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GHETTOS
During the Holocaust, the creation of ghettos was a key step in the Nazi process of separating,
persecuting, and ultimately destroying Europe's Jews.
KEY FACTS
Ghettos were set up to segregate Jews from the rest of the population.
They were designed to be temporary; some lasted only a few days or weeks, others for several
years.

The vast majority of ghetto inhabitants died from disease or starvation, were shot, or were
deported to killing centers

ORIGIN OF THE TERM GHETTO

The term "ghetto" originated from the name of the Jewish quarter in Venice, Italy. Venetian
authorities compelled the city's Jews to live in the quarter, which was established in 1516. In the
16th and 17th centuries, officials ranging from local authorities to the Austrian emperor ordered
the creation of ghettos for Jews in Frankfurt, Rome, Prague, and other cities.
GHETTOS DURING WORLD WAR II
During World War II, the Germans concentrated urban and sometimes regional Jewish
populations in ghettos. Living conditions were miserable. Ghettos were often enclosed districts
that isolated Jews by separating Jewish communities from the non-Jewish population and from
other Jewish communities. The Germans established at least 1,000 ghettos in German-occupied
and annexed Poland and the Soviet Union alone. There were three types of ghettos: closed
ghettos, open ghettos, and destruction ghettos.

German occupation authorities established the first ghetto in Poland in Piotrkw Trybunalski in
October 1939. The largest ghetto in Poland was the Warsaw ghetto. In Warsaw, more than
400,000 Jews were crowded into an area of 1.3 square miles. Other major ghettos were
established in the cities of Lodz, Krakow, Bialystok, Lvov,Lublin, Vilna, Kovno, Czestochowa,
and Minsk. Tens of thousands of western European Jews were also deported to ghettos in the
east.
The Germans ordered Jews in the ghettos to wear identifying badges or armbands. They also
required many Jews to carry out forced labor for the German Reich. Nazi-appointed Jewish
councils (Judenrat) administered daily life in the ghettos. A ghetto police force enforced the
orders of the German authorities and the ordinances of the Jewish councils. This included
facilitating deportations to killing centers. Jewish police officials, like Jewish council members,
served at the whim of the German authorities. The Germans did not hesitate to kill those Jewish
policemen who were perceived to have failed to carry out orders.
GHETTOS AND THE FINAL SOLUTION
In many places ghettoization lasted a short time. Some ghettos existed for only a few days.
Others lasted for months or years. The Germans saw the ghettos as a provisional measure to
control and segregate Jews while the Nazi leadership in Berlin deliberated upon options for the
removal of the Jewish population.
With the implementation of the "Final Solution" (the plan to murder all European Jews)
beginning in late 1941, the Germans systematically destroyed the ghettos. The Germans and their
auxiliaries either shot ghetto residents in mass graves located nearby or deported them. Jews
were deported to killing centers. German SS and police authorities also deported a small
minority of Jews from ghettos to forced-labor camps and concentration camps.
In August 1944, German SS and police completed the destruction of the last major ghetto, in
Lodz.

RESISTANCE EFFORTS

Jews responded with a variety of resistance efforts. Ghetto residents frequently smuggled food,
medicine, weapons, or intelligence across the ghetto walls. These and other such activities often
took place without the knowledge or approval of the Jewish councils. On the other hand, some
Jewish councils and some individual council members tolerated or encouraged the smuggling
because the goods were necessary to keep ghetto residents alive.
The Germans generally showed little concern in principle about religious worship, attendance at
cultural events, or participation in youth movements inside the ghetto walls. However, they often
saw a security threat in any social gathering and would move ruthlessly to incarcerate or kill
perceived ringleaders and participants. The Germans generally forbade any form of consistent
schooling or education.

In some ghettos, members of Jewish resistance movements staged armed uprisings. The largest
of these was the Warsaw ghetto uprising in spring 1943. There were also violent revolts in Vilna,
Bialystok, Czestochowa, and several smaller ghettos.
GHETTOS IN HUNGARY
In Hungary, ghettoization did not begin until the spring of 1944 after the German invasion and
occupation. In less than three months, the Hungarian gendarmerie, coordinating with German
deportation experts from the Reich Main Office for Security, concentrated nearly 440,000 Jews
from all over Hungary except for the capital city,Budapest. They forced the Jews into short-term
destruction ghettos and then deported them into German custody at the Hungarian border. The
Germans deported most of the Hungarian Jews to the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center.
In Budapest, Hungarian authorities required Jews to confine themselves to marked houses (socalled Star of David houses). On October 15, 1944, leaders of the fascist Arrow Cross movement
seized power in a German-sponsored coup. A few weeks later, the Arrow Cross government
formally established a ghetto in Budapest. About 63,000 Jews lived in this 0.1 square mile area.
Approximately 25,000 Jews who carried certificates indicating they were under the protection of
a neutral power were confined in an "international ghetto" in the city. In January 1945, Soviet

forces liberated that part of Budapest in which the two ghettos were located and liberated the
nearly 90,000 Jewish residents.

http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/04/27/306829915/segregated-from-its-historyhow-ghetto-lost-its-meaning
Segregated From Its History, How 'Ghetto' Lost Its Meaning

April 27, 201412:46 PM ET

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The pushcart market in the East Side Ghetto of New York's Jewish Quarter was a hive of activity
in the early 1900s.
Ewing Galloway/Getty Images
As you might have gathered from our blog's title, the Code Switch team is kind of obsessed with
the ways we speak to each other. Each week in "Word Watch," we'll dig into language that tells
us something about the way race is lived in America today. (Interested in contributing? Holler at
this form.)
The word "ghetto" is an etymological mystery. Is it from the Hebrew get, or bill of divorce?
From the Venetian ghto, or foundry? From the Yiddishgehektes, "enclosed"? From Latin
Giudaicetum, for "Jewish"? From the Italian borghetto, "little town"? From the Old French
guect, "guard"?
In his etymology column for the Oxford University Press, Anatoly Liberman took a look at each
of these possibilities. He considered ever more improbable origins Latin for "ribbon"?
German for "street"? Latin for "to throw"? before declaring the word a stubborn mystery.
But whatever the root language, the word's original meaning was clear: "the quarter in a city,
chiefly in Italy, to which the Jews were restricted," as the OED puts it. In the 16th and 17th
centuries, cities like Venice, Frankfurt, Prague and Rome forcibly segregated their Jewish
populations, often walling them off and submitting them to onerous restrictions.
By the late 19th century, these ghettos had been steadily dismantled. But instead of vanishing
from history, ghettos reappeared with a purpose more ominous than segregation under
Nazi Germany. German forces established ghettos in over a thousand cities across Europe. They
were isolated, strictly controlled and resource-deprived but unlike the ghettos of history, they
weren't meant to last.
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Maxwell Street, a teeming marketplace of Chicago's ghetto, on July 22, 1939.
AP

Reviving the Jewish ghetto made genocide a much simpler project. As the Holocaust proceeded,
ghettos were emptied by the trainload. The prisoners of the enormous Warsaw ghetto, which at
one point held 400,000 Jews, famously fought their deportation to death camps. They were
outnumbered and undersupplied, but some managed to die on their own terms; thousands of Jews
were killed within the walls of the ghetto, rather than in the camps.
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Jewish ghettos were finally abolished after the end of World War II. But the word lived on,
redefined as a poor, urban black community.
From Anti-Semitism To Race And Poverty
As early as 1908, "ghetto" was sometimes used metaphorically to describe slum areas that
weren't mandated by law but that were limited to a single group of people because of other
constraints. That year, Jack London wrote of "the working-class ghetto." Immigrant groups and
American Jews were also identified as living in these unofficial "ghettos."
Even as those areas were identified, they were already transforming. A 1928 study of American
Jewish ghettos explained why such communities were being "invaded" by people of color: "the
Negro, like the immigrant, is segregated in the city into a racial colony. Economic
considerations, race prejudice and cultural differences combine to set him apart." "Race
prejudice" included laws and lending practices, from redlining to restrictive covenants, explicitly
design to separate white and nonwhite city dwellers.
After World War II, "white flight" from inner cities further exacerbated racial segregation. By the
'60s and '70s, so-called "negro ghettos" in cities like Chicago, New York and Detroit were central
to the cultural conversation about poverty. "Something must be done, and done soon, to build a
strong and stable family structure among Negro ghetto dwellers," an Ebony editorial contended
in 1966; countless academic articles argued about the causes of ghetto poverty.
And in 1969, Elvis in his late-career comeback took a turn for the mournful with "In the
Ghetto."
Elvis (and many cover singers after him) sings about Chicago's crowded black ghettos with an
outsider's concern: "People, don't you understand / the child needs a helping hand / or he'll grow
to be an angry young man some day."
Almost half a century later, Busta Rhymes used the same song title to celebrate the ghetto as a
source of identity.
Busta Rhymes doesn't ignore the painful effects of intergenerational poverty. The ghetto is
where "crackhead chicks still smoke with babies in they belly." But he's not calling for help or
claiming that all ghetto-dwellers are miserable. The ghetto is also "where you find beautiful
women and rugrats / and some of the most powerful people, I love that!