Nazi Ghettos

Soon after the 1939 German invasion of Poland, the Nazis began to force Jews to live in designate areas, or ghettos.

Hundreds of ghettos were established. In most cases they functioned only as a temporary concentration of the local Jewish population before moving them to the major urban ghettos or directly to killing centers (designed areas in the woods or death camps). The major ghettos were those in Warsaw (500.000 people), Lodz, Krakow, Lvov, Bialystok, Lakhva in Poland; Kaunas and Vilnius in Lithuania; Budapest and Cluj in Hungary; Theresienstadt in Czechia.

Living conditions

Initially the ghettos were given some appearance of self-government under a Jewish Council and a Jewish police.

The conditions in the ghettos were generally brutal. The Jews were not allowed out of the ghetto, so they had to rely on smuggling and the starvation rations supplied by the Nazis: in Warsaw this was 253 calories (1,060 kJ) per Jew, compared to 669 calories (2,800 kJ) per Pole and 2,613 calories (10,940 kJ) per German. With the crowded living conditions, starvation diets, and insufficient sanitation (coupled with lack of medical supplies), epidemics of infectious disease became a major feature of ghetto life. In the Łódź Ghetto some 43,800 people died of 'natural' causes, 76,000 in the Warsaw Ghetto before July 1942. The children and the elderly were the ones who suffered mostly from the brutal living conditions in the ghetto.

The killing

Starting from 1942, the Nazis began the liquidation of the ghetto, first through mass shootings in the East, then with the establishment of death camps. Chelmno (Lodz), Treblinka (Warsaw and Bialystok), Sobibor, Belzec (Lvov), Majdanek, Auschwitz. The children and the elderly were the first to be eliminated.