The Warsaw Ghetto

After the German Army had captured Poland in World War II, one of the first actions was to begin to separate all Jews into an area of the city with a previously high concentration of Jewish residents. On April 1, 1940, construction of a wall was begun to seal off the section of the city. The wall was almost 10 feet tall and topped with barbed wire, and anyone attempting to escape was shot. The wall was completed and the Warsaw Ghetto was closed off with movement into and out of the ghetto extremely limited.

The population of the ghetto reached over 400,000 people crammed into an area of 840 acres. The Germans tightly controlled the food allowed into the ghetto, with less than 200 calories allowed for each Jewish resident. The crowded conditions and lack of medical care encouraged the spread of diseases like typhus. People were literally dying in the streets and on the sidewalks. Over 100,000 died before the Germans began shipping Jews to concentration camps.

Still there was a whole separate community illegally functioning out of sight of the Germans. Hospitals, soup kitchens, schools and orphanages all gave the residents some sense of normalcy. That normalcy began to disappear July to September 1942 when the Germans began shipping Jews out of the ghetto to supposed relocation camps. Those camps were nonexistent as the trains carried up to 300,000 deportees to Treblinka concentration camp for extermination.

When word of this got back to the ghetto, a resistance movement, ZOB, was formed. When the Germans returned to the ghetto to begin further deportations in January 1943, they were met with armed resistance. The Germans withdrew after four days of fighting to prepare for the final assault on the ghetto. On April 19, 1943, several thousand German troops returned and systematically began the block-by-block destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. The operation concluded with the destruction of the Great Synagogue of Warsaw on May 16, 1943. German reports claimed that over 56,000 Jews had been killed or shipped to the concentration camps by the end of this battle.

Jack Dragoni attended Boston College and served in the U.S. Army in Berlin and Vietnam. He lives in Chaffee, Missouri.