in the Holocaust were treated similar to animals. The Nazi party believed in forcing them to work and live in terrible conditions. This was to ‘rid the world of them’. The book Night displays the awful conditions forced upon them. “The ghetto was ruled by neither German nor Jew; it was ruled by delusion” (Weisel 11). These ghettos were a way to keep in the Jews, to
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.
While in many places ghettoization only lasted a brief period of time, ghettos had a profound impact as they isolated Jews from society, served as a crucial role in Hitler’s Final Solution, and left thousands living in inhumane conditions.
Joshua Sobol’s Ghetto is the first part of his Vilna Trilogy, A collection of stories centered around the Vilna Ghetto during the Holocaust, Ghetto premiered in 1984 at Haifa Municipal Theatre in Israel. Since then it has been seen around the world in more than sixty productions and been awarded numerous accolades from countries around the world and even closer to home in Chicago. It won the Jefferson Award for best production in 2000. Since it’s premiere, audiences have been disturbed and moved by the play’s extremely painful portrait of Jews attempting to survive the Nazis at any cost and attempting to also keep their humanity alive.
Holocaust ghettos; these are the over looked places where the Jews, in Nazi controlled lands, awaited their future.
Life in the ghetto was subjected to death. Many took their own lives, and others tried to escape.
Resources were lacking in all respects during the Holocaust. Scarcity of necessities made life in the ghettos tortuous, at best mildly tolerable. The ghettos were broken down in many ways. The plumbing was horrific, there was garbage everywhere especially in the streets, as well as human defecation. These conditions, as well as tight quarters made the ghettos a breeding ground for numerous diseases. Once the diseases started spreading there was no good way to stop it because the immune systems of many were compromised, as a result of the almost nonexistent rations of food they were provided. To remedy this many of the small children would squeeze through the barriers of the ghetto and find food. However, they did this at great risk because if caught there would be severe consequences, if not execution. In addition, winters were even worse, on account of the fact that many
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