The Ghettos

The ghettos played an essential role in the Holocaust. One of the purposes of the ghettos was to isolate the Jews from the rest of society in selected areas. The ghettos created by the Nazis were one of the first steps to annihilate the Jews. As the hostilities against the Jews grew, the ghettos became a transition area, meaning that after a length of time they were sent to concentration camps or death camps. The conditions were harsh and every day was a challenge to survive. The Jews were forced to live there and go through hunger, sickness and torment. In the ghettos tens of thousands of deaths took place, but a small percent survived.
Although the ghettos were not Hitler's master idea, they were one of the steps to the process of control, dehumanization, and the extinction of the Jewish culture. Jewish neighborhoods were changed into prisons. The ghettos were initially for the Jews but Poles were also imprisoned. For the time being, Jews would be placed into ghettos while plans were being formulated. Stories were created and told to the locals that the Jews carried illnesses and were a "plague" and that they should be isolated from the rest of the community. Between 1939 and 1945, a total of 356 ghettos were established in Poland, Soviet Union, Baltic States, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Hungary. Jews saw this as temporary confinement but the Nazis had other plans. On October 8, 1939, the first ghetto was created in Poland in Piotrków Trybunalski. Deportations began in the month of October 1941 to major ghettos.
The Nazis purposely tried to make the harshest living conditions possible and they succeeded in doing so. Each individual ghetto population varied. The smallest ghetto held around 3,000, and the largest ghet...

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...at German forces killed up to 7,000 Jews during the uprising. Even towards the end of the ghetto uprising on May 16, 1943, individual Jews hiding in the ruins of the ghetto continued to attack the German troops. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was the biggest, symbolically, most significant Jewish rebellion. This inspired many other ghetto uprisings.
The ghettos did in fact play a role in World War II and the Holocaust. The Jewish people suffered in the ghettos with extremely cramped quarters, hunger, and no sanitation, which led to hundreds of thousands of Jews dying of disease and hunger. The people that experienced living in the ghettos or for that matter in the Holocaust should be remembered. Each survivor of the ghettos has a story to tell. These stories must be told, so public awareness can be raised and efforts can be made to prevent anything like it again.