Life in the Ghettos: Controlling and Segret

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“The Jews were convinced that it couldn’t get any worse. The truth is that, to the very end, every stage was more difficult and more terrible. The dynamics of this development are the essence of horror” (Vashem, 2010). A ghetto is a part of a city where Jews were forced to live in horrendous conditions. Even though a ghetto was a transitional stage, it was still an atrocious place to be.
The least of importance is what is ghetto and where did it originate. The term “ghetto” originated from the name of the Jewish quarter in Venice, established in 1516, in which the Venetian authorities compelled the city’s Jews to live (United States United Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2013). The creation of ghettos for Jews in Frankfurt, Rome, Prague, and other cities were ordered by various officials, ranging from local municipal authorities to the Austrian Emperor Charles V. (United States United Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2013). German occupation authorities established the first ghetto in Poland in Piotrkow Trybunalski in October 1939 (United States United Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2013). Ghettos were city districts, that were often enclosed, in which the Germans concentrated the municipal and sometimes regional Jewish population and forced them to live under miserable conditions during World War II (United States United Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2013). Ghettos isolated Jews by separating Jewish communities from the non-Jewish population and from other Jewish communities (United States United Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2013). The Germans established at least 1,000 ghettos in German-occupied and annexed Poland and the Soviet Union alone (United States United Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2013). The first major ghetto was established in Lodz in t...

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...as still a terrible place to be. The life in a ghetto is not easy, people were forced to live is unbearable conditions. It shows how grateful we should be and how blessed we are to live in a free country like America.

Works Cited

Landau, Ronnie, S. The Nazi Holocaust. Chicago: Library of Congress Catalog-in-publication, 1994.
“Ghettos” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Holocaust Encyclopedia. 2013. http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005059 Merrick, Leon. Online interview. 1 July. 2008.
Survivors Reflect on Life in Ghettos. The Holocaust Explained Website, Video, 2011. http://www.theholocaustexplained.org/ks3/life-in-nazi-occupied-europe/ghettos- an-overview/survivors-reflect-on-life-in-ghettos/#.U1NIJ1zHNHg
Yad Vashem “Holocaust History.” Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum. http://www.yadvashem.org/
yv/en/holocaust/about/03/daily_life.asp

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