Research Paper

The Holocaust: Life in the Ghettos

College English

Mr. Neuberger

10 September, 2008
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The Holocaust remains to be one of the most tragic and terrible events ever to take place

in recorded history. Millions of people lost their lives due to a horrid series of events put into

motion by one very disturbed man and his equally evil followers. However, many aspects of this

monstrous event are not well known and sometimes even completely overlooked. One such

example is the plight of those who lived in the various miserable ghettos throughout Europe

during World War II.

During Hitler’s reign in Germany, ghettos could be described as dirty, overcrowded, and

often disease and lice infested sections of cities in which Nazis forcefully imprisoned Jews and

other victims of the Holocaust. There they lived until they began being deported via cattle cars to

extermination camps or, less likely, slave labor camps. Jews, and other victims of the Holocaust,

were gathered up from all over occupied Europe, stripped of all personal belongings, torn from

the lives they had worked so hard to achieve, and shipped off to the thousands of ghettos

throughout Eastern Europe, often splitting up families, friends, and communities. These ghettos

could be found throughout Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Latvia,

Lithuania, and other countries and territories occupied by or allied with Germany.

Describing life in the ghettos as hard is an understatement. The scarcity of food forced

people to do desperate things to avoid dying of starvation. The United States Holocaust

Memorial Museum (ushmm) contains many survivor testimonies on their website that illustrate

the hardships endured in the ghettos. One such testimony is reported by a survivor from the Lodz

ghetto in Poland named Paula Garfunkel:

“In early 1940 our family was forcibly relocated to the Lodz ghetto, where we
were assigned one room for all six of us. Food was the main problem. At the
women’s clothing factory where I worked, I at least got some soup for lunch. But
we desperately needed to find more food for my younger brother, who was very
sick and bleeding internally. From the window at my factory I looked out at a
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potato field. Knowing that if I was caught, I’d be shot, I crept out one night to the
field, dug up as many potatoes as I could, and ran home.” (Module 261)

Another account is told by Charlene Schiff, another Holocaust survivor, in a 1993 interview:

“Ingeniously, we dug out two holes in the fences, below the fences, so that a child
could sneak out to the other side and, you know, take off the Star of David and try
to act like a normal human being and see if we could obtain food. And now and
then children brought home some food back to the ghetto. I did it many times. It
was very dangerous, because if one was caught one would pay with life. I mean
this was the order, to shoot, to kill the person, the perpetrator. I was very lucky,
and now and then I would bring a slice of bread, I would bring a carrot, or a
potato, or an egg, and these were very, very great achievements. My mother made
me promise that I wouldn’t do it any more, but I disobeyed.” (Module 1111)

And yet another report of the starvation endured in the ghettos is given in this 1996 interview by

Leah Hammerstien Silverstien, a survivor from the Warsaw ghetto in Poland:

“We came to live in the ghetto in, in October 1940. By, by March my father was
dead, starved to death, literally. Because, uh, once cut off from the ghetto, he was
cut off from his clientele and from his, from his subsistence, you know, he, and a
terrible hunger was in my father’s house because sometimes I was running from
the kibbutz to see how my father is doing. And it was a sight which I will never
forget. And I run to see my grandmother, whom I loved because she was the
substitute of my mother, you know… These sights of my father and of my
grandmother dying from starvation, in terrible hygienic conditions, is a picture
that haunts me till this very day, you know. And this is over half a century ago,
and it torments me in terrible nightmares to this very day.” (Module 1180)

Walls and fences surrounded most of the ghettos, cutting the people within off from the

outside world. Anyone who dared to try to escape or disobey in any way would be shot

immediately. German soldiers and police guarded the streets day and night. Nazis established

curfews and other rules and regulations to prohibit public assemblies of any kind. Most, if not

all, inhabitants of the ghettos were forced to perform hard manual labor, working long hours for

no pay. Sam Itzkowitz, a survivor of the Makow ghetto, described this in a 1991 interview:

“And everyday…Jews had to go out from the ghetto, line up in groups of a

hundred and perform work for the Germans. In the wintertime, we had to shovel
the snow on the roads. In the summertime, we had to help build the roads. We had
to demolish houses that were in the Germans’ way. Dig ditches, clear swamps.
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They found work that just wasn’t suitable for human beings but they just did it for
meanness. Somehow we survived longer than they thought we ought to do.”
(Module 1219)

When the German guards or officials thought that the ghetto became too overcrowded to

be easily handled, or new shipments of Jews came in, they would kill off as many of the current

residents as they deemed necessary. The soldiers usually killed either the very young, very old,

or the very ill, as they posed the least resistance and accomplished less work. Very brutal mass

murders occurred often. David J. Selznick, a survivor from the Kovno ghetto, reports one such

instance in his own words:

“…In summer 1941 the Germans occupied Kovno and we were forced into a
ghetto. Conditions worsened in 1943. The murder of Jews in the ghetto escalated
in March 1944. I saw some Ukrainians and Lithuanians helping the Nazis. I
watched as they took children to the top floor of a building and dropped them out
the window to a guard who stood on the street. He then picked them up and
knocked their heads against the wall until each child was dead.”(Module 252)

In 1942, the Nazis decided that the best way to rid themselves of people they did not

approve of was to simply kill them off. This became known as the “final solution” plan. The

Nazis now believed they no longer needed the ghettos, so they began to liquidate them. One by

one the ghettos began being shut down and their residents transported to extermination camps.

People often did not know what lied ahead of them. The deportation process itself was carried

out with a complete lack of compassion. Cecilie Klein-Pollack tells of her experience with

deportation in this 1990 interview:

“They told us the day before that we can pack one small suitcase and we should
be ready to leave the ghetto. When we came to the, it was a, um, at one time a
factory for, um, bricks, and there they started to search us again. The SS was they
also, and every woman had to, and every girl had to undress, naked, and we were
searched internally for valuables. My mother was a very religious person, and all I
could think of was how terrible this is for my mother to go through something
such, such a terrible ordeal. When we were finished my mother took the baby
from my sister, she, because she was holding the little boy, Danny, and she had a
bottle of milk for the child. And the SS grabbed the bottle of milk and said, “Let’s
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see, you cow, what you have there.” My mother pleaded, “Please, this is, the child
needs the milk. Please don’t take the milk from, from my grandson.” He started to
beat her with a horse whip, and when I saw that she was being beaten, so I
screamed, so at least I got the attention from my mother. So my mother ran into
the, because the trains were, were right there, we were just, you know, going into
those, uh, cattle trains. So I took away the attention away the attention from my
mother, and he started to beat me with that whip and finally, um, I was able to run
away also, and we were finally in the cattle trains.” (Module 1107)

Another example of the deportation from the ghettos is this 1994 interview with Blanka

Rothschild:

“When we walked through the ghetto to work after the entire ghetto was empty, it
was a very weird feeling. Empty streets, open windows, flowing curtains blowing
with the wind. No people. Once we thought we saw a glimmer of somebody in the
window, or a candle or something and, of course, we averted our eyes not to give
away to the German escorts that somebody was there. In November of 1944 came
our time, we had to be taken out. The entire population of our hospital was walked
to the place where the cattle cars were, and we were loaded. It was a horrible
thing because people had to stand. There was no place to sit or squat. If somebody
was sick or even dying, he died on his feet, standing up. It was just unbearable.
Water was the worst…the lack of water, the thirst was the worst.” (Module 1125)

The ghettos are a major part of the Holocaust. In many ways, the establishment of the

ghettos represented the first major step in tearing apart the spirit of the Jewish people. Millions

of people fought so hard to survive the ghettos only to be faced with unavoidable death at

concentration camps. Yet even through all the hardships, people still managed to hold on to some

scraps of humanity and dignity. To hear and read the testimonies of these people is truly a

humbling and amazing experience. For these reasons I believe that it is important to remember

the plight of those who lived, and died, in the ghettos.

Bibliography
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Garfunkel, Paula. "Testimonies-Holocaust Encyclopedia." ushmm.org. United States Holocaust

Memorial Museum. 7 Sept 2008

<http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/media_oi.php?lang=en&ModualeId=261>.

Hammerstien, Leah. "Testimonies-Holocaust Encyclopedia." ushmm.org. United States

Holocaust Memorial Museum. 08 Sept 2008

<http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/media_oi.php?lang=en&ModualeId=1180>.

Klein-Pollack, Cecilie. "Holocaust Encyclopedia-Testimonies." ushmm.org. United States

Holocaust Memorial Museum. 9 Sept 2008

<(http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/media_oi.php?lang=en&ModualeId=1107)>.

Rothschild, Blanka. "Testimonies-Holocaust encyclopedia." ushmm.org. United States Holocaust

Memorial Museum. 8 Sept 2008

<http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/media_oi.php?lang=en&ModualeId=1125>.

Schiff, Charlene. "Testimonies-Holocaust Encyclopedia." ushmm.org. United States Holocaust

Memorial Museum. 6 Sept 2008

<http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/media_oi.php?lang=en&ModualeId=1111>.

Selznick, David J. "Holocaust Encyclopedia-Testimonies." ushmm.org. United States Holocaust

Memorial Museum. 9 Sept 2008

<(http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/media_oi.php?lang=en&ModualeId=259)>.