The name came from a Jewish quarter in Venice.  The Germans observed closely the establishment of ghettos as a temporary measure to control the Jews.  With  the start of the "Final Solution'', in 1942, Germans destroyed the ghettos and deported the Jews to extermination camps where they were killed. during WW2, Jews were forced to live in ghettos.  The first ghetto was set up in Piotrkow, Poland in 1939.  The death rate was very high due to starvation and disease.  The Warsaw Ghetto was Europe's largest ghetto. It housed about 445,000 Jews. It functioned as a transition before the Jews were deported to their deaths.   The smallest ghetto housed about 3,000 people.  Lodz, the second largest, held about 160,000 people.  Despite heroic efforts, all but about 2,000 of Warsaw's Jews were killed, as a result of inhuman ghetto conditions and from deportations to death camps.
Some names that are stamped into history are Treblinka, Auschwitz, Birkenau,  Dachau,  Chelan, Sobibor, Belzec, and Majdanek. Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were three components of Aktion Rhinehard.   In ghettos, some members of Jewish resistance staged armed uprisings.   The largest uprising in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943. In 1944, the Nazis completed the destruction of the last major ghetto in Lodz.   In Hungary, ghettoization did not begin until spring of 1944. After the German invasion, it took less than 3 months to deport nearly 440,000 Jews from the ghettos in Hungary.
There were a lot of prisoners of war but over half of them were Jews.  About 200,000 Jewish prisoners, from Allied forces, came into German hands.  A camp for the prisoners was called the Poniatowa.  Soon it became a forced labor camp for the Jews.  Most camps were ghettos or special labor camps set up by the SS. When Germany entered Poland, in 1939, the Jews were forced to work in terrible conditions,  in those camps. Often the lack of food, hardship, and beatings led the workers to their death.
Concentration camps were camps of imprisonment used in the Nazi system of oppression. few survived the brutal conditions including forced labor and starvation. In extermination camp, in Poland, where 3.5 million Jews were killed as part of the "Final Solution''.  Also, about six million Jews were murdered throughout Europe. They were killed either near their homes by firing squads or transported to concentration camps where they were worked to death or were gassed.  When the SS started using Poniatowa for a forced labor camp, 16,00-18,000 Jews were deported from Warsaw to that camp. Of the approximately 6 million Jews that were killed in the Holocaust, more than half were killed in the Nazi Death Camp between 1942 and 1945.
The Erntefest , was a one-day massacre. Almost 15,000 Jews were shot to death in a single day. On November 4, 1943, they began this and destroyed Poniatowa.  Prisoners who resisted were burnt alive inside a large building  called barracks.  There were only a few survivors who escaped the camp before it was totally liquidated.
In the late summer of 1944 there were 7.6 million prisoners and workers of war.   They were officially reported as working territory of the ''Greater German Reich''.  In addition to being the first step to extermination the Nazi ghettos used Jewish labor.  The second a worker was seen to be working below his accepted level then his fate was either a bullet in the head.  Or a ''Deportation to the East'', where death camps awaited him.
 
Forced Labor and The Camps
The Pietrasza is a place where Jews were taken away from their homes in Bialysok and shot on it. There was approximately 4000 Jews who were shot there.  The Jewish colony wiped out about 2500 to 3000 Jews that were killed. There were about 35,000 that were taken to concentration camps.  The remainder, around 3000, were taken to Majdan-Tatarski, where they soon were killed in shabby buildings.

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People work in Nazi Death Camps.
The task of liquidating the Jews at Lwow was decided.  Between August 10-22, 40 to50 thousand Jews were slaughtered.  And during that same month about 60,000 Jews were murdered in the Dabrowa coalmining area.  A total of 25,000 died or were killed by 1940. Of the 60,000 Jewish enlisted men held in the Lublin-Lipowa camp for extermination, only a few hundred survived the war.  
 The food  was probably the best thing there, well between forced labor and gas chambers it was, even though it was really bad.  The amount of food depended on how well or how bad you worked.  Each only got one bowl of soup, which was mostly water.  The usual rations of one loaf of bread for five days.  Later it was a loaf of bread for seven days.  With a small amount of vegetables and brown water, that was supposed to be coffee.  When ghetto residents started feeling hunger they became suspicious of Rumkowski and his officials.  Rumors went around blaming him for their lack of food.  Saying that he dumped all the useful food on purpose.  Each month and each day the residents became very thin and afflicted with dysentery, tuberculosis, and typhus while Rumkowski seemed to fatten and remained healthy, just made suspicions.

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      Starving Poles carving up a dead horse.
In Auschwitz 95,000 died, 89,000 were gassed on arrival, and only 110,000 survived. By the time Himmler had stop the shooting, in the fall of 1942, they had already killed approximately 1.5 million.  So in Auschwitz a total number of Jews killed was 1.684 million.  Six death or extermination camps were constructed in Poland. The main purpose of these camps was the methodical killing of millions of innocent people.
 
Children of the Ghettos
After the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich and the destruction of the Czech town of Lidice, 88 children from there were sent to Chelmno and murdered.  Later Jews were no longer allowed in public places such as cinemas, libraries, and zoos.  Also, they couldn't attend sporting events or use public sporting facilities  Children still lived within the security of their homes with their families.  Until their basic freedom was taken away from them.  The Zegota was a Polish Underground Organization Shelter for children of the ghettos, that provided shelter for them, usually in homes of Christian families.
There was a lot of Jewish children in the ghettos. Three of them, along with many more, were taken form their home and went to Warsaw in September 1939 and in October 1940 were taken from their home and went to live in a ghetto.  One of them was Alinka Cukierman.  She was part of a large loving well-educated family.  She had a regular early childhood until  she turned 5 that's when the Germans took her family  to Warsaw.  When they were forced to live in a ghetto.  After that nothing is known bout her family and nothing has ever been founds.  Another child is Sorela she was also 5 when the Germans took her and her family to Warsaw.  Then they were forced to leave their home and live in a ghetto.  Later they went to Treblinka and murdered in a gas chamber. she had yet to turn 8.  Helena and Natus Weissbalt were 11 and 13 when they went to Warsaw.  Later they had to leave their home, to live in a ghetto. After that nothing has been known of their fate.
Children respective chances for survival and their ability to perform physical labor varied enormously by age.  Chances of survival were higher for older children since they could be assigned to forced labor in concentration camps and ghettos.  The number of children who  died in the Holocaust will never be known, the estimate range is about 1.5 million Jewish children.  In addition to that tens of thousands of Gypsy children, Polish-French, handicapped Germans and Eastern European children were murdered while under Nazi control.  German and Austrian children were also killed.  They were constantly expose to malnutrition, disease, and death.
Of the 15,000 children imprisoned in the Theresienstadt ghetto only 1,100 survived. After German-Jewish children were trapped in a hostile atmosphere.  Letter's written  by German children to the editors of the Nazi tabloid DER STURMER  reveals a shameful outpouring of stupidity and fanaticism against there Jewish children.  Shortly after Germany invaded Poland, Jewish children were trapped in German-occupied cities where confined with their families in ghettos and transit cam.  It is impossible to know how many children were killed in these ''special wards'' the best estimate is 5000 children.
 Of the approximately 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust.  There was about 1.55 million Jewish children killed, half of the children hadn't turned 5.  Most children had to eat in the streets, in the ghettos, because they could barely afford anything.  The total number of adults will never be known but in one camp there was 4,515,000 died or were gassed.  People think wars are bad when a couple hundred die, but nothing will ever come as bad as this.  No wars or anything will come near this.  Luckily we have a  good leader.   Also,  nobody like Hitler will come to do that same thing.
   

Dana Channel

7th Holocaust Projects

Rossville Jr. High, April 2005

Bibliography