After World War II began, the Nazis began ordering all Jews to live within very specific regions of select large cities-these areas were called ghettos. Jews were forced out of their homes and relocated into smaller apartments inside these ghettos, often sharing them with other families.
Some ghettos started out as “open,” meaning that the residents could leave the area during the daytime for work, but had to be back inside the ghetto before their curfew. Later on, all ghettos became “closed,” trapping Jews within the confines of the ghetto walls. The major ghettos were located in the European cities of Warsaw, Lodz, Minsk, Riga, Vilna, Bialystok and Kovno. The largest ghetto was in Warsaw, Poland—at its height, in March 1941, its population reached almost 500,000.
In most ghettos, the Nazis ordered the Jews to establish a Judenrat (a Jewish council) to both administer Nazi demands and to regulate internal life in the ghetto. The organization allowed Nazis to effectively order deportations of large numbers of Jews from the ghettos to the concentration camps. When the “Final Solution” began, the larger ghettos loaded up to 1,000 people per day into cattle cars and sent them to either concentration or death camps.
To facilitate the Jews’ cooperation, the Nazis repeatedly lied to them, such as telling them that they were being transported from the ghettos to work sites for labour when, in fact, they were being sent to their deaths, although the young and healthy were often worked to death. The Nazis eventually decided to murder all of the Jews remaining in the ghettos, “liquidating” them by boarding every one onto trains to be sent to death camps.
When the Nazis attempted to liquidate the Warsaw Ghetto on April 13, 1943, the remaining Jews fought back in what is now known as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The Jewish resistance fighters had only a few small weapons yet held out against the Nazi regime for 28 days—longer than some European countries had been able to withstand Nazi conquest.
World History
