Essay On Ghettos

The term “ghetto” came from the Jewish Quarter in Venice that was made in 1516, when the Venetian experts required the entire city’s Jewish people to live in this area. The Ghettos separated the Jews from the Non-Jews and from other Jewish communities. There were three types of ghettos, closed, open, and destruction ghettos. My thoughts are that the destruction ghettos are concentration or death camps. The ghetto was not a Nazi invention.

The ghetto residents frequently would go in so called “illegal activities,’” such as sneaking food, medicine and weapons across the ghetto walls often without the Jewish council knowing. Some of the Jewish councils and individual council members allowed it or even encouraged it, because the goods were necessities to keep the Jews in to ghetto alive. In some ghettos members of Jewish resistance movements staged armed uprisings which didn’t end well.

In Hungary ghettoization didn’t begin until spring of 1944, after the Germans invaded and stayed in the country. The Germans deported most of the Hungarian Jews to the Auschwitz-Birkenu killing center. During the holocaust ghettos were a central step in the Nazi process of control. Confining Jews in ghettos was not in Hitler’s plan. For centuries Jews had faced persecution and were often forced to live in ghettos.

Closed ghettos had a lot wrong with them but they were good for hiding the Jews, the ghettos were extremely crowded and unsanitary. On the outside it was closed off by walls or barbed wire fences, depending on the location and the area around it. Out of all three types of ghettos the most popular were closed. Closed ghettos lead to starvation, unheated housing which leads to severe winter weather. Absence of authority leads to outbreaks of ...

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...them to forced- labor camps at Poniatowa, Trawniki and the Lublin/Majdanek concentration camps. At least 7,000 Jews died fighting or hiding in the ghetto, while the SS and police sent the other 7,000 to the Treblinka killing center.

For months after the attack of the Warsaw ghetto individual Jews continued to hide themselves in the remains and even on occasion attacked German police officials on patrol. When Soviet troops went back on January 17th, 1945, they enlightened a disappointed Warsaw. According to the Polish data, only about 174,000 people were left in the city, less than 6% of the prewar population. Approximately 11,500 of the survivors were Jews.

In conclusion the ghetto life was wretched but then again it was better than going into a concentration camp or even a death camp, the people in the ghettos were probably relieved they lived as long as they did.