What was life like in the Ghetto?
Before the Second World War, Warsaw Poland was a intellectual and social capital. It also had the largest Jewish settlement in Europe – perhaps 380,000 Jews (almost a third of the city’s population) lived in Warsaw, many of them in a rich and vibrant area called Nalewki.
Poland, of course, was the first country to be conquered by Nazi Germany. Immediately, the persecution of Jews began, as Nazi soldiers mocked and bullied vulnerable Jews in the street. By 26 October, Hitler had imposed his own civilian government on Poland, and – as part of this – Jews were put immediately to manual labour.
In December, more regulations followed: Jews over the age of 12 had to wear white armbands showing a blue Star of David, Jews’ bank accounts were closed, and their houses and businesses were confiscated. Jewish patients were expelled from the hospitals, and schools were closed to Jewish children. In 1940, the synagogues were closed and Jewish prayers forbidden.
In April 1940, however, Jewish workers were put to building walls, On the night of 15-16 November 1940, without warning, the ghetto was closed. Jews were not allowed to leave the ghetto, under punishment of death.
The Warsaw ghetto comprised an area of 307 hectares (slightly greater than a square mile). Into it were crammed, not only the city’s Jews, but large numbers of Jewish ‘refugees’ sent there by the Nazis from the surrounding areas, so that the total number of people in the ghetto numbered about 450,000.
The Nazi Major General Jürgen Stroop estimated that, at its creation, the ghetto contained 27,000 apartments with an average of 2 ½ rooms each – an average of six persons per room. In Spring 1941, the Nazis set up workshops, using the Jews as slave labour, producing mainly armaments for the war effort.
Conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto were so bad that between 1940 and 1942 an estimated 100,000 Jews died of starvation and disease in the Warsaw Ghetto.
The immediate problem was survival. The inhabitants of the ghetto were issued with ration cards – but where the daily requirement for an adult is 3,500 calories, ‘intellectuals’ and key workers were allowed only 1,000 calories, and everybody else was allowed only 300 calories. These were starvation rations
Meanwhile, inside the ghetto, dozens of workshops were set up making pots and pans, brushes and buttons, clothes and mattresses, toys and dolls, which could be traded for food. One historian suggests that this – the refusal to lie down and starve to death – was the first ‘resistance’ movement against the Nazis.
It must be mentioned also that – again, absolutely contrary to what Nazi propaganda claimed – ordinary Polish people ALSO helped in many ways. The Nazis had forbidden any post, but many postcards and letters got through, secretly passed on by Poles from the ‘Aryan side’ of the wall, mostly in the Law Courts, the only ‘shared’ building in Warsaw. Polish inhabitants of Warsaw, despite the dangers, hid 20,000 Jews outside the ghetto. And one Polish doctor, Franciszek Raszeja, was shot for visiting a patient in the ghetto.
The problem was, not the will, but the means. The ‘refugees’ from outside Warsaw had arrived with almost nothing – food, clothes or possessions. Slowly, despite everything they were doing, the inhabitants of the ghetto starved to death. Children, especially, were vulnerable, and begging children were everywhere.
Disease was an associated problem. At the beginning of the ghetto, yellow spotted fever (carried by ticks) was a problem.In fact, deaths from spotted fever had fallen as a result by 1942, but by that time there was an epidemic of typhus (a disease carried by lice).
In January 1942, nearly 6,000 people – and perhaps 100,000 people, 1939 to 1942 – died of starvation and disease in the ghetto.
From the beginning of 1942, the Nazis actively began to try to exterminate the Jews as a race