Daily Life in the Guettos - Research Paper Example

Daily life in ghettos Hunger and anguish were parts of daily life in ghettos under the Nazi regime during the World War II. The tale of the Warsaw ghetto is known with its hunger and anguish and its heroism and sacrifice. As compared to Warsaw the less known is the second largest Nazi ghetto, located in Lodo, the city which the Nazis renamed Litzmannstadt. Warsaw and Lodz were the biggest and second biggest ghettos, respectively. Jews were forced to travel in cattle cars under horrifying conditions to the ghettos, where they were starved and given no medical attention. Hate towards Jews was on extreme and some of the Nazis had finally decided to clear the Jews out of Europe. They intended to establish a Jewish reservation where Jews could labor for the Reich. (Witte 318-9) The plan of the Nazi regime could not succeed when the Jews were dying off too quickly. They came up with a new idea and decided to ship all of the Jews to Madagascar, after the Nazis conquered the French, who held Madagascar at the time. Hitler never carried out this arrangement. Some historians are of the view that both of these ideas were a cover for Hitler’s plan to execute all of the Jews. But some believe that he really did want to carry out these plans, but circumstances forbid it. The ghettos were established in the east because a large number of Jews were already living there as compared to the west where Jews were in a very few number. The few that were in the west were scattered. Around three million Jews and thousands of Gypsies had been cornered in ghettos. There were many deaths in ghettos because of starvation, cold and forced labor. A number of factories had been established near the ghettos and Jews were forced to work there in very bad working condition and without any pay. The other people the ghetto who were not able to work were sent to nearby gas chambers. The ghettos and labor camps were emptied at an increasing rate towards the end of the fighting. The Warsaw ghetto which was set up on Oct 16, 1940, had a population of around 400,000 people. It was divided into two areas which were known as small ghetto and large ghetto. Rich Jews lived in small ghetto while poor ghetto, most of them Polish people, lived in large ghetto. The two ghettos were linked with a bridge. In November the same, the Warsaw ghetto was blocked when a wall was erected. There were a number of people who played a very important role in Warsaw ghetto uprising. Few of them are Tosia Altman, Dawid Moryc Apflbaum, Adam Czerniakow, the chief of Warsaw Judenrat (Jewish council) and Mordechaj Anielewicz. The picture of brutality, the Lodz ghetto, was established in February, 1940. The ghetto at its maximum held some 160,000 men, women, and children. Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the chairman of the Jewish Council (Judenrat), was in fact its dictator as long as he carried out all the orders of the German authorities. A complicated internal governmental structure was established to control work permits and passes, food rationing, tax collecting, housing allocation, and educational and cultural institutions. A Jewish police force, armed only with batons, provided enforcement with occasional backup from heavily armed German police, known as SS, and military units. A record office was the part of this state-within-a-state. The office was responsible to compile a daily account of life within the ghetto. Secretly buried when the ghetto was closed in August 1944, these papers have been carefully edited, abridged, and annotated to give a morbidly fascinating account of life within a condemned group of people. The memories of Lodz ghetto are full of pain but one of the most terrible times for it was the deportation of children and elderly residents during September, 1942. The forced breakup of families was described as an unnatural nightmare with much weeping and lamentation when children, the old, and the sick people were sent on a journey into a destination which was unknown for them. (Barkai 271-2) It is really painful to describe how at the old-age home, the elderly were loaded on trucks like lambs for slaughter by the Jewish police. When the SS moved in to hurry the process, blood was everywhere. It could be seen on in the streets, over the yards and in the buildings. Isaiah Trunk quotes from a speech by Rumkowski, cited in his book Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe Under Nazi Occupation (1972), in which the chairman had tried to justify his actions in cooperating with the deportation orders. There were distinction between the Jews of local origin, who spoke Polish as well as Yiddish, and those relocated to Lodz from German-speaking communities. The original record was partly in Polish, partly in German, but language was not the most crucial distinction. Polish Jews were mostly working-class people who had less difficulty in accommodating themselves to unkind working conditions and inadequate meals in the ghetto factories. However, German Jews arrived from a very different environment as most of them were wearing elegant sport clothes and showed revulsion for the awfully unsanitary conditions in which they were accommodated. German Jews lived by selling the few goods they had brought along, buying food on the more-or-less open black market. When their resources came to an end, they had no other option but to begging, having never integrated themselves into the work force. Most German Jews were among the first sent on the trains for resettlement. Compared to Polish Jews, the Jews of Western Europe offered considerably less resistance and strength of spirit. According to some statistics, Polish Jews sometimes exploited the needs and innocence of the newcomers, and ghetto humorists ridiculed the sophisticated German Jews and sang songs satirizing them. Rumkowski, the man in his sixties, was the so-called Eldest of the Jews in the Lodz Ghetto. Rumkowski, who in prewar years had run a small orphanage, was sharply opposed from time to time by Jews in the ghetto who tried to thwart his plans by strikes and demonstrations. In some other ghettos, the leadership, including the Jewish police, played a double game, carrying out German policies on the one hand, while plotting for eventual revolt on the other. The situation was different with Rumkowski. He saw that all orders were carried out to the letter, and there never was an armed anti-Nazi rebellion. The Nazi regime allowed the Lodz ghetto to exist longer than any others because it was arranged and productive, like a labor camp, but when the Russian forces began to draw near, the word went out that the entire remaining population was to be rearranged. There was no documented account of Rumkowski’s death. He and members of his family took one of the last trains from Lodz to Auschwitz, which he did not survive. Auschwitz was a busy place in 1944, and many people met anonymous deaths. In conclusion it can be said that the sufferings of Jews in ghettos are the painful parts of human history. There is stuff abundantly to deal with the questions often asked about Jews during the Holocaust. Was there relationship with the oppressors? Yes, though always under compulsion. Rumkowski was the leader and vocal advocate of the policy of salvation through work; he wanted to make the ghetto so important to the Germans that they would preserve it for an indefinite period. Were people in the ghetto offer resistance? Yes, but it was the resistance of fragile and unarmed individuals who ran, hid, and cheated the system to survive yet one more day. There were strikes by the workers in protest of the terrible conditions, but the strikes were always made unsuccessful or broken on Rumkowski’s orders. Did the Jews of Lodz know what was in store for them? There were rumors of death at the end of the deportation trains, but Jews heard the lies of those who promised that they would live if they submissively followed orders. Jews of Lodz feared the worst, but they were hoping for the best. The Lodz ghetto was more hermetically sealed from the Aryan section of town than was the Warsaw ghetto, so little information and absolutely no weapon were ever reached to Jews. (Plotkin 84-86) Works Cited Barkai, Avraham. “Between East and West: Jews from Germany in the Lodz Ghetto.” Yad Vashem Studies 16 (1984): 271-322. Morgenstern, Naomi, and Carmit Sagie. The Legend of the Lodz Ghetto Children: Study Unit for Grades 10-12 Plotkin, Diane. “Smuggling in the Ghettos: Survivor Accounts from the Warsaw, Łódź, and Kraków Ghettos.” In Life in the Ghettos During the Holocaust, edited by Eric J. Sterling, 84-119 Trunk, Isaiah. Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation. New York: Macmillan (1972) Witte, Peter. “Two Decisions Concerning the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question’: Deportations to Lodz and Mass Murder in Chelmno.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 9, no. 3, (1995): 318-345 Read More