What is a Ghetto?
During the Holocaust, a ghetto was an isolated section of a city in which Jews were forced to live. The conditions the Nazis created in the ghettos were horrible and unhealthy - - usually cramped, dirty, and with little food. (Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh - Holocaust Center)
It helped the Nazis separate the Jews and non-Jews so that there would be no intermingling, and take away their rights as people and citizens. Brick walls and fences were some of the ways that the Nazis accomplished this separation.
During the Holocaust, a ghetto was an isolated section of a city in which Jews were forced to live. The conditions the Nazis created in the ghettos were horrible and unhealthy - - usually cramped, dirty, and with little food. (Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh - Holocaust Center)
It helped the Nazis separate the Jews and non-Jews so that there would be no intermingling, and take away their rights as people and citizens. Brick walls and fences were some of the ways that the Nazis accomplished this separation.
They had to use bridges to walk over the roads or not walk on them at the same time as non-Jews. Once the work day was over, the Jews were corralled back into the ghetto.
There were many ghettos throughout Europe during the Holocaust period. However, the largest was the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland, with about 400,000 people crammed into an area of about 2.5 square miles.
(Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh - Holocaust Center)
In Poland's Warsaw ghetto, people walk past the bodies of those who have died from starvation or disease. The residents of the Warsaw ghetto had to survive on an official food allocation of 300 calories per day. (USHMM,courtesy of Zydowski Instytut Historyczny Instytut Naukowo-Badawczy)
(Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh - Holocaust Center)
In Poland's Warsaw ghetto, people walk past the bodies of those who have died from starvation or disease. The residents of the Warsaw ghetto had to survive on an official food allocation of 300 calories per day. (USHMM,courtesy of Zydowski Instytut Historyczny Instytut Naukowo-Badawczy)
In 1943, an uprising occurred in the ghetto. Although the Jews in Warsaw fought courageously against the Nazis, after one month of fighting, the Nazis burned the entire ghetto until nothing was left. Those who remained were deported to concentration camps. (Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh - Holocaust Center)
SS troops round up participants in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943. Rather than allow themselves to be shipped off to the death camps without a fight, these Jewish men and women resisted the SS troops with guns and other weapons smuggled into the ghetto. (USHMM, courtesy of National Archives)
When we walked through the ghetto to work after the entire ghetto was empty, it was a very weird feeling. Empty streets, open windows, flowing curtains blowing with the wind. No people. Once we thought that we saw a glimmer of somebody in the window of somebody in the window, or a candle or something and, of course, we averted our eyes not to give away to the German escorts that somebody was there.
-- Blanka Rothschild