The word ghetto was coined in early sixteenth century Venice. There had been Jewish districts in European cities for centuries, and at gentile insistence some of these districts were walled off and closed at night. The Nazis banned the use of the word 'ghetto', instead referring to the Jüdischer Wohnbezirk (Jewish Residential District). In reality their creation was neither a ghetto nor a Wohnbezirk, but instead a vast concentration camp with a very limited degree of self-government.

The Nazis first attempted to set up a ghetto in Warsaw on 3rd November 1939. They took hostages from among the Judenrat and held them in the Pawiak prison to ensure compliance. The Judenrat, however, sent a delegation (including Adam Czerniaków) to appeal to the local Wehrmacht commander, and by playing the army off against the SS managed to delay the creation of the ghetto by a year.

In March 1940 the Germans declared the Jewish quarter a Seuchensperrgebiet (Infected Area). Ostensibly a measure against typhus, this was in practice an excuse to begin sealing off the Jewish population from the rest of Warsaw. It was also intended to encouraged Polish anti-Semitism. On a deeper level it reflected the Nazi view of the Jews not as carriers of typhus but effectively as an epidemic disease in themselves.

The Judenrat was ordered to start building a wall around the Jewish district at its own cost. The fact that this would make any typhus epidemic worse within the wall while not protecting the rest of Warsaw to any real degree was naturally ignored. There followed a transfer of populations, 113,000 gentiles being moved out of the Jewish district and 138,000 Jews being moved into it. The ghetto was sealed on 16th November 1940. Sections of the Polish underground opposed the creation of the ghetto, but other gentiles were more ambivalent towards it.

The ghetto boundary was eleven miles long. Inside it, 2.4% of the city of Warsaw housed 30% of the city's population. There were 380,740 people within the wall in January 1941, a figure that would rise to 445,000 in March as more Jews were settled in Warsaw from elsewhere. German restrictions meant that only 27,000 of this population were gainfully employed. The average number of people per room was 9.2. In the poorer part of the pre-war Jewish quarter, 20,000 people lived on Mila Street alone. A number of Jews managed to survive on the 'Aryan' side, passing themselves off as gentiles or living in hiding.

Many German photographs taken in the ghetto had a specifically propagandist purpose. Others, taken by ordinary service personnel, are more neutral, though even these were taken by individuals who saw Warsaw's Jews as foreign, exotic and (usually) inferior.

The ghetto was a city within a city. Its population included people from a variety of different classes, backgrounds, nationalities and political and religious traditions. Upper-middle-class assimilated Warsaw Jews lived alongside Orthodox Jews from small towns outside the capital. Jews from the Warthegau, Germany proper and western Czechoslovakia (wearing yellow stars rather than the white and blue armbands of the Generalgouvernement) existed alongside lifelong Varsovians. Political parties ranging from right-wing Zionists through left-wing Zionists to parties to the left of the Socialist Bund existed, and were able to carry out clandestine work comparatively freely until 18th April 1942, when the Germans targeted the political underground as a prelude to the Great Deportation. 1,718 converts to Christianity were moved into the ghetto. For a brief time there were even a number of Gypsies, who reportedly managed to escape.

Some reminders of normality continued for a while. Telephone and postal services operated (the latter limited to postcards). Rickshaws and improvised horse-buses (called 'Kohn-Hellers' after their owners) existed, and there was even a short electric tram route. The ghetto had its own Jewish Police, the Jewish Order Service (Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst), and a prison on Gesia Street. The police contained disproportionate numbers of ex-soldiers, converts to Christianity and lawyers, and was not representative of the general population. Jewish policemen guarded the ghetto's gates, along with the Polish police, known as 'Navy Blues' because of their uniform, and SS gendarmes.

Germans could maltreat or kill Jews with impunity, and the amount of food allocated to the ghetto was catastrophically insufficient. The population only managed to survive because of smuggling, and even then large numbers died of starvation, while epidemic disease became rife. According to the Holocaust historian Israel Gutman, who was also an eyewitness, the pavements "were filled with masses of people whose threadbare clothing reeked with the smell of rotting foodstuffs and human sweat. The odor of waste and refuse filled the air. In the ghetto, it was said that a day felt like a month and that a month felt like years." There were virtually no trees, as the ghetto contained no parks, though its eastern walls were close to two. Starving babies cried continually.

It is estimated that some 20,000 people in the ghetto had enough food and money. Some of these were large-scale smugglers. It was these people who tended to frequent the few cafés, restaurants, and clubs that existed in the ghetto. 200,000 people had limited quantities of basic foodstuffs, and sometimes temporary work. More than 200,000 were starving, and as time went by many in the second category slipped into the third.

Between September 1939 and July 1942 it is estimated that over 100,000 people died in the ghetto. 1941 was the worst year for 'natural' deaths. 43,000 people died, 10% of the population. Many of these people died of typhus, which became epidemic in the overcrowded tenements. In 1942 the death rate eased, the weakest having died in 1941. The German army was also increasingly using the Jews to manufacture uniforms and minor pieces of equipment, which improved the employment situation. By then, however, the Nazis had decided to wipe out the European Jews altogether.

Jewish Warsaw prior to 1939 * War & Occupation * The Great Deportation

The Jewish Fighting Organisation * The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising * After the Ghetto Uprising

Map

Home