Warsaw Ghetto Research Paper

His entire family was dead. The nazis had “liquidate” the warsaw ghetto in 1943, first burning down buildings, then taking the surviving 49,000 men, women, and children by train to death and forced labor camps. ( 10)

​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

This was the Nazi’s policy to murder Jews in Europe. The Nazis believed that the Aryan German race were superior to Jews, which were a threat to German community. There were however other victims including the Roma(Gypsies), disabled, Slavic, Jehovah’s witnesses, war prisoners, etc. Ghettos were created to segregate the Jews from the rest of the world. There were three different types of ghettos; closed, open and destruction. Most ghettos were temporary, but some lasted for several years. Inside the ghetto people were forced to wear badges to be easily identified. Many died inside the ghetto from either disease, or starvation. The ghettos also were used to temporarily hold Jews, and they would later be deported to either a concentration camp or a killing center (ushmm.org).

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.

The Warsaw Ghetto By the middle of 1942, Jews in the ghettos realized that all their former residents were being murdered, not sent to labor camps. In the Warsaw Ghetto

70 years ago (Ochayon) a new Ghetto was established. The Germans built Ghetto’s to hold Jews before they could take them out to a camp. They could be taken to a Death camp, Work camp, or a concentration camp. All the camps had a different reasons for different Jews. The Ghetto was located in Warsaw, Poland and became the largest Ghetto in Europe. It was opened in September, 1939 (“Ghetto”). The German soldiers created it in Warsaw for a certain reason. Usually people think that the Germans build Ghetto’s to take up space in a town. Because Warsaw had the largest Jewish population in Europe pre World War II (Ochayon), they held Jews throughout Poland (“Ghetto”).

The ghettos were used as a means to hold the Jews captive, and isolate what Heydrich had termed the “plague” until they could find a what to eradicate the problem. This made it appear that the Nazi’s were helping the Jews, and was a way to cover up the “final solution.”

Holocaust ghettos; these are the over looked places where the Jews, in Nazi controlled lands, awaited their future.

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.

Jews were soon put into hard labor. In 1940, the Germans closed off part of Warsaw with a wall topped with barbed wire. Jews were forced to live inside these walls. On average, the were 7 Jews living in each room. Jewish organizations

During the holocaust, Jews would first removed from their homes and were sent to ghettos. Some ghettos had areas with diseases in the air. They were purposely sent there. People were catching other people’s diseases and illnesses. In the ghettos, Jews were put in small apartment rooms with a maximum of 2-3 families in each room. People were overcrowded in these rooms and only had a handful of possessions with them. All these people caused food storage. Jews were fed little amount of foods. People would die of starvation and dehydration.

    The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was organized by Jews in an underground group called the ZOB. The Jews were being held in the ghetto, and the Nazis began deportations to an extermination camp. The ZOB collectively organized an attack in order to stop the deportations. Then, “The resistance sprang into action. Jewish fighters could strike [the Nazis] quickly, then escape on rooftops,” (Berenbaum 4). Jews crowded the Nazis, using whatever weapons they could find to strike them. It had seemed like their efforts had been successful, because, “the German deportations effort ended within a few days… from then on the [ZOB] dominated the ghetto,” (Berenbaum 4). The Jews were in charge of their ghetto, and they felt freed. Unfortunately, a few days later the deportations to the extermination camps resumed, and the Jews could no longer fight.

However, there was no real uniformity to these ghettos. The ghettos usually varied with respect to the size of the city in which they were located. The ghettos in small towns were generally not sealed off, which was often a temporary measure used until the Jewish occupants could be sent to a bigger ghetto. Larger cities had closed ghettos, with brick or stone walls, wooden fences, and barbed wire defining the boundaries. In the larger ghettos, guards were strategically placed at gateways and other boundary openings for policing the area. In these larger ghettos, Jews were not allowed to leave the Jewish residential districts (Holocaust),under penalty of severe punishment, often including death. As mentioned earlier, all of the ghettos had the most appalling, inhuman living conditions. The smallest ghetto housed about 3,000 Jews. Warsaw, probably the largest ghetto, held close to 400,000 people. Lodz, the second largest, held about 160,000 (Phillips 304-12). Other areas (mainly Poland) with large Jewish ghettos included Bialystok, Czestochowa, Kielce, Krakow, Lublin, Lvov, Radom, and Vilna(a history 170). Many of the ghetto dwellers were from the local area; others were from neighboring villages. In October 1941, general deportations began from Germany to major ghettos in Poland and further east. Also, Jews from Austria and the

Throughout the summer of 1942, nearly 300,000 Jews were deported from the Warsaw ghetto to the Treblinka death camp. During this summer, a resistance organization known as the Z.O.B. was formed. It was headed by the 23 year old Mordecai Anielewicz, and was comprised primarily of young men. The deportations halted in September, and the Z.O.B. began collecting whatever weapons they could manage to smuggle into the

Theresienstadt became a ghetto where most of the well-known Jews of Europe would reside happily for the remainder of the war. Theresiensadt, now a beautiful town filled with the most prosperous Jews of Europe became the set for a well-planned propaganda film that the Nazi’s used to deny the final solution. The ghetto had become a scene for a sick play for the worlds viewing.