Life In Ghettos

Ghettos are a section of a city in which Jews lived it has come to mean a section of a city where the poor must live. The first place ghettos were built in were Spain and Portugal by the end of the 14th cent. (“Ghetto”) The ghetto was typically walled with gates that were closed at a certain hour each night, and all the Jews had to be inside the gate at that hour or suffer the price. To live in the Ghettos were hard and some of the problems that the Jews had to deal with were children labor, diseases, resistance efforts, different types of ghettos.

The reason generally given for ghettos was that the faith of Christians would be weakened by the presence of Jews. The idea of Jewish segregation dates from the Lateran Councils of 1179 and 1215

Some had beloved dolls or trucks they brought into the ghettos to avoid being caught” (“Life in the Ghettos”). Although suffering and death were all around the children they did not care about the environment around them: “Children also made toys, using whatever bits of cloth and wood they could find. In the Lodz ghetto, children turned the tops of empty cigarette boxes into playing cards.” (“Life in the Ghettos”) Disease in the Ghettos

A great deal of the deaths in the ghettos was cause by the effects of starvation and war. There were also actions of poisonings and bacterial warfare that were experimented with in some ghettos by the Nazis (“Leah Preiss”). One such example is in a Jewish ghetto outside of Kaunas were an entire town had their water system poisoned (“Warsaw Ghetto”). Typhus is a common disease in the camps and the ghettos camps was seen as a way of exterminating large numbers of Jews. German police will carry out roundups in the ghetto. Hundreds of Jews, children, the elderly, and the sick, are killed on the spot during the roundups. By September 1942, over 70,000 Jews and about 5,000 Roma will have been deported to Chelmno, where they are killed in mobile gas vans (trucks with

The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest and was the Uprising when the Jews fought back against the Nazis and nearly won their battle. Ghetto residents had to wear arm bands or badges that identified them as Jewish or for whatever other reason they were being held captive (“Types of Ghettos”). They were forced to live in squalor limited to food supplies, and forced to follow strict rules based on the type of ghetto that they were in. During World War II, the Nazis established more than 400 ghettos in order to isolate Jews from the non-Jewish population and from neighboring Jewish communities. The Germans regarded the establishment of ghettos as a provisional measure to control and segregate Jews. The assumption behind this separation was to stop the Jews, viewed by the Nazis as an inferior race, from mixing with and thus degrading the superior Aryan race.