Jewish Ghettos Overview

The term "ghetto" originated from the name of the Jewish quarter in Venice, established in 1516, in which the Venetian authorities compelled the city's Jews to live. Various authorities, ranging from local municipal authorities to the Austrian Emperor Charles V, ordered the creation of other ghettos for Jews in Frankfurt, Rome, Prague, and other cities in the 16th and 17th centuries.

During World War II, ghettos were city districts (often enclosed) in which the Germans concentrated the municipal and sometimes regional Jewish population and forced them to live under miserable conditions. Ghettos isolated Jews by separating Jewish communities from the non-Jewish population and from other Jewish communities. The Germans established at least 1,000 ghettos in German-occupied and annexed Poland and the Soviet Union alone. German occupation authorities established the first ghetto in Poland in Piotrków Trybunalski in October 1939.

The Germans regarded the establishment of ghettos as a provisional measure to control and segregate Jews while the Nazi leadership in Berlin deliberated upon options to realize the goal of removing the Jewish population. In many places ghettoization lasted a relatively short time. Some ghettos existed for only a few days, others for months or years. With the implementation of the "Final Solution" (the plan to murder all European Jews) beginning in late 1941, the Germans systematically destroyed the ghettos. The Germans and their auxiliaries either shot ghetto residents in mass graves located nearby or deported them, usually by train, to killing centers where they were murdered. German SS and police authorities deported a small minority of Jews from ghettos to forced-labor camps and concentration camps.

There were three types of ghettos: closed ghettos, open ghettos, and destruction ghettos.

The largest ghetto in Poland was the Warsaw ghetto, where over 400,000 Jews were crowded into an area of 1.3 square miles. Other major ghettos were established in the cities of Lodz, Krakow, Bialystok, Lvov, Lublin, Vilna, Kovno, Czestochowa, and Minsk. Tens of thousands of western European Jews were also deported to ghettos in the east.

The Germans ordered Jews residing in ghettos to wear identifying badges or armbands and also required many Jews to perform forced labor for the German Reich. Daily life in the ghettos was administered by Nazi-appointed Jewish councils (Judenraete). A ghetto police force enforced the orders of the German authorities and the ordinances of the Jewish councils, including the facilitation of deportations to killing centers. Jewish police officials, like Jewish council members, served at the whim of the German authorities. The Germans did not hesitate to kill Jewish policemen who were perceived to have failed to carry out orders.

Jews responded to the ghetto restrictions with a variety of resistance efforts. Ghetto residents frequently engaged in so-called illegal activities, such as smuggling food, medicine, weapons or intelligence across the ghetto walls, often without the knowledge or approval of the Jewish councils. Some Jewish councils and some individual council members tolerated or encouraged the illicit trade because the goods were necessary to keep ghetto residents alive. Although the Germans generally demonstrated little concern in principle about religious worship, attendance at cultural events, or participation in youth movements inside the ghetto walls, they often perceived a “security threat” in any social gathering and would move ruthlessly to incarcerate or kill perceived ringleaders and participants. The Germans generally forbade any form of consistent schooling or education.

In some ghettos, members of Jewish resistance movements staged armed uprisings. The largest of these was the Warsaw ghetto uprising in spring 1943. There were also violent revolts in Vilna, Bialystok, Czestochowa, and several smaller ghettos. In August 1944, German SS and police completed the destruction of the last major ghetto, in Lodz.

In Hungary, ghettoization did not begin until the spring of 1944, after the Germans invaded and occupied the country. In less than three months, the Hungarian gendarmerie, in coordination with German deportation experts from the Reich Main Office for Security (Reichssicherheitshauptamt-RSHA), concentrated nearly 440,000 Jews from all over Hungary, except for the capital city, Budapest, in short-term “destruction ghettos” and deported them into German custody at the Hungarian border. The Germans deported most of the Hungarian Jews to the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center. In Budapest, Hungarian authorities required the Jews to confine themselves to marked houses (so-called Star of David houses). A few weeks after the leaders of the fascist Arrow Cross movement seized power in a German-sponsored coup on October 15, 1944, the Arrow Cross government formally established a ghetto in Budapest, in which about 63,000 Jews lived in a 0.1 square mile area. Approximately 25,000 Jews who carried certificates that they stood under the protection of a neutral power were confined in an "international ghetto" at another location in the city. In January 1945, Soviet forces liberated that part of Budapest in which the two ghettos were, respectively, located and liberated the nearly 90,000 Jewish residents.

During the Holocaust, ghettos were a central step in the Nazi process of control, dehumanization, and mass murder of the Jews.

Resources

Corni, Gustavo. Hitler's Ghettos: Voices from a Beleaguered Society 1939-1944. London: Arnold, 2002.

Kermish, Joseph, editor. To Live With Honor and Die with Honor!: Selected Documents from the Warsaw Ghetto Underground Archives "O.S." ("Oneg Shabbath"). Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1986.

Sterling, Eric J., editor. Life in the Ghettos during the Holocaust. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005.

Trunk, Isaiah. Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation. New York: Stein and Day, 1977.

Trunk, Isaiah. Lodz Ghetto: A History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.

Deportation To and From Warsaw Ghetto

DEPORTATIONS TO THE WARSAW GHETTO

Between January and March 1941, Jews from smaller communities to the west of Warsaw were deported to the Warsaw ghetto. Between April and July 1942, Jews from the nearby towns east of Warsaw, from Germany, and from German-occupied areas of western Poland were deported there. The Germans also deported several hundred Roma (Gypsies) to the Warsaw ghetto.

At its height, the total population of the Warsaw ghetto exceeded 400,000 people. Miserable conditions in the ghetto, deliberately exacerbated by German policies, worsened over time. In 1941, one year before mass deportations, over 43,000 people died, more than 10 percent of the entire ghetto population.

DEPORTATIONS FROM THE WARSAW GHETTO

Between July and September 1942, German SS and police units, supported by non-German auxiliaries, deported approximately 300,000 Jews from the Warsaw ghetto to the Treblinka II extermination camp. German SS and police personnel used violence to force Jews to march from their homes or places of work to the Umschlagplatz (concentration point), and forced them to board freight cars bound for Malkinia, on the Warsaw-Bialystok rail line. When the trains arrived in Malkinia, they were diverted along a special rail spur to Treblinka.

The Germans demanded that members of the Jewish council (Judenrat) assist in organizing the deportations. The head of the Jewish council in Warsaw, Adam Czerniakow, refused to cooperate. Although Czerniakow did not call for resistance to the Germans, he refused to pass on the deportation order and committed suicide on July 23, 1942, by swallowing a cyanide capsule.

Generally, the Germans and their auxiliaries rounded up Jews by cordoning off a city block and systematically forcing the residents out onto the street. They then forced the Jews to march to the Umschlagplatz under heavy guard. As soon as one block was cleared, German SS and police units and their auxiliaries would secure the next block and repeat the process. German SS and police personnel viciously beat and tortured Jews to make them move more quickly; they shot those who were unable or unwilling to move. To lure Jews out of hiding, the German authorities often resorted to announcements that the deportations were over and those who not been deported would receive food. Starving and unaware that they would be transported to their deaths, some Jews reported and they too were deported to Treblinka. Toward the end of the deportations, German forces and collaborators systematically searched the then empty apartment houses and workplaces to find Jews in hiding.

In September 1942, as many as 70,000 Jews remained in the ghetto. In January 1943, German SS and police units deported roughly 6,500 Jewish residents of the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka. During this three-day operation, 1,171 Jewish ghetto residents were shot and killed.

Between April 19 and May 16, 1943, German SS and police forces, supported by a battalion of specially trained auxiliary police guards from the Trawniki training camp, liquidated the Warsaw ghetto. When Jewish inhabitants resisted the initial deportation efforts (in what became known as the Warsaw ghetto uprising), the SS and police were caught by surprise and sustained dozens of casualties. The Germans then destroyed the ghetto block by block in order to break the resistance. More than 7,000 Jews, most of them resistance fighters or persons hidden inside the ghetto, were killed during the operation. Most of them were shot in combat with the SS and German police. The Germans deported about 7,000 more Jews to Treblinka, and about 42,000 to concentration camps and forced-labor camps in the Lublin District of the Generalgouvernement. Of this group, approximately 18,000 Jews were sent to the Majdanek camp, about 16,000 to the Poniatowa forced-labor camp, and some 6,000 to the Trawniki forced-labor camp. The remaining 2,000 were dispersed among smaller forced-labor camps such as Budzyn and Krasnik.

After the destruction of the ghetto, SS authorities established a small concentration camp on the site of the Warsaw ghetto.

Warsaw Life Victim Story
Gisha Galina Bursztyn
Born Pultusk, Poland

Gisha was raised by Yiddish-speaking, religious Jewish parents in the town of Pultusk in central Poland. She married in the late 1890s and moved with her husband, Shmuel David Bursztyn, to the city of Warsaw, where Shmuel owned and operated a bakery on Zamenhofa Street in the city's Jewish section. In 1920 the Bursztyns and their eight children moved to a two-bedroom apartment at 47 Mila Street.

1933-39: By 1939 six of Gisha's children were grown and had left home: her eldest daughters had married, and her four eldest sons had emigrated to America and Mexico. Only her youngest son and daughter still lived at home. Her husband had given up his business and was working for the Kagan Bakery. Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. After being attacked for four weeks, Warsaw fell to the Germans on September 28.

1940-42: When the Warsaw ghetto was set up by the Germans in November 1940, the Bursztyn's apartment ended up within the closed-off ghetto. Shmuel continued working at the Kagan Bakery, which was also located within the ghetto. In April 1942 he was killed by the Germans. Fearing the German roundups, Gisha decided to hide in one of the ghetto's makeshift bunkers. During a massive roundup that began on July 22, 1942, Gisha was rousted from her bunker, marched several blocks to an assembly point, and herded onto a boxcar.

Gisha was deported to the Treblinka extermination camp, where she was gassed in July 1942. She was 65

Source: http://www.ushmm.org

Smuggling began at the very moment that the Jewish area of residence was established; its inhabitants were forced to live on 180 grams of bread a day, 220 grams of sugar a month, 1 kg. of jam and 1 kg. of honey, etc. It was calculated that the officially supplied rations did not cover even 10 percent of the normal requirements. If one had wanted really to restrict oneself to the official rations then the entire population of the ghetto would have had to die of hunger in a very short time....

The German authorities did everything to seal off the ghetto hermetically and not to allow in a single gram of food. A wall was put up around the ghetto on all sides that did not leave a single millimeter of open space....

They fixed barbed wire and broken glass to the top of the wall. When that failed to help, the Judenrat was ordered to make the wall higher, at the expense of the Jews, of course....

Several kinds of guards were appointed for the walls and the passages through them; the categories of guards were constantly being changed and their numbers increased. The walls were guarded by the gendarmerie together with the Polish police; at the ghetto wall there were gendarmerie post, Polish police and Jewish police...The victims of the smuggling were mainly Jews, but they were not lacking either among the Aryans (Poles). Auerswald, too, employed sharply repressive measures to stop the smuggling. Several times smugglers were shot at the central lock-up on Gesiowka Street. Once there was a veritable slaughter (100 persons were shot near Warsaw). Among the Jewish victims of the smuggling there were tens of Jewish children between 5 and 6 years old, whom the German killers shot in great numbers near the passages and at the walls....

And despite that, without paying attention to the victims, the smuggling never stopped for a moment. When the street was still slippery with the blood that had been spilled, other smugglers already set out, as soon as the "candles" had signaled that the way was clear, to carry on with the work....
Source: Life in the Warsaw Ghetto, Emanuel Ringelblum quoted in Yad Vashem Documents on the Holocaust

The insurgency was launched against the Germans on January 18, 1943. The most significant portion of the rebellion took place from April 19 until May 16, 1943, and ended when the poorly armed and supplied resistance was crushed by the German troops under the direct command of Jürgen Stroop. It was the largest single revolt by the Jews during the Holocaust.