Between
the years 1939 (the outbreak of WWII) and 1943 the Germans forcibly concentrated
hundreds of thousands of Jews in 400 separate ghettos which were set up in
Eastern Europe. The ghettos varied in size
(from several hundred residents to close to the half a million who lived in the
Warsaw Ghetto by the end of 1940), and by the level of their closure. There were
ghettos which did not permit entering or leaving them (like the Lodz Ghetto),
whereas there were ghettos which permitted work in factories outside (like the
Warsaw Ghetto).
The
residents of the ghettos died of hunger, illness, exhaustion, executions and of
course, from the deportations to forced labor camps and death camps. By the
summer of 1944 all the ghettos of Eastern
Europe were emptied of most of their inhabitants. The varied
population which was concentrated in the ghettos, the constant daily struggle
for a means of livelihood and food, and the difficulty in procuring arms made it
extremely difficult for the Jews to resist their oppressors. Jews were
accustomed to humiliation throughout their history, and most of them could not
imagine that the intended future for all of them was destruction, and that it
was imminent.
In
spite of this Jews did rebel in some of the ghettos, and the following section
relates the stories of their
heroism.
