GHETTO.

The word ghetto originally denoted the traditional Jewish quarter of medieval Christian cities; the term evidently originated in a quarter of this kind that existed in Venice. From the early Middle Ages, Jews tended to live on separate streets or in separate neighborhoods, but they did so voluntarily to maintain their distinct way of life. The first ghettos imposed on Jews appeared in Spain and Portugal in the late fourteenth century.

From the end of the eighteenth century on, and especially after the political changes that the French Revolution brought about, the ghettos that had been established for Jews in Europe began to disappear. The ghetto of Rome was the last to be formally abolished—in 1883, after papal rule ended in Rome (it was thenceforth confined to the Vatican).

Although this type of ghetto existed mainly in Central and Western Europe, separate Jewish quarters also came into being in cities across the Muslim world. In the United States, during the struggle for equal rights by the African American population in the 1950s and 1960s, the term ghetto was widely used to denote the impoverished neighborhoods noted for rampant distress, crime, and violence that these citizens inhabited in major American cities. A diverse alternative culture, noted for its music and art and its sweeping social protest, evolved in the vicinity of the African American ghetto. To this day, the term ghetto is used for a neighborhood inhabited by an ethnic minority that is socially marginalized and suffers from inferior living conditions and fewer opportunities when compared to those of the established population.

THE NAZI GHETTO

The ghettos established by the Nazis for European Jews during World War II were totally different in structure and goals from those described above. The establishment of these ghettos, beginning in Poland shortly after the onset of the German occupation of that country in 1939, was a phase in the overall development of an anti-Jewish policy that aimed to find a comprehensive solution to the "problem" of the Jewish presence in Europe. The Nazi ghetto was not intended to be a permanent solution, a place where Jews would be strictly isolated from the surrounding society. Instead, it was something like a quarantine camp or at times a giant prison, where harsh and restrictive living conditions were imposed. The ghetto provided various German authorities with a reserve of available labor for various purposes and gave them an opportunity, unconstrained by laws and regulations, to oppress the Jewish inhabitants and dispossess them of money, valuables, and other goods according to Nazi officials' needs and caprices.

The first German directive regarding the concentration of Jews in separate urban quarters appeared in the Schnellbrief (quick brief) that the head of the Security Police, Reinhard Heydrich, sent to the commanders of the SS and the police special units (Einsatzgruppen) that followed the Wehrmacht into Poland in September 1939. According to the directive, within three or four weeks the Jews in the Polish areas were to be concentrated in special areas of the large cities so that they would be easier to control and eventually deport. Small Jewish communities were to be eradicated and their inhabitants removed to more central towns, preferably close to railroads. Several weeks later, Hans Frank, the governor-general of the General Government, issued a similar directive. Neither of these documents, however, speaks specifically about the establishment of a ghetto, that is, a closed and isolated area where the Jews would be concentrated under strict supervision.

In 1939–1940, it was the declared policy of Nazi Germany to resolve the Jewish issue in territorial ways. This goal, however, quickly proved unrealistic and unworkable. The absence of clear guidelines about what to do with the Jews, coupled with the abandonment of the total deportation policy, convinced the local authorities that they should deal on their own with the presence of Jews within their purviews. Consequently, the Nazi ghettos were established at different times and differed in their ways of life, in the type of official German control, and in the extent of freedom of movement allowed.

The first large ghetto, located in Lodz, was sealed on 1 May 1940, with 162,000 Jews packed into it. The Lodz model was closely studied and adopted by those who established ghettos in other Polish cities. The assumption behind the founding of the Lodz ghetto was that the Jews' continued presence in the city would be short-lived. Therefore, the Germans' main concern was how to exploit fully the Jews' property as the ghetto was being established. As it became increasingly evident that the Jews would not quickly disappear from Lodz, however, an economic structure was built in the ghetto, including a variety of workshops that exploited Jewish labor and funneled the profits into the pockets of the German ghetto administrators, merchants, and others.

The Warsaw ghetto was sealed in November 1940. It was the largest of all the ghettos, its population peaking at around 440,000 in mid-1941. The governor of Warsaw District, Ludwig Fischer, claimed that in the opinion of the German medical service in Warsaw, the Jews were spreading dangerous illnesses and therefore had to be isolated from the surrounding population. Allegations of Jewish involvement in the black market and in the corruption of the morals and culture of Polish society provided additional rationales for a sealed ghetto. The establishment of the ghetto also amounted to an admission by the local German authorities that they would not be able to deport the Jews of Warsaw rapidly. Since the plans for the ghetto did not include mechanisms that would keep the inhabitants fed and gainfully employed, however, the Warsaw ghetto became a focal point of distress, hunger, and severe epidemics. The situation did begin to improve slightly in mid-1941, when the Germans in charge of the ghetto decided to make the ghetto economically viable, to create jobs so that the Jews could support themselves and to increase food supplies. In March 1941, ghettos were established in Lublin and in Kraków, the seat of the governor-general and the administrative capital of the German occupation in Poland. The Kraków ghetto was established during a deportation action that had begun in the spring of 1940 with the aim of banishing some 50,000 Jews, leaving only 5,000 workers in high-demand trades. By economic necessity, however, the ghetto eventually held 18,000. In April 1941, ghettos were established in several other important cities in Poland: Kielce, Radom, and Cz?stochowa. By the spring and summer of 1942, when the deportations to the death camps began in Poland, hundreds of ghettos had been established across the country, including some in the Jewish communities of small towns.

The Germans' goal in establishing the ghettos remains unclear and various authorities who dealt with the Jewish question in Poland interpreted it in different ways. Obviously, the Nazis were not concerned about the high mortality rate that ghettoization and the living conditions in some of the ghettos caused among the imprisoned Jews. In 1941–1942, more than 112,000 Jews in the two most important ghettos in Poland, those of Warsaw and Lodz—20 percent of the Jewish population living there at the time—died of starvation and illness. In 1941 the deaths of thousands of Jews in the ghettos, especially in Warsaw, forced the leaders of the General Government to choose between allowing the starvation and slow extermination of the Jews to continue or transforming the ghettos to serve the Germans' economic interests. In mid-1941, those who favored the economic rationale won the day. Thus, German policy toward the ghettos in general favored economic considerations as long as a comprehensive territorial solution involving the deportation of the Jews had not been formulated.

Ironically, the Jewish labor force in the ghettos became more necessary than ever in early 1942, after the Final Solution was set in motion. As the war in the east expanded, the German war industry required more and more workers. Hundreds of thousands of Poles were sent to Germany as laborers, as were Soviet prisoners of war, who had survived a winter of catastrophic mortality in German prisoner of war camps. Demand for Jewish workers in the ghettos escalated so rapidly that in June 1942 Ludwig Fischer issued a directive to the effect that every effort must be made not to leave Jews idle. The fundamental goal of employing the ghettoized Jews changed at this time. The instrumental purpose—enabling the Jews to support themselves and absolving the German authorities of this concern—gave way to the needs of companies that urgently required a handy supply of labor. The decision about the Jews' ultimate fate, however, had already been made in Berlin and economic considerations were not central in its adoption. By then, local leaders no longer played a role in making decisions about the Jews.

The last phase in the establishment of ghettos began in 1941 in the newly occupied Soviet territories. Ghettos were established in various towns in Lithuania, Latvia, Byelorussia, and Ukraine. The formation of ghettos in cities in these areas—Vilna (Vilnius), Kovno (Kaunas), Riga, Minsk, Lwów (Lvov/Lviv), and so on—coincided with the mass murder of the Jewish populations there, beginning in the summer of 1941. Often the ghettos served as a mechanism for the selection of some Jews for immediate murder and others for continued survival based on their ability to contribute their labor to the cause of the war. Thus, the ghettos in the occupied Soviet areas were already part of the Final Solution that had been decided upon and that had begun to be implemented in autumn 1941. In some towns, fewer than 20 percent of the pre-Occupation Jewish populations were left in the ghettos. Some of these ghettos resembled huge labor camps in every respect.

Although almost all the ghettos were located in Eastern Europe, the Germans did establish several ghettos for specific purposes elsewhere. The most notable of them was that in Theresienstadt, northwestern Czechoslovakia, to which in 1941–1945 some 140,000 Jews were deported from Germany, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and Western European countries. Responsibility for this ghetto belonged to the SS Security Police (the RSHA), which transferred its guarding requirements to the Czech police. Theresienstadt had been established to concentrate selected groups of Jews—the elderly, the famous, or those who had special status in Germany and Western Europe. In this manner, the Nazis intended to disprove rumors about the fate of German Jews who were being deported to the east. The first groups of Jews from Prague reached this ghetto in November 1941, but by January 1942 extermination transports were already setting out from Theresienstadt to Riga, Latvia. Most Jews who were concentrated in Theresienstadt were sent in 1942–1944 to be killed at the Auschwitz and Treblinka death camps in Poland; by late 1944, only 11,000 remained there.

Another ghetto in Central Europe was that of Budapest, established in late November 1944. After approximately 70,000 Jews were led out of this city on a death march toward the Austrian border, members of the Hungarian Nazi Party, the Arrow Cross, which had seized power in Hungary, set up a ghetto in Budapest, where most remaining Jews were concentrated. In December 1944–January 1945, the Hungarian Fascists removed about 20,000 Jews from the ghetto and murdered them along the banks of the Danube.

JEWISH LIFE IN THE GHETTOS

The Germans left the Jews to their own devices in many respects. Even before the ghettos were established, Jewish councils—Judenräte—were set up in Polish towns. Their function, in addition to obeying the Germans' directives, was to oversee the Jews' lives. This created an impression of Jewish autonomy that was illusory, since the powers of the Judenräte were never entrusted to any Jewish leaders who had been active in the prewar Eastern European Jewish communities.

The Judenräte were composed of public figures who had remained in the Jewish communities after the Occupation began. Once ghettoization had occurred, the Judenräte had to cope with dire problems that they could rarely solve. They dealt with the allocation of apartments and other dwellings in the ghetto, the removal of waste, the distribution of food, the welfare and relief of the indigent and refugees, education, the operation of clinics and hospitals, and burial of the dead. In many ghettos, a Jewish police force was established to maintain public order, control the entrances to the ghetto, and escort groups of workers who set out from the ghetto to workplaces in town. In certain ghettos, the Germans even allowed the Judenräte to manage an independent branch of the postal service.

The Judenräte in the major ghettos, however, invested most of their effort toward creating an economic infrastructure that would provide the inhabitants with jobs. In ghettos such as those of Lodz, Bia?ystok, and Vilnius, a systematic network of workplaces—ghetto workshops and employers outside the ghetto who hired Jewish workers—was built in cooperation with the Judenräte. Ghettos that had such systems were usually more orderly and stable than the others. Although chronic shortages of food, clothing, and other essentials persisted, mass mortality was not in evidence as in the Warsaw ghetto. Many Jews believed that a productive, well-kept, and functioning ghetto was the only instrument that might persuade the Germans to leave them unharmed and might increase their prospects of survival.

Community and cultural life continued in almost all ghettos that had been established in Eastern Europe. Even in small ghettos, Jews maintained their educational, cultural, and religious institutions as best they could, at the initiative of the Judenräte or of public activists and intellectuals. In Warsaw, Lodz, Vilnius, Kaunas, and other towns, drama groups put on Jewish and non-Jewish plays for the ghetto public. Public libraries collected thousands of books from Jewish libraries that had been shut down, including some that the Nazis had torched at the beginning of the Occupation.

Activists in Jewish youth movements were very important and had an impact on the lives of young people in the ghettos. In ghettos in the major cities—Warsaw, Lodz, Kraków, Vilnius, Kaunas, Bia?ystok—these activists were the most dynamic group, secretly maintaining informal education and cultural and welfare endeavors. They organized social activity groups for children and young people, evening literary events, theater troupes, and choirs. The youth movements and underground activists of the former Jewish political parties also published dozens of underground newspapers in the Warsaw ghetto, which were disseminated to other ghettos in occupied Poland. In this way, the underground activists managed to break through the isolation that the Germans had imposed on the Jews in ghettoizing them. They also formed the core that established the resistance organizations in the ghettos in 1941–1942.

In early spring 1942, the Germans began to evacuate the ghettos in Poland as part of a comprehensive extermination scheme known as Operation Reinhardt. The operation started in Lublin District and culminated in the deportation of 350,000 Jews from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka for extermination in summer 1942. On 19 July 1942, Heinrich Himmler issued a directive for the final annihilation of the Jews in the General Government by the end of 1942, with the exception of selected groups that would be left behind for labor in several major cities. In another directive, on 21 July 1943, Himmler ordered the deportation of these remaining Jews to concentration camps in the Baltic countries and parts of Byelorussia. The last ghetto to be liquidated was that of Lodz, where the remaining Jews, some 70,000 in number, were sent in August 1944 to the Auschwitz death camp.

See alsoHolocaust; Warsaw Ghetto.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

The Chronicle of the ?ód? Ghetto, 1941–1944. Edited by Lucjan Dobroszycki. Translated by Richard Lourie, Joachim Neugroschel et al. New Haven, Conn., 1984.

Czerniaków, Adam. The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków: Prelude to Doom. Edited by Raul Hilberg, Stanislaw Staron, and Josef Kermisz. Translated by Stanislaw Staron and the staff of Yad Vashem. New York, 1979.

Kahane, David. Lvov Ghetto Diary. Translated by Jerzy Michalowicz. Amherst, Mass., 1990.

Kruk, Herman. The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939–1944. Edited by Benjamin Harshav. Translated by Barbara Harshav. New Haven, Conn., 2002.

Ringelblum, Emanuel. Ksòvim fun Geto. 2 vols. Tel Aviv, 1985.

Secondary Sources

Berkley, George E. Hitler's Gift: The Story of Theresienstadt. Boston, 1993.

Browning, Christopher R. "Nazi Ghettoization Policy in Poland, 1939–1941." In his The Path to Genocide. Essays on Launching the Final Solution, 28–56 . Cambridge, U.K., 1992.

Gutman, Yisrael. The Jews of Warsaw, 1939–1943: Ghetto, Underground, Revolt. Translated by Ina Friedman. Bloomington, Ind., 1982.

Daniel Blatman