The ghettos of World War II were set up by the Nazis in attempt to close Jews off from the rest of the world. The German Nazis created more than 400 ghettos in order to contain the Jewish people, which the Nazis believed were inferior to them. The ghettos were a terrible way to treat the Jews. It was degrading for them to be labeled and separated from all other human race. The ghettos of the holocaust were a death sentence for many Jews. Over crowdedness, disease, and starvation were among the main problems with the ghettos. These problems caused poor and unhealthy living conditions for the young and old living in these ghettos.
Overcrowding was a major problem in the ghettos. The largest of the ghettos was the Warsaw ghettos, which had a
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The Germans tried to starve the Jews by allowing them to buy only small amounts of food, such as bread, potatoes and fat, if they had valuables to trade. In order to receive food tickets, a person had to be fit for work, which meant no work, no food, guaranteed death. The Germans had factories inside the ghettos and had every able bodied person to work. It was free labor and they didn’t have to pay workers except with food tickets. The Nazis determined that Jews in the ghetto could survive on 300 calories a day, which was literally a small potato and a piece of bread with a little fat smeared on it. In order for people to survive, they became resourceful. The children helped smuggle food to their families and friends by crawling through narrow holes in the barbed wire fences and blocked walls surrounding the ghettos. The German authorities tried everything to stop the smuggling, from building higher walls and putting broken glass on top with barbed wire. Children that were caught smuggling were shot and left lying there to warn off the others. The small children who lost their parents often lived on the streets and begged or stole food in order to survive. In the first year alone, it is estimated that 83,000 people died from starvation.
During World War II, the death of thousands of Jews were owed to the ghettos. Life inside the “prison walls” were horrendous. The Jewish people were