Lodz Ghetto Research Paper

The Jewish people faced endless horrors during the Holocaust. One of the horrors they experienced was the ghettos. A ghetto was a specified neighborhood where all Jewish people were required to live. The ghettos were not meant to be permanent residences, instead, they were meant to be a middle ground between freedom and concentration camps. Life inside the ghettos was appalling. Death and disease were rampant, and the possibility of deportation was a constant fear. The Institute for Jewish Research explains the atrocious living conditions inside the ghettos best saying, “Overcrowding, lack of sanitary infrastructure, and poor building standards took a toll upon the physical state of ghetto residents.” By withholding adequate infrastructure and forcing

The specified Jewish neighborhoods of the Holocaust, the ghettos, were the painful homes of thousands of people throughout the Holocaust. The Lodz ghetto is one of the most well known ghettos from the Holocaust. It was the second largest Nazi ghetto after the Warsaw ghetto and is a prime example of the horrors of the ghettos. The Lodz ghetto began on May 1st, 1940 when approximately 230,000 Jewish people living in Lodz, a city in Poland, were sealed into a 4.3 square kilometer ghetto. Immediately following the formation of the ghetto, the Nazis appointed Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski to be the leader. Rumkowski believed that the ghetto should be independent. He did everything in his power to insure that the ghetto became independent and separate from Nazi rule. According to an article be Jennifer Rosenberg from the Jewish Virtual Library, “Rumkowski was a firm believer in the autonomy of the ghetto. He started many programs that replaced