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During
the Holocaust, ghettos were small and, in most cases, poor areas in
cities and towns, to which the Jews were confined and from which
non-Jews were generally barred. Many ghettos were surrounded by
walls or fences in order to help enforce the Jews' isolation and
separation from their neighbors and the outside world. The ghettos
were meant to serve as temporary, tightly controlled collection
points, where the Jews' labor potential would be exploited until a
future German policy led to their removal.
Jews
in the ghettos were kept under horrendous conditions. The Nazis
confiscated nearly all of their belongings and denied them access to
most needs of daily life. Severe overcrowding, lack of hygiene,
extreme starvation, and denial of basic medicines led to widespread
epidemics in many ghettos. The harsh conditions and long hours of
forced labor weakened the Jews further. In Warsaw, the largest of
the ghettos, approximately 85,000 Jews (about 20 percent of the
ghetto population) died from the conditions before the Nazis began
to deport them to a death camp. Similar death rates were evident in
other ghettos, and even where conditions were somewhat better, they
were "narrow as the grave," in the words of one Vilna
ghetto diarist, Dr. Lazar Epstein. |
