Ghetto
A ghetto is an area where people from a specific ethnic background or united in a given culture or religion live as a group,voluntarily or involuntarily, in milder or stricter seclusion. The word historically referred to restricted housing zones where Jews were required to live. However,since the life in ghetto invariably featured four specific attributes ( in various degrees of combination and severity ): "social ostracism," "economic hardship," "legal arbitrariness," and "security," the term now commonly labels any powerty-stricken or specific, by sociology defined, urban minority area.
The original ghetto was formed by the Jewish immigrants to Venice in 14th century, who settled in the place where former iron foundry ( 'getto' ) used to be. Other suggested etymologies include the Greek 'Ghetonia' ("neighborhood" ), Italian 'borghetto' for "small neighborhood" or the Hebrew word 'get', literally a "bill of divorce."
Jewish Ghettos in Europe
13th–19th Centuries
The first ghettos appeared in Italy, Germany, Spain, and Portugal, in the 13th century. It is worth noticing that the gated ghettos in Venice and in other European cities, was an affluent part of the town inhabited by merchants and moneylenders. Non-Jews were not allowed to live in this ghetto, nor were Jews allowed to leave, and the gates were locked at night. The attributes of social ostracism and security had probably played a combined role in this fact, as money lenders were certainly reaching the elites of the society which, in turn, wanted to have them under control. It also explains various ways in which ghettos were established in various cities. While the ghetto in Venice was officially established in 1516 after a long negotiations between the city and the Jews, to one of the infamous ghettos ( the one of Frankfurt ) were Jews simply compelled to move by a city ordinance of 1460.
Venetian Ghetto
The Venetian Ghetto was the area of Venice in which Jewish people were required to live under the Venetian Republic. From its name, the word "ghetto" is derived.
The Ghetto is an area of the Cannaregio sestiere of Venice. It is named for the iron foundries ("geto") located there in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Unlike much of Europe, the presence of Jews was usually tolerated in Venice from the late fourteenth century. Restrictions on their movement and permitted trades varied, but moneylending, running pawnshops, dealing in second hand goods and tailoring were common occupations. In 1516, the Venetian Senate voted to compel all Jews in the city to move to the area known as the Ghetto Nuovo. Surrounded by canals, the area was only linked to the rest of the city by two bridges, which were closed at night and during certain Christian festivals, when all Jews were required to stay in the Ghetto.
Despite the restrictions on movement, the Jewish population thrived, and in 1541, the quarter was enlarged to cover the neighbouring Ghetto Vecchio, and in 1633, the Ghetto Nuovissimo was also added.
The area had such a dense population that – uniquely in Venice – buildings rose to six or more stories. There were numerous benevolent institutions, and it is still home to five synagogues connected by a secret corridor. They are known for their interiors, the oldest (Schola Grande Tedesca) dating from 1528. Most having fairly plain exteriors, although the Scola Levantina is a grander, Baroque building. The Scola Spagnola contains the Museum of Hebrew Art.
Roman Ghetto
The Roman Ghetto was located in the area surrounded by today's Via del Portico d'Ottavia, Lungotevere dei Cenci, Via del Progresso and Via di Santa Maria del Pianto close to the Tiber and the Theater of Marcellus, in Rome, Italy.
Papal bull Cum nimis absurdum, promulgated by Pope Paul IV in 1555 segregated the Jews, who had lived freely in Rome since Antiquity, in a walled quarter with three gates that were locked at night, and subjected them to various restrictions on their personal freedom (like limits to the allowed professions), and degradations like compulsory Catholic sermons on the Jewish shabbat although to a lesser degree than in other European countries. The district lacked a well and flooded every winter. This "ghetto had two objects—to protect Christians from too close an association with persons of a different religion, and to protect the Jews from mobs or hooligans. The ghetto was welcome to some Jews because it protected the small community from the drain which must follow from assimilation to the majority and enabled special religious customs to be observed without interference...for three or four decades of the nineteenth century this was not a black mark to the papal government—Vienna, Prague, Venince—and further East, in Russia and Poland, their treatment could be rougher." [1]
When Napoleonic forces occupied Rome, the Ghetto was legally abolished (in 1808), but it was reinstated as soon as the Papacy regained control. In 1848, during the brief revolution, the Ghetto was abolished once more, again temporarily. The Jews had to petition annually for permission to live there, and were disabled from owning any property even in the Ghetto. They paid a yearly tax for the privilege; formality and tax survived until 1850.
They had to swear yearly loyalty to the Pope by the Arch of Titus (it celebrates the Roman sack of Jerusalem). Pope Leo XIII was less intransigent than Pius IX, and the city of Rome was able to tear down the Ghetto's walls in 1888 and demolish some houses, before the area was reconstructed around the new Synagogue.
The ghetto of Rome was the last remaining ghetto in Western Europe until its later reintroduction by Nazi Germany.
In 1555 Pope Paul IV created the Roman Ghetto and issued papal bull Cum nimis absurdum, forcing Jews to live in a specified area. According to historian Owen Chadwick, the Roman Ghetto "...had two objectives:to protect Christians from too close an association with persons of a different religion, and to protect the Jews from mobs or hooligans..." The ghetto was welcome to some Jews because it protected the small community from the drain which must follow from assimilation to the majority and enabled special religious customs to be observed without interference.
Much later on,Pope Pius V recommended that all the bordering states should set up ghettos, and at the beginning of the 17th century all the main towns had one (with the only exceptions being Livorno and Pisa; both in Italy ). In medieval Central Europe ghettos existed in Paris ,Frankfurt ,Mainz,Prague, and even further East, such as in Poland and Russia. There, however, the treatment of Jews was more arbitrary and "harsher" as the authotities very often withdrew the legal protection and left the ghettos open to the pogroms from the side of, sometimes even more impoverished, non-ghetto population.
The character of ghettos has varied through the ( good and bad ) times. There were time periods in wchich the ghetto featured relative affluence ( for instance in Venice in 16th century in Prague in 15th century).In other times, even the same ghettos, having lost political concessions or ( as in Prague ) money trade privileges, became impoverished.
Since Jews could not acquire land outside the ghetto, during periods of population growth,the ghettos landscape was transformed into narrow streets and tall, crowded houses. Residents had their own justice system. Around the ghetto stood walls that during pogroms were closed from the inside during Easter Week and from the outside during Christmas or Pesach.An attribute of social ostracism often resulted in that the ghetto residents needed passes to go outside of the bounds of the ghetto. They were socially isolated, although not necessarily culturally and cognitively ( they have their ownschool system based on synagogues ), sometimes they have to set up their own communal authority, and they were definitely kept in segregation which they sometimes needed and which, sometimes, benefited both sides.
Eventually, Jewish ghettos were progressively abolished, and their walls demolished in the 19th century, following the ideals of the French Revolution. Furthermore,some Western European countries with tolerant governments (such as Napoleon's France,or the United Kingdom) incited industrious Jews to immigrate. In the Papal States,the life in ghettos was made somewhat less restrictive under Pope Pius IX. They were completely abolished when the kingdom of Italy was established in 1861 and after the Papal States were overthrown in 1870, in which year the last ghetto in Western Europe was abolished, and the walls were physically torn down in 1888. In Russia,however, the Jewish Pale continued to exist until 1917.
Second World War
The Nazis re-instituted Jewish ghettos before and during the World War II in Eastern Europe. The above mentioned four attributes now changed drastically. The notion of Jews as a decadent race had been long established in the German society. It was started by philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte in 19th century and corroborated by Nietzsche and other proponents of the Prussian-cum-German superiority, such as Richard Wagner. With Hitler and his Nazi camarilla (who all pathologically hated Jews ) in power the "security and state control" was given clear priority as social and economic hardship became a norm and legality nonexistent. Ostensibly to save German Jews against the chauvinistic German-Nazi society, the ghettos, in which Jews were confined and later shipped to concentration camps, were newly reestablished by the German goverment. This had become the official state policy, especially when it appeared to be also a source of substantial enrichment of the Nazi government as the Jewish property was, generally, expropriated. This policy was extended to all countries under the Third Reich influence with most of the Jews confined into tightly packed areas of the cities in the Eastern Europe. Some of the most notorious ghettos were set up in Warsaw, Lublin, Lodz, Tuliszhkow, Radom,Opole, Kielce, and Krakow ( all of which on the Polish territory ) with Riga, Vilno, Vitebsk, Bialystok, Pinsk, Lvov, Smolensk in Russia and in Budapest (Hungary). As we said above, the social, economic, and legal attributes ceased to exist, all being supplanted by state control over life and death of every single German and European Jew.
For instance, starting in 1939, the Nazi regime began systematically move Polish Jews into designated areas of large Polish cities mentioned above. The first large ghetto at Tuliszkow was established in December 1939, followed by the Lodz Ghetto in April 1940, and the Warsaw Ghetto in October 1940 with many other ghettos following throughout 1940 and 1941. The ghettos were walled off ( just like in the mediaval times ) except now, any Jew found leaving was shot. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest of them all with 380,000 people while the Lodz Ghetto,second largest, was holding about 160,000 ihnabitants. The situation in the ghettos was brutal. In Warsaw, 30% of the population were forced to live in 2.4% of the city area, a density of 9.2 people per room. In the ghetto of Odrzywol, 700 people lived in an area previously occupied by 5 families making the density between 12 and 30 people per each room. As the Jews were not allowed out of the ghetto, they had to rely on food supplied by the Nazis. In Warsaw, this constituted 253 calories per Jew ( and day ) compared to 669 calories per Pole and 2,613 calories per German.With crowded living conditions, starvation diets, and little sanitation ( in the Lodz Ghetto full 95% of apartments had no sanitation, piped water or sewers ) hundreds of thousands of Jews died of disease and sratvation. In 1942 the Nazi government began Operation Reinhard ( Heydrich, the author of the "Final Solution of the European Jewish Problem" ) which meant systematic deportation to extermination camps during the Holocaust. The authorities deported Jews from everywhere in Europe to the ghettos of the East or directly to the extermination camps. Almost 300,000 people were deported from Warsaw Ghetto alone over the course of 52 days. In some of the ghettos ( Warsaw's was the most important and largest; it lasted almost two months ) the local resistance orhaniztions started uprisings. None were successful and the Jewish population of the ghettos were almpost entirely annihilated.
Warsaw Ghetto
The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest of the Jewish ghettos established by Nazi Germany in General Government during the Holocaust in World War II. In the three years of its existence, starvation, disease and deportations to concentration camps and extermination camps dropped the population of the ghetto from an estimated 450,000 to 37,000. The Warsaw Ghetto was the scene of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, one of the first mass uprisings against Nazi occupation in Europe.
Formation of the Ghetto Plans to isolate the Jewish population of Warsaw and its nearby suburbs in a ghetto first circulated immediately after the German occupation of Poland in 1939. At the time, the German administration of the General Government had not been fully organized, and there were conflicting interests among the three major players: the civilian administration, the military, and the SS. Under these circumstances, the Jewish Council, or Judenrat, headed by Adam Czerniakow, was able to delay the establishment of the Ghetto by one year, mainly by appealing to the military to consider how Jews were a valuable labor resource.
The Warsaw Ghetto was finally established by the German Governor-General Hans Frank on October 16, 1940. At this time, the population of the Ghetto was estimated to be about 380,000 people, about 30% of the population of Warsaw. However, the size of the Ghetto was about 2.4% of the size of Warsaw. Nazis then closed off the Warsaw Ghetto from the outside world on November 16th that year, building a wall. During the next year and a half, Jews from smaller cities and villages were brought into the Ghetto, while diseases (especially typhoid) and starvation kept the inhabitants at about the same number. Average food rations in 1941 for Jews in Warsaw were limited to 253 kcal, compared to 669 kcal for Poles and 2,613 kcal for Germans.
Destruction of the Ghetto
In early 1942, the Nazis made the decision at the Wannsee conference to exterminate the Jews of Europe. The first phase of the Final Solution was Operation Reinhard, with the goal of destroying the Jews of Poland. Construction started on the Treblinka extermination camp in May of 1942, and it was completed in July, when the wholesale liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto was to begin.
On July 22, 1942, the Judenrat was informed that all Jews except those working in German factories, Jewish hospital staff, members of the Judenrat and their families, and members of the Jewish police force and their families would be "deported to the East". The Jewish police were to deliver 6,000 Jews to the Umschlagplatz train station each day, and failure to do so would result in immediate execution of some one hundred hostages, including Czerniakow's wife. After failing to persuade the Germans to change their plans, or at least spare the orphans of the Ghetto, Czerniakow killed himself on July 23, 1942, leaving behind a note, "I can no longer bear all this. My act will prove to everyone what is the right thing to do." On July 23, members of the Jewish underground met, but decided not to resist, believing that the Jews were really being sent to work camps, rather than their death.
As ordered on July 22, 1942, mass deportations of the inhabitants started; in the next 52 days (till September 12, 1942) about 300,000 people were taken to the Treblinka extermination camp. During the remaining days of July, the Jewish Ghetto Police were responsible for carrying out the deportations, a total of 64,606 Jews were transported to the death camps that month. From August onward, the Germans and their allies took a more direct role in the deportations, with over 135,000 Jews deported in August alone.
The final phase of the first mass deportation happened between September 6 and September 10, 1942, when 35,885 Jews were deported, 2,648 were shot on the spot and 60 committed suicide. After this selection approximately 55,000 to 60,000 Jews remained alive in the Ghetto, either working in German factories within the Ghetto or living in hiding.
During the next six months, what was left of several political organizations was brought together under the name ŻOB (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, Jewish Fighting Organization), headed by Mordechaj Anielewicz, with 220-500 persons; another 250-450 were organized in the ŻZW (Żydowski Związek Walki, Jewish Fighting Union). The members of these groups had no illusions about the German plans and wanted to die fighting. Their armament consisted largely of handguns, homemade explosives and Molotov cocktails; the ŻZW was better armed as a result of better contacts to the Polish underground outside the Ghetto.
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the destruction of the Ghetto
On January 18, 1943, the first instance of armed resistance occurred when the Germans started the second expulsion of the Jews. The Jewish fighters had some success: the expulsion stopped after four days and the ŻOB and ŻZW resistance organizations took control of the Ghetto, building dozens of fighting posts and operating against Jewish collaborators. During the next three months, all inhabitants of the Ghetto prepared for what they realized would be a final struggle. The final battle started on the eve of Passover, April 19, 1943. Jewish partisans shot and threw grenades at German and allied patrols from alleyways, sewers, house windows, and even burning buildings. The Nazis responded by shelling the houses block by block and rounding up or killing any Jew they could capture. Significant resistance ended on April 23, and the uprising ended on May 16. During the fighting approximately 7,000 of the Jewish partisans were killed and 6,000 were burnt alive or gassed in bunkers. The remaining 50,000 people were sent to German death camps, mostly to Treblinka extermination camp.
Social and cultural life in the ghetto
Despite the enormous hardships of day-to-day life, the Judenrat and youth movements succeeded in organizing various institutions and organizations in the Ghetto to meet the various needs of the inhabitants. The major concerns were overcrowding, hunger, inactivity, and work detail. In response, the Judenrat took the bulk of the responsibility for allocating housing-with an average of seven people per room, while charitable organizations such as CENTOS organized free soup kitchens: at one point as much as two-thirds of the Ghetto's population was provided for by these soup kitchens. For a brief time, the Judenrat was also permitted to organize four elementary schools (grades 1-3) for ghetto children, but there was also an extensive underground school system run by the various youth movements, which covered all grades (often disguised as soup kitchens) and even offered university-level courses on Sundays.
The Judenrat was also responsible for the hospitals and orphanages that operated in the Ghetto. One orphanage, headed by the pediatrician and author Janusz Korczak, was run as a model democracy, called the Republic of Children. This and the other orphanages were evacuated in 1942 and their occupants and staff were sent to Treblinka.
Cultural life included a lively press in three languages (Yiddish, Polish, and Hebrew), religious activity (including a church for Jews who had converted to Catholicism), and lectures, concerts, theater, and art exhibits. In many cases, the artists and performers were prominent figures in Polish cultural life during the war.
One of the most remarkable cultural efforts in the Ghetto was headed by the historian Emmanuel Ringelblum and his group Oyneg Shabbos, which collected documents by people of all ages and positions to create a social history of life in the Ghetto. In all, it is estimated that some 50,000 documents were collected, including essays on various aspects of ghetto life, diaries, memoirs, art work, underground journals, drawings, school work, posters, play bills, recipes, notes from lectures, etc. These documents were hidden in three separate batches, two of which have since been recovered and provide an invaluable insight into life in the Ghetto. Plans are now underway to find the third cache, which is believed to be buried under what is now the Chinese Embassy in Warsaw.
Łódź Ghetto
The Łódź Ghetto was the second-largest ghetto (after the Warsaw Ghetto) established for Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland. Situated in the town of Łódź and originally intended as a temporary gathering point for Jews, the ghetto was transformed into a major industrial center, providing much needed supplies for Nazi Germany and especially for the German Army. Because of its remarkable productivity, the ghetto managed to survive until August 1944, when the remaining population was transported to Auschwitz. It was the last ghetto in Poland to be liquidated.
Establishment of the Ghetto
When German forces occupied Łódź in September 1939, the city had a population of 672,000 people, over one-third of them (233,000) Jews. Łódź was annexed directly to the Warthegau region of the Reich and renamed Litzmannstadt. As such, the city was to undergo a process of Aryanization: the Jewish population was to be expelled to the Generalgouvernement and the Polish population was to be reduced significantly and transformed into a slave labor force.
First mention of the establishment of a ghetto appears in an order dated 10 December 1939, which spoke of a temporary gathering point for local Jews to ease the deportation process. By 1 October 1940, the deportation was to have been completed, and the city was to have been Judenrein (free of Jews).
This set in motion a long series of anti-Jewish measures (as well as anti-Polish measures), by which Jews were stripped of their businesses and possessions, and forced to wear the yellow badge. Since the invasion, many Jews, particularly the intellectual and political leadership, fled to the area of the General government or eastward to Soviet-occupied Poland. On 8 February 1940, Jewish residence was limited to specific streets in the Old City of Łódź and the adjacent Batuny Quarter, the areas that would later become the ghetto. A Nazi-sponsored pogrom on 1 March in which many Jews were killed, expediated the relocation, and over the next two months, wooden and wire fences were erected around the area to cut it off from the rest of the city. Jews were formally sealed into the ghetto on 1 May of that year.
Because so many Jews had fled the city, the population of the ghetto upon its creation was 164,000. Over the coming years, Jews from Central Europe and as far away as Luxembourg were deported to the ghetto, and there was also a small Romany population that was resettled there (see: Porajmos).
To ensure that there was no contact between the Jewish and non-Jewish population of the city, two German police units were designated to patrol the perimeter of the ghetto. Within the ghetto itself, a Jewish police force was created to ensure that no Jews attempted to escape. Any Jews caught outside the ghetto could, by law, be shot on sight. On 10 May orders went into effect prohibiting any commercial contact between Jews and non-Jews in Łódź under similarly severe penalties.
In other ghettos throughout Poland, a thriving underground economy based on the smuggling of food and manufactured goods managed to emerge between the ghetto and the outside world. In Łódź, however, this was practically impossible, and Jews were entirely dependent on the German authorities for food, medicine, and other vital supplies. To further exacerbate the situation, the only legal currency in the ghetto was a specially created ghetto currency. Faced with starvation, Jews eagerly traded their remaining possessions and currency for this scrip, thereby abetting the process by which they were dispossessed of their few remaining belongings.
The End of the Łódź Ghetto
The ultimate fate of the Łódź Ghetto was debated among the highest ranking Nazis as early as 1943. Heinrich Himmler called for the final liquidation of the ghetto, with a handful of workers relocated to a concentration camp outside Lublin, while Armaments Minister Albert Speer advocated the ghetto's continued existence as a source of cheap labour, especially necessary now that the tide of the war was turning against Germany.
In the summer of 1944, it was finally decided to commence with the gradual liquidation of the remaining population. From June 23 to July 14, about 7,000 Jews were deported to Chelmno, where they were killed. As the front approached, however, it was decided to transport the remaining Jews, including Rumkowski, to Auschwitz. By late August, the ghetto was eliminated. Some 900 people managed to hide among the ruins, where they survived until the Soviet army liberated Łódź. Altogether, just 10,000 of the 204,000 Jews who passed through the Łódź Ghetto survived the war.
Resistance in the Łódź Ghetto
The peculiar situation of the Łódź Ghetto prevented any manifestations of armed resistance, which have become synonymous with the final days of the Warsaw Ghetto, Vilna Ghetto, Białystok Ghetto, and other ghettos in Nazi-occupied Poland. Rumkowski's overbearing autocracy, the failure of attempts to smuggle food—and consequently, arms—into the ghetto, and the conviction that productivity would ensure survival precluded any attempts at armed revolt.
Nevertheless, Swiss sociologist Werner Rings identified four distinct forms of resistance that civilian populations engaged in throughout Nazi-occupied Europe, with offensive resistance constituting the final form of resistance. The other three categories: symbolic, polemic, and defensive, can all be found in the ghetto, and there are even indications of offensive resistance in terms of sabotage.
Symbolic resistance is evident in the rich cultural and religious life that was maintained in the ghetto throughout the early years. Initially, there were 47 schools and day care facilities in the ghetto, which continued to operate despite the harshest conditions. When the school buildings were converted to living space to house the 20,000 Jewish transported to the ghetto from Central Europe, alternatives frameworks were established, particularly for younger children whose mothers were forced to work. In addition to educating the young, schools attempted to ensure that children received proper nourishment despite the meager rations they were allotted. After the schools were shut down in 1941, many of the ressorts continued to maintain illegal daycare centers for children whose mothers were working.
Political organizations also continued to exist in the ghetto, and even engaged in strikes when rations were cut. In one instance, a strike got so out of hand that the German police were called upon to suppress it. At the same time, there was also a rich cultural life, including active theaters, concerts, and banned religious gatherings, all of which countered official attempts at dehumanization. Much information about cultural activities can be found in the ghetto archive, organized by the Judenrat to document day-to-day life in the ghetto.
The archive can also be considered a form of polemic resistance, intended to record life in the ghetto for future generations.
The photographers of the statistical department of the Judenrat, besides their official work, illegally took photos of everyday scenes and atrocities.
One of them, Henryk Ross, managed to bury the negatives and dig them up after liberation.
It is because of this archive that we have a real sense of what life in the ghetto was like. Unlike many other images from that period, some of the photographs taken in the ghetto are in color, enhancing the already vivid portrait of ghetto life. As one diarist wrote: "We must observe and protect everything with a critical eye, draw sketches of everything that occurs ..." so that they would be remembered. The archivists also began creating a ghetto encyclopedia and even a lexicon of the local slang that emerged to describe their daily lives.
Although it was illegal, the Jewish population even maintained several radios with which they were able to keep abreast of events in the outside world. At first, the radio could only receive German news broadcasts, which is why it is codenamed "Liar" in many of the diaries from that period. Among the news bulletins spread around the ghetto was the Allied invasion of Normandy on the day it occurred.
Defensive resistance in the ghetto includes avoiding the final transports and helping others to do the same. Some 900 Jews managed to survive in the ghetto from the final liquidation until the Soviets finally liberated the city. Yet even before the final deportation, members of youth movements shared meager rations with friends who refused to report for deportation, allowing them to survive even after they were no longer entitled to food rations.
Since work was essential to the ghetto's survival, it seems inevitable that sabotage was common. In the latter years, leftist workers adopted the slogan P.P. (pracuj powoli, or "go slow") to hinder their work on behalf of the Wehrmacht. When a bunker with Jews hiding in it was discovered, one of the people assaulted Hans Biebow, Rumkowski's direct superior in the Nazi administration.
There is evidence in diaries that some form of armed resistance was discussed in the final days of the ghetto, but it never materialized as it did in other ghettos, because of the aforementioned considerations.
Krakow Ghetto
The Jewish ghetto in Kraków (Cracow) was one of the five main ghettos created by the Nazis in the General Government, during their occupation of Poland during World War II. It was a staging point to begin dividing "able workers" from those who would later be deemed worthy of death. Before the war, Kraków was an influential cultural center for the 60,000-80,000 Jews that resided there.
Overview Persecution of the Jewish population of Kraków began soon after the Nazis occupied the city in September 1939 during the Polish September Campaign. Jews were obliged to take part in forced labour (September 1939); in November 1939 all Jews 12 years or older were required to wear identifying armbands; throughout Kraków, synagogues were ordered closed and all their relics and valuables turned over to the Nazi authorities.
By May 1940, the German occupation authority announced that Kraków should become the "cleanest" city in the General Government (occupied, but unannexed portions of Poland) and ordered a massive deportation of Jews from the city. Of the more than 68,000 Jews in Kraków when the Germans invaded, only 15,000 workers and their families were permitted to remain in the city. All other Jews were ordered out of the city, to be resettled in surrounding areas.
The Kraków ghetto was formally established on March 3, 1941. Because the ghetto was set up in the Podgórze district, not in the Jewish district of Kazimierz, displaced Polish families from the area took up residence in the former Jewish dwellings away from the ghetto. Before the creation of the ghetto, 3,000 people lived in the Podgórze district. This expanded initially to 15,000 Jews, all crammed into 30 streets, 320 residential buildings, and 3,167 rooms. As a result, one apartment was allocated to every four families, and many less fortunate lived on the street.
The ghetto was surrounded by walls that kept it isolated from the surrounding city. All windows and doors that gave onto the "Aryan" side were ordered bricked up, although four guarded entrances allowed traffic to pass through. In a grim foreshadowing of the near future, these walls contained panels in the shape of tombstones. Small sections of the wall remain today.
Leftist militants in an Akiva group joined forces with Zionists to form the Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB, Polish: Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa), and organize resistance in the ghetto, supported by Polish restistance of Armia Krajowa. The group carried out a variety of resistance activities including the bombing of an officers club in Kraków. Unlike in Warsaw, their efforts did not lead to a general uprising before the ghetto was liquidated.
From May 30, 1942 onward, the Nazis implemented systematic deportations from the ghetto to surrounding concentration camps. Thousands of Jews were transported over the succeeding months.
On March 13-March 14, 1943 the Nazis carried out the final 'liquidation' of the ghetto under the command of SS-Sturmbannführer Willi Haase. 8,000 Jews, deemed able to work, were transported to the Plaszow labor camp. Those deemed unable to work— some 2,000 Jews— were killed in the streets of the ghetto on those days. Any remaining were sent to die in Auschwitz.
Notable persons
Movie director Roman Polanski, a survivor of the ghetto, recalls his experience there as a young child in his memoir, Roman. The early months, Polanski describes, resembled normalcy although the peacefulness was sometimes punctuated by fear. Town residents dined out, listened to town bands, and children such as Polanski socialized in the snow.
Roma Ligocka, Polish artist and author who as a small girl was saved and survived the Ghetto. Many years later after seeing herself portrayed in the movie Schindlers List wrote a novel The Girl in the Red Coat: A Memoir which is based on her personal experience.
German war profiteer Oskar Schindler came to Kraków because of the labor available from the ghetto. He selected employees to work in his enamelware plant, and came to see them sympathetically. In 1942 Schindler watched ghetto inhabitants brutally rounded up for transportation to Płaszów, and subsequently worked furiously to save Jews interned there, events portrayed in the film Schindler's List. In an especially dramatic event, 300 of Schindler's workers were deported to the Auschwitz death camp despite his efforts, and he personally intervened to save them.
Post-War Ghettos in the World
South African & African Ghettos
In South Africa, The Group Areas Act (27 April 1950) barred people of particular races from various urban areas. One of the most notorious “black ghettos” has been Soweto, a mostly black urban area to the south west of Johannesburg. During the apartheid regime, Soweto was constructed for the specific purpose of housing African people who were then living in areas designated by the government for white settlement,such as the multi-racial area called Sophiatown. Today, Soweto is among the poorest parts of Johannesburg; however, there have been recent signs of economic improvement and Soweto has become a centre for nightlife. There are other ghetto parts of South Africa like KwaMashu in Durban in the KZN province. Similar “resettlements” into specific "ghetto-like" areas were quite common elsewhere in Africa, especially along the Zambezi River. Before the Kariba Dam was constructed in 1956,the whole tribes were forcibly moved into economically unyielding inland. Here, just as in Soweto, the economic and social aspects were supposed to be quickly outweighed by over-all economic boom and, thus, social upgrade with the “control and security” aspect practically negligible. It was the combination of the state governments’ wasteful management and neglect that had prolonged the unnecessary suffering for several decades.
Ghettos in the United States
In the United States, between the abolition of slavery and the passing of the civil rights laws of the 1960s, discriminatory notions (sometimes codified in law) often forced urban African Americans to live in specific neighborhoods, which became known as "ghettos". Due to segregation laws,in existence in many US states until the Civil Rights Movement and the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,African-Americans of all economic levels had to live in ghettos such as Bronzeville in Chicago and Harlem in New York City. In 1960s enacted civil rights laws allowed wealthier African Americans to emigrate to formerly all-white areas. The result of this was that the economic bases of many ghettos collapsed, leaving them to be zones of below-average wealth, poorly-maintained housing,and high crime. By the 1970's, the Robert Taylor Homes, located in Chicago's Bronzeville, was home to the poorest and third-poorest census tracts in the United States.
The formation of the ghetto and the black underclass forms one of most controversial issues in sociology. One of the earliest studies of the modern phenomenon of ghetto formation was Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1965 work The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, usually simply referred to as the Moynihan Report. The Report pointed out that black welfare cases and unemployment were beginning to "disaggregate", that is, the number of black welfare cases were rising while employment was falling. The Report also pointed out that a quarter of all black children were born to unmarried women, that the percentage was rising and described the ghetto as a "tangle of pathologies", predicting, at the same time, that conditions would worsen, despite the Great Society.
For almost two decades after the Moynihan Report, there was little discussion of the family conditions in the ghetto. The 1980s began to see a revival of this sociological question, as well as the development of new theories on why the ghetto emerged.Charles Murray argues in Losing Ground that Great Society liberalism created the hopeless poor.Murray claims that the eligibility of single women for welfare encouraged women to have babies out of wedlock,and that welfare discouraged all from working.Murray concluded his book with a call for the abolition of welfare.On the other hand,William Julius Wilson argues in The Truly Disadvantaged that easy access to welfare had little effect on women's decisions on childbearing.Wilson instead claims that the flight of low-skilled manufacturing jobs to the suburbs and the South left blacks economically isolated in the ghetto due to this "spatial mismatch".Wilson thus explains the high percentage of out-of-wedlock births by the lack of marriageable ( i.e. employed single )men.Yet another theory of ghetto formation offers Roger Waldinger in Still the Promised City? detailing a mismatch between the wages which blacks desire and the wages which low-skilled jobs actually pay.In looking at New York City, Waldinger points out that new immigrants living in similar “ghettos” ( Koreans, Chinese , Pakistanis, Dominicans, etc. ) often do better than American-born blacks. Waldinger also notices that southern-born and Caribbean-born blacks have higher incomes than northern-born blacks. Waldinger argues that immigrant groups benefit by establishing nepotistic niches for themselves,and use niches for mutual help,something blacks have in most cases been unable to do.Waldinger also says that even though hotels and restaurants may offer very low wages,they still outclass wages in Mexico, rural China, or Africa; thus, immigrants readily accept them.In contrast,unskilled northern-born blacks,who hope to do something better than their parents,disdain these jobs and may often wind up working outside the legitimate economy.Altogether,it appears that the authorities are trying,with variable success,to improve social and economic conditions ( thus the first two ghetto-life attributes ) while universal legality,at least in theory,holds.There is also,at least at this moment ,no need to extend state(s) security presence in the US “ghettos” except as a deterrent to the alarmingly high crime rate which follows from the above discussed “sociological exposes” into the ethnic and cultural life of visible minorities trying to explain “ghetto mentality” in America.
While the American “melting pot” have,more or less,pushed the question of ethnic origin,different cultures and religion of individual strata of society from the all-important attributes to a lower importance - some of it came back with “ethnic profiling” after 9/11 though - quite different situation have developed in Europe in the last three decades.
European Ghettos
Applying the definitional elements proposed above,there are "ghettos" in most ( if not all ) of the industrialized European countries at this moment.There are, of course,no Jewish ghettos anymore . Those who have survived the Holocaust completely assimilated within the World population during the last century and a half.The problem in Europe now are the visible minorities ( i.e. recent,and even second if not third generation immigrants ).In France the poorer banlieues,or suburbs,especially those of Paris, house an impoverished population largely of North African Muslim and Black African origin in large medium- and high-rise building developments known as "Cités". They were built in the 1960's and 1970's in the industrial suburbs to the north and east of Paris, especially in the department of Seine-St-Denis (also known from its departmental code as "le 93" or "le 9-3"), and in other French cities like Villeurbanne near Lyon. They are similar in style and have similar problems as the large inner-city urban renewal projects in the US (like Cabrini Green in Chicago). Though most of the young were born in France, and (like many of those who weren't) are citizens, this North-African and African population is routinely discriminated against in the job market, as well as by the police. (There are, however, affluent banlieues around Paris as well, such as the department of Hauts-de-Seine to the west.) The recent riots in France largely originated within the ghettos as a reaction to legal discrimination and chauvinistic attitudes of the French society that feels these ( mostly Moslim )minorities are becoming a threat to their secularism . So , although the generally poor economic situation drives home the social hardship, it is mostly the state legal, control and security attributes that incited the unrests in the society . On the other hand, most of the recent African immigrants ( from Ivory Cost, Dakar, etc. ) prefer living in the French ghettos because of complete legal breakdown and chaos in their home countries. They feel that even biased but functioning legal system is better than none. In Germany, the, so called, “post-war economic miracle” happened with considerable help from Turkish immigrants. They came, officially invited in, to boost much needed labor force in heavy machinery sectors and, as in France, they settled in “ghettos”. They did not seem to mind and certainly their social, economic and over-all life dramatically improved ; as long as the “economic miracle” lasted, of course . With increasing unemployment in the machinery sector and other industries, the state had to step in and, to pre-empt riots, offered the Turkish families reasonable settlements if they return to their homeland.
Roma Problem : Czech Republic & Slovakia
Roma, their basically nomadic way of life and hence their reluctance to stay and try to assimilate in any one country - even if we refrain from the absence of common language ( let alone any European one ) and any marketable skills - have been causing problems for all Eastern & Central European countries’ bureaucracies for centuries. Their nomadic way kept saving them from being put into ghettos ( or worse still, concentration camps ) until after the WWII. Afterwards, the East European states were forced to do something. They categorized the Roma as a "social group" or "problem" and thus legitimized intrusive state intervention to deal with the problem. Another aspect of the redefinition of Roma identity was the transformation of ethnic and cultural differences into social deviance. Roma children who did not speak the host language very well were treated as mentally deficient and put into special classes within which they could advance only to the fourth grade. Young Roma thus became increasingly alienated and isolated from the host society, experiencing an enforced "social retardation" which led to withdrawal, aggression, and other forms of antisocial behavior. Perhaps the most radical instance of such intervention was the policy of social sterilization adopted by the Slovak government between 1980 and 1990 to curb what it called "unhealthy high fertility rates" among the Roma. Since the 1989 revolutions in those countries, harassment and prejudice towards the Roma of Eastern Europe have intensified along with a sharp decrease in economic status. A 1991 Times Mirror survey found that Europeans in overwhelming numbers expressed contempt for Roma. The survey found the similar negative attitude in 59% of Germans, 91 % of Czechoslovaks, 71 % of Bulgarians, 79% of Hungarians, and 50% of Spaniards. 1994 Bulgarian statistics indicate levels of prejudice against Roma which are higher than against Blacks in the United States south in the 1950's (Kanev 1995). The difference from “standard racism” exhibited elsewhere, the Roma problems are not solely in the racism displayed towards them, but in their long-standing historical and sociological isolation.
This is just a preamble to what is going on in the Czech Republic , Slovakia and other Eastern European countries. A few Roma ghettos had appeared in the Czech Republic within the last ten years and the trend continues. These ghettos are inhabited by Roma who move there both voluntarily or involuntarily (municipalities often try to relocate them from other areas). Majority of the people is unemployed and uneducated, crime rate is high. As ghetto appears, non-Roma people move away. Most infamous ghetto in the Czech Republic is Chánov (part of city Most). Other city with neighborhoods slowly transforming into ghettos is, for example, Karviná. In the case of Roma , there are virtually all four attributes of their hardship at play . Legally very tentative, social and economic hardhip on the rise, and state relocating them into ghettos, allegedly to protect them from chauvinistic attitudes of the society, in reality not knowing what to do with them. Hence, Roma, as the situation looks now, have three options. They can choose either total assimilation or total separation on their own now . The third alternative, representing an entirely new political possibility : a trans-European nationality, is rather a matter for the European Union and its parliament to decide.
Cultural Life and the Ghetto
It is often said that great art is born out of suffering. So it is not necessarily a coincidence that great artists lived and still live in the ghetto. Ghettos often became known as vibrant cultural centers, for example the late 19th century Paris, or Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s. Artists such as Bob Marley, Ice Cube, Naughty By Nature, The Fugees, John Lee Hooker, Nina Simone, Cab Calloway, and Tupac Shakur were born and raised in ghettos, and much of their music comes from their own suffering, experiences and life in the ghetto or their own experiences with desegregation, eg. Bob Marley's "No Woman, No Cry", Nina Simone's "Mississippi Goddamn", John Lee Hooker's "Rent Blues", Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five's "The Message", Ice Cube's "3 Strikes You In", Eminem's "8 Mile" and Calloway's "Minnie The Moocher".
As this is certainly true of the post-war ( i.e. post-WWII-war ) ghettos, the culture ( and sometimes a world-class cultural events happened in the Nazi-run ghettos during the war. Apart from the standard printing activity , usually in three languages (Yiddish, Polish, and Hebrew), religious activities (including a church for Jews who had converted to Catholicism), and lectures, concerts, theater, and art exhibits. In many cases, the artists and performers were prominent figures in Polish cultural life during the war. In Terezin Ghetto ( in the then Protektorat Bohmen und Mohren (i.e. Czech & Moravian part of the pre-war Czechoslovak Republic ) they succeeded to put together extremely good symphonic orchestra under the conductor Karel Ancerl , who after the WWII conducted The Czech Filharmonic Orchestra, and still later, in the 70s the Toronto Symphonic Orchestra.
And, perhaps, the best example yet. It is generally known that the renaissance, actually the literary historians even say the "golden era," of the Czech & Slovak literature of post-war period was happening during 70s - 80s in Czechoslovakia under the brutal Communist regime. There, for several hundred intellectuals ( writers , scientists and artists ) who signed on and became members of the, so called, “Chartist Movement,” the Czech State Security Police ( modelled after the infamous Russian KGB ) made the following harrowing conditions. They were kicked out of work, forbidden to publish, shadowed by agents for 24 hours day after day ( and hence ostracized by the general public because of the non-stop police presence ), and virtually forced to meet only each other. In other words, all the definitional prerogatives of a classic ghetto - they actually coined the term themselves - were there and yet the best work by : writer Ludvik Vaculik, playwrights Pavel Kohout, and ( former Czech president ) Vaclav Havel, scientist Prof. Vaclav Cerny and many others, were done during the “ghetto period.” And, again, this ghetto had all four attributes in full force : total social and economic depression , no legal rights whatsoever ( actually the police could imprisoned anybody anytime ; even without the trial ), and total control of their every movement, and that of the rest of the population , all the time .
External links
- Kraków Ghetto history
- About Kraków Ghetto in Polish with valuable historical photos
- Schindler's Krakow - modern-day photographs
- Overview of Lodz ghetto's history
- A treatment of ghetto-culture and living conditions at wwww.urbanology.org
- Venetian Ghetto map and history
- Roman Ghetto described
- Warsaw Ghetto Liquidation
- Documents and information about the Warsaw Ghetto from the Jewish Virtual Library
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