Life and Death in the Ghettoes

The largest of the ghettoes was that in Warsaw.

Before the Nazis' arrival, Jews made up approximately a third of Warsaw's 1 million inhabitants. Following the Nazi occupation, Jews were transferred in from other areas, increasing their numbers from 330,000 to 450,000. But the Nazis crammed this huge number into a walled area that represented only 2.3 percent of the city. The poorest district was set aside for the Jews, and Jewish residents from all the other parts of the city were moved there forcibly. Before they were put inside, all their money and valuables were taken from them.

Life in the ghetto went on under terrible conditions. An average of seven families were crammed into one room. Very little food was given, and everyone lived on the edge of starvation. The buildings were crawling with rodents and insects. Every day, those living in the ghetto could be subjected to slaps, mockery and abuse from the Nazis, who made elderly Jews so weakened that they could barely walk wash the streets with soap and water and laughed at their suffering. People living in the ghettoes were beaten at random, and the Nazis would merrily yank the beards and ringlets of the elderly, which they let grow as a religious obligation. An average of 100 people a day died from hunger, sickness or maltreatment. The photographs of wretched children in the Warsaw ghetto clearly reveal the suffering of these innocents.

Jews who took part in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising were all put to death en masse. These Jews were murdered shortly after leaving the ghetto. Jews rounded up in the camps were stripped of everything they possessed, including their money .

The memories of one Jew who lived in the Warsaw ghetto reveal the true situation in the city:

The oppression began as soon as the Germans entered the city, with the killing of 34 innocent Jews. The German SS were just looking for excuses to kill Jews. The SS asked a gentile where the Jews were living. He indicated Itzhak Goldfliess' house. The SS entered my friend's house and killed his parents, wife and two children. On the first Sabbath of the occupation, the Germans rounded up all the Jews and ordered them to dig a long, wide ditch in the city centre. They were then told to go home, put their Sabbath clothes on and come back. To the great surprise of everyone, the Jews were then made to line up in that filthy trench. They were made to spend a whole day in it, which was full of sewage. The Germans beat them with sticks, and sometimes allowed the Ukrainians to attack them with sticks and pieces of wood. Whenever anyone tried to get out of the ditch, they would be beaten by German SS officers or Ukrainian civilians and made to get back in.108

Hundreds of thousands of innocent Jews were slaughtered in the Warsaw Ghetto, a place of starvation and poverty.

In 1942, some 300,000 people from the ghetto died, some from hunger and disease, others in the concentration camps where they were sent. In April 1943, some of the 60,000 or so Jews remaining in the ghetto began a doomed uprising. Even though they had almost no weapons, they fought the Nazis for exactly three weeks. In the end, the Nazis regained control and killed all the Jews they could find. Of the original 500,000 in the ghetto, only a handful of Jews remained alive.

In other ghettos set up by the Nazis, hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed after suffering fear, terrible starvation, and torture.

In 1943, the last Jews remaining in the Warsaw Ghetto initiated an uprising against Nazi oppression, which the Nazis suppressed with terrible bloodshed.