The German occupation established around 1,200 ghettos across occupied Poland and the western Soviet Union between October 1939 and the summer of 1942. They held, between them, the great majority of the surviving Jewish population of those territories. The largest, Warsaw, held 460,000 people at peak. The smallest were a few hundred. The conditions in all of them were lethal. Around 800,000 to 1 million Jews died in the ghettos before any deportations to the death camps began, from starvation, disease and German violence. The ghettos were not waiting rooms. They were the first stage of the killing.
The Warsaw Ghetto
The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest single Jewish detention site in modern history. It was sealed on 16 November 1940. The wall was around three metres high, eighteen kilometres long, and topped with broken glass set in concrete. Inside the wall lived around 380,000 people in November 1940, rising to 460,000 by mid-1941 as Jews were deported into Warsaw from the surrounding region. The total area of the ghetto was around 3.4 square kilometres, an average density of around 130,000 people per square kilometre, around seven times the density of pre-war central Warsaw.
The ghetto was administered by a Jewish Council, the Judenrat, under Adam Czerniakow, with the German civil administration setting policy and the Order Service, a Jewish ghetto police force, providing internal order. The ration set by the German authorities for ghetto inhabitants was around 180 calories per day. Around 100,000 ghetto inhabitants died of starvation and disease in 1941 and 1942. Photographs taken by SS propaganda units and by sympathetic German soldiers, intended for various purposes, document the visible end stage of starvation in the ghetto streets.
The Warsaw Ghetto deportations to Treblinka began on 22 July 1942. By the end of September 1942, around 280,000 Warsaw Jews had been sent to Treblinka and murdered. The remaining 60,000, mostly young workers in the ghetto factories, were left as a labour reserve. Czerniakow committed suicide on 23 July 1942, the second day of the deportations, refusing to sign the daily lists the SS demanded of him. The remaining 60,000 became the population that would mount the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943.
The Łódź Ghetto
The Łódź Ghetto, in what the Germans had renamed Litzmannstadt, was sealed in April 1940. It held around 200,000 Jews at peak. Łódź was a major textile manufacturing centre, and the German administration kept the ghetto productive longer than any other Polish ghetto by turning it into a manufacturing operation under the Judenrat chairman Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski. Rumkowski’s strategy of survival through productivity bought the ghetto time. The price of the strategy was the regular cooperation of the Judenrat with German deportation demands. Rumkowski personally announced, in his speech of September 1942, that the German authorities had demanded the ghetto’s children and elderly. He told the assembled population: Brothers and sisters, give them to me. Around 16,000 children and elderly were deported to Chełmno that month and murdered. Rumkowski himself was eventually deported to Auschwitz in August 1944 with the last Łódź Jews and was killed there.
Łódź was the only major Polish ghetto that survived into 1944. Its protected status as a productive industrial site preserved it for two years longer than the rest. The final deportations of August 1944 emptied the ghetto. Around 7,000 Łódź Jews are estimated to have survived the war.
The Kraków Ghetto
The Kraków Ghetto was established in March 1941 in the Podgorze district of the city. It held around 20,000 Jews. Conditions were similar to other Polish ghettos. The deportations to Bełżec began in June 1942 and continued in pulses until March 1943, when the ghetto was finally liquidated. The remaining inhabitants were sent either to the Płaszów labour camp on the southern edge of the city or directly to Auschwitz. Płaszów itself, run by the SS officer Amon Goeth, became a major killing site in its own right. The Kraków story is the setting of the Steven Spielberg film Schindler’s List, drawing on the actual rescue work of Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist whose factory in Kraków employed around 1,200 Jews who would otherwise have been deported.
The other major ghettos
Lublin, around 40,000 Jews, was deported to Bełżec in March and April 1942 in one of the earliest mass deportation operations of Operation Reinhard. The Lublin ghetto was effectively eliminated within weeks. Białystok, around 50,000 Jews, was the site of the August 1943 ghetto uprising covered on its own page. Vilna, around 60,000 Jews, was concentrated in two small ghettos and progressively reduced through 1941 and 1942 with the killings at Ponary; the ghetto was finally liquidated in September 1943. Kovno, in Lithuania, had a ghetto of around 30,000 Jews concentrated in the Slobodka district; deportations began in late 1941 with mass shootings at the Ninth Fort outside the city. Minsk, in Belarus, had a ghetto of around 100,000 Jews including thousands deported there from Germany and Czechoslovakia; mass killings happened in pulses through 1941 to 1943.
The smaller ghettos
Beyond the major sites were hundreds of smaller ghettos in the towns and small cities of the Generalgouvernement. Some were sealed enclosures with walls or wire. Others were open ghettos consisting of designated Jewish streets that the inhabitants could not leave. Each was lethal in its own way. The smaller ghettos generally lasted for periods between a few months and two years before being liquidated and their inhabitants deported to the death camps or shot in the surrounding forests.
What the ghettos were for
The ghettos served three purposes for the regime. They concentrated the Jewish population in known locations where it could be controlled and exploited for forced labour. They reduced the population through starvation, disease and German violence. And they held the population ready for eventual deportation to the killing sites once those had been built. The third purpose was not the original one; the early ghettos of 1940 were established before the regime had decided on the killing programme. By 1942 the third purpose had become primary. The deportations from the ghettos to the death camps in 1942 and 1943 are what most observers think of when they think of the Holocaust. The deaths in the ghettos themselves, before the deportations, are the half of the killing that gets forgotten.
The diaries
Some ghetto inhabitants kept diaries. The Warsaw Ghetto diary of Emanuel Ringelblum, a historian who organised the underground archive Oneg Shabbat (Joy of Sabbath) inside the ghetto, is the largest single documentary record of life inside the ghettos. Ringelblum and his colleagues collected diaries, photographs, letters, posters, and oral testimonies from around 1,200 ghetto inhabitants. They buried the archive in milk cans and metal boxes in three locations under the ghetto buildings. Two of the three caches were recovered after the war; one is still buried under what is now Warsaw’s Polish embassy of the People’s Republic of China. The Oneg Shabbat archive is the documentary basis on which the modern reconstruction of Warsaw Ghetto life rests. Ringelblum himself was caught hiding on the Aryan side of Warsaw in 1944 and shot.
See also
Sources
- Emanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, McGraw-Hill, 1958
- Yisrael Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw 1939-1943, Indiana University Press, 1989
- Geoffrey Megargee (ed), Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933-1945, USHMM and Indiana University Press, multiple volumes
- Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oyneg Shabes Archive, Indiana University Press, 2007
- USHMM: Ghettos