The Nazi Ghettos

Why this Chapter exists

The stage between the rise and the killing.

After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, millions of the Jews of occupied Europe were confined before they were deported and murdered. Before the deportation trains, there were the ghettos, sealed quarters where people were held, sometimes for years, under starvation and forced labor. The ghettos are where the largest Jewish communities in Europe spent their last years, and where some of them rose up.

A necessary distinction

Not the same word twice.

The early-modern ghetto, the walled Jewish quarter that began in Venice in 1516, has its own Chapter, Unit 3 · Ch. 03 · The Ghetto System. Apart from the name, the two had little in common.

The early-modern ghetto was a lasting institution. It could stand for three hundred years. People inside it raised families, ran businesses, kept their own courts and schools, and were locked in only at night. Its aim was separation within a society that meant for the community to continue.

The Nazi ghetto was different in kind. Most lasted months or a few years. The longest, Łódź, ran more than four years. There was no central policy for creating them. Local German authorities improvised them as tools of concentration, dispossession, and forced labor. Once the decision for total murder was taken, in 1941 and 1942, the ghettos became holding places for people marked for death, and some new ghettos were created specifically to make mass murder easier.

The scale and the order

What the ghettos were.

The best-known ghetto is Warsaw, behind its wall, but there were many more. Germany and its allies established more than 1,300 ghettos, about 1,100 of them created by German authorities after the invasions of Poland in 1939 and the Soviet Union in 1941. They stretched across German-occupied Poland, the Baltic states, and the western Soviet Union, in great cities and in small towns: Kraków, Białystok, Lvov (Lviv), Lublin, Vilna (Vilnius), Częstochowa, Minsk, and hundreds of others. Communities that had stood for centuries were swept into them.

For a family, it began with an order. A notice would go up, or soldiers would come to the door: you have until a stated hour to leave your home and report to the ghetto. You could take only what you could carry. The rest (the house, the furniture, the shop, the savings, the photographs on the wall) stayed behind, and was taken. People left their front doors for the last time carrying a suitcase or a bundle, a child by the hand, not knowing they would never come back.

Where they were sent was a few streets of a poor district, walled off with brick or fenced with barbed wire, the gates guarded so no one could leave. Into it the Jews of a whole region were packed, far more people than the space could hold, families crowded six and seven to a single room, strangers sharing the floor.

The order to concentrate came from the top. On September 21, 1939, Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Security Police, sent an express letter to the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen, the SS task forces in occupied Poland. He ordered Jews moved from the countryside into a few larger cities, chosen because they were rail junctions or lay on railroad lines. He ordered a Council of Jewish Elders set up in every Jewish community and made “fully responsible” for carrying out German orders. The letter foresaw that Jews might be forbidden to “leave the ghetto.” It ordered concentration but set no single policy for ghettos, and local German authorities created them at different times and in different forms. The first ghetto was set up in Piotrków Trybunalski, in central Poland, in October 1939.

Theresienstadt (Terezín), set up in November 1941 in the German-run Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, held about 140,000 Jews over its existence. About 34,000 died there. About 88,000 more were deported to other ghettos, camps, killing sites, and killing centers in German-occupied eastern Europe. About 3,500 of them survived. In May 1944, ahead of a Red Cross visit in June, the Germans deported about 7,500 inmates to Auschwitz so the ghetto would look less crowded. They also staged improvements to deceive the delegation. In Hungary, in April to June 1944, Hungarian authorities created more than 60 short-lived ghettos to hold Jews for deportation. In Greece, the Germans created ghettos in Salonika (Thessaloniki) in February 1943 and began deporting the city’s Jews to Auschwitz the next month.

The ghettos varied: some sealed completely, some more open, some lasting weeks, some years. Two were the largest, and much of what survives of ghetto life comes from them.

The largest

Warsaw.

Warsaw held the largest Jewish community in Europe and the second largest in the world, after New York. In October 1940 the Germans ordered a ghetto there. In November they sealed it. More than four hundred thousand people were confined behind walls enclosing about 1.3 square miles, an average of more than seven people to a room.

The hunger and crowding the Germans imposed were lethal on their own. About 83,000 people died inside the ghetto of starvation and disease between 1940 and mid-1942, before the mass deportations began. Then, from July 22 to September 21, 1942, the Germans deported about 265,000 people from Warsaw to the Treblinka killing center, where they were murdered. About 35,000 more were killed inside the ghetto during the operation.

The last to fall

Łódź.

Łódź, in western Poland, held the second-largest ghetto. The Germans renamed the city Litzmannstadt, sealed the ghetto on April 30, 1940, and turned it into a vast workshop. Its residents, including children, made uniforms and goods for the German war effort. About 210,000 people were forced to live in it.

Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski headed its Jewish council, the body the Germans appointed to run the ghetto (described below). Łódź outlasted every other major ghetto in German-occupied Poland. Historians still debate how much its forced-labor workshops had to do with that. Deportations to the Chełmno killing center began in January 1942. In the summer of 1944 the Germans liquidated what remained. About 7,000 people were sent to Chełmno in June and July, and about 67,000 to Auschwitz-Birkenau in August, Rumkowski among them. Of about 210,000, fewer than a thousand were found alive in Łódź when Soviet forces arrived in January 1945.

Object Spotlight

The boxes that came out of the ground.

Two men stand in a pit dug into broken brick and rubble. One is down in the hole, and the other reaches in. Between their hands is a dented metal box, an ordinary container of the kind that might hold tools or food. It held part of the secret record of the Warsaw ghetto.

The box is one of the ten metal boxes that held the first part of the Oneg Shabbat archive. The historian Emanuel Ringelblum started it. He gathered a hidden group of perhaps sixty people to document the life around them: the hunger and the smuggling, the schools and the deportations, the jokes, the rumors, the deaths. They met on Saturdays and took the cover name “the joy of the Sabbath.” Their method was to collect as much as possible and leave the sorting for after the war.

As the deportations emptied the ghetto in 1942 and 1943, the group sealed its papers into metal boxes and milk cans and buried them in three caches under the streets, in August 1942, February 1943, and April 1943. The ten boxes were recovered in 1946. Two milk cans came out of the ground at 68 Nowolipki Street in 1950. The third cache has never been found. The containers found in 1946 belong to the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. This one has been on loan to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and research center in Jerusalem, since 2003.

Much of what the world knows about how people died in the Holocaust comes from the records of the people who killed them: German orders, lists, photographs. The archive is the largest and most systematic exception, a record of the ghetto written by the people inside it while it was happening. Of its roughly sixty makers, only three lived to see the end of the war. Ringelblum was found hiding in Warsaw and murdered in 1944, with his wife Yehudit and their thirteen-year-old son Uri. The diaries, drawings, underground newspapers, and last letters they buried are the source of much of what historians know about daily life in the Warsaw ghetto.

Daily life

Life inside.

Hunger governed daily life. In Warsaw the Germans set the official food ration for a Jew at fewer than 200 calories a day, roughly a tenth of what a person needs to live. People made up the difference however they could, almost all of it illegal. Much of the smuggling was done by children, small enough to slip through gaps in the wall or the sewers, who brought back food on their bodies and were shot if caught. By August 1941, more than five thousand people a month were dying in the Warsaw ghetto of starvation and the diseases that follow it.

“When it’s so cold, even my heart is heavy. There is nothing to cook today; we should be receiving three loaves of bread but we will be getting only one bread today… Does this deserve to be called life?”An anonymous girl, diary kept in the Łódź ghetto, March 6, 1942. A partial diary found in the area of the ghetto in July 1945. Its author was never identified. Via the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Still, life inside the ghettos did not stop. People ran secret schools for children who were forbidden to be taught. They held prayer services, lectures, and concerts. Doctors, themselves starving, ran a clinical study of the effects of hunger on the human body, so that medicine might learn from what was being done to them. In Kraków, the pharmacist Tadeusz Pankiewicz, the only non-Jewish Pole allowed to live inside the ghetto, kept his Eagle Pharmacy open for as long as the ghetto stood. He and his three assistants passed information and smuggled food between the ghetto and the city. Yad Vashem recognized him as Righteous Among the Nations in 1983, and the pharmacy is a branch of the Museum of Kraków today.

The largest of these efforts was the Oneg Shabbat archive of Emanuel Ringelblum’s group, described in the Object Spotlight above and told in full in the Resistance Chapter.

The impossible position

The choice with no good answer.

Inside each ghetto the Germans appointed a Jewish council, the Judenrat, and made it carry out their orders. At first that meant distributing food and organizing labor. Later the Germans demanded that the councils draw up the lists of who would be put on the deportation trains.

Two men who held that position answered the demand in opposite ways.

In Warsaw, the council was led by an engineer named Adam Czerniaków. For three years he tried to keep the ghetto alive. When the Germans ordered him, in July 1942, to begin handing over thousands of people a day for “resettlement,” and refused his plea to spare the orphans, he understood what resettlement meant. On July 23, 1942, the day after the deportations to Treblinka began, he swallowed a cyanide pill at his desk. In a note to his wife he wrote that they were demanding he kill the children of his people with his own hands, and that he could not.

In Łódź, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski chose the opposite path. He believed that if he made the ghetto too useful to the German war effort to destroy (“rescue through labor”), he could save at least some of his people. So he complied. In September 1942 the Germans ordered him to hand over twenty thousand of the ghetto’s children, sick, and elderly. About 15,000, among them some 6,000 children, were seized, sent to Chełmno, and murdered. Rumkowski stood before the community and begged the parents to give up their children so that the rest might live. The deportations he organized sent tens of thousands to the killing centers.

Historians judge these two men differently and still debate their choices. Both acted inside a position the Germans designed, in which the councils were ordered to choose who would be deported, and in which neither compliance nor refusal stopped the deportations.

Resistance

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

By early 1943, the people left in Warsaw understood what the deportations meant. In January 1943, when SS and police units returned to resume deportations, a small group of Jewish fighters attacked them, and the Germans halted the roundup after seizing about 5,000 people. On April 19, 1943, the eve of Passover, the Germans came to empty the ghetto for good. About 700 young fighters of the Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB) and the Jewish Military Union (ŻZW), with smuggled and homemade weapons, fought back. The ŻOB was commanded by Mordecai Anielewicz, who was twenty-four.

They held out for nearly a month against a far larger, better-armed force. The Germans burned the ghetto block by block. On May 8, they seized the ŻOB headquarters at 18 Miła Street, where Anielewicz and many of his commanders died. On May 16, 1943, the SS commander Jürgen Stroop ordered the Great Synagogue on Tłomackie Street blown up and reported, “The former Jewish Quarter in Warsaw is no more.” The Germans killed at least 7,000 Jews in the fighting and in the underground bunkers where they hid. They sent about 7,000 more to Treblinka, where they were murdered, and about 42,000 to Majdanek and labor camps. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum calls the uprising the largest Jewish uprising of the Second World War. It also inspired revolts in other ghettos, including Białystok.

Where it led

Where the ghettos led.

The ghettos were a stage in the Holocaust, not its final destination. Jews were concentrated and held there, and from 1942 the ghettos were emptied into the killing centers: Treblinka, Chełmno, Auschwitz, and the rest. In the occupied Soviet Union, many ghetto inmates were shot by the mobile killing units. Separate Chapters cover the mobile killing units and the camp system.

By the end of the war the great ghettos were gone, and with them most of the communities that had filled them. Centuries of Jewish life in Poland were all but destroyed in a few years. What survives is the record: the buried archives, the testimonies, and the few who lived.

Read the documents

The record itself.

• Photograph. The wall goes up: Polish and Jewish laborers build the wall sealing the Warsaw ghetto, 1940. USHMM Photo Archive ↗
• Artifact. The Oneg Shabbat archive: the milk cans and tin boxes in which the Warsaw ghetto buried its own record. Yad Vashem ↗
• Photograph. A family says goodbye to a child through a ghetto fence. USHMM ↗

Discussion questions

Working from the evidence.

Each question is anchored in a fact this Chapter documents. Answer from the evidence on the page.

• The Germans ordered families to leave their homes with only what they could carry, and took all they left behind. Why might controlling people’s property and movement come before the violence that followed, rather than after? C3 D2.His.14.9-12 (causation).
• Adam Czerniaków took his own life rather than sign the deportation lists. Mordechai Rumkowski chose cooperation, believing labor might save some. Using this Chapter’s evidence, what options did each man have, and what limits did the Germans set on those options? C3 D2.His.16.9-12 (interpretation).
• Emanuel Ringelblum’s circle buried their archive in milk cans. Mendel Grossman photographed the deportations in secret. An unnamed girl kept a diary. All risked their lives to make a record. What does it mean to decide that being remembered is worth that risk? C3 D2.His.10.9-12 (sources).
• One photograph on this page was taken by a German soldier treating the ghetto as a spectacle. Another was taken by a Jewish prisoner documenting his own people’s deportation. How should a historian weigh an image differently depending on who held the camera, and why? Common Core RH.11-12.6 (point of view).
• There were more than 1,300 ghettos, but much of what survives comes from Warsaw and Łódź. How should we think about the communities that left few or no records, and what does the unevenness of evidence do to the story we can tell? C3 D2.His.10.9-12 (limits of evidence).

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

• World History. Examines Nazi occupation policy, forced segregation, deportation, and the role of the ghettos within the Holocaust.
• Classroom Applications. Students can:
  • interpret diaries, maps, and photographs as primary sources
  • compare daily life across different ghettos
  • analyze the geography of forced segregation
  • trace the path from ghettoization to deportation
  • construct evidence-based historical arguments
• International Classroom Relevance. Supports Holocaust education, urban history, human-rights education, and museum-based learning.

Standards Alignment

• NYS Social Studies Framework: NY Grade 8 (United States History) 8.6 and NY Global History 10.5 (Unresolved Global Conflict, 1914–1945).
• NYS Holocaust Education Mandate, Education Law §801. Supports Holocaust instruction through the study of ghettoization, daily life, documentation, and deportation.
• Common Core, Reading in History/Social Studies (grades 6–12). Students assess an author’s purpose and point of view (RH.6–8.6, RH.9–10.6, RH.11–12.6) and compare and corroborate multiple sources (RH.6–8.9, RH.9–10.9, RH.11–12.9), working from maps, diaries, photographs, demographic records, and survivor testimony.
• C3 Framework, D2.His.1 and D2.His.14 (grades 6–8 and 9–12). Students investigate historical context, continuity and change, and evidence-based interpretation.