In the Warsaw ghetto, Jewish children with bowls of soup. Warsaw, Poland, ca. 1940.
During the Holocaust, the creation of ghettos was a key step in the Nazi process of brutally separating, persecuting, and ultimately destroying Europe's Jews. Ghettos were often enclosed districts that isolated Jews from the non-Jewish population and from other Jewish communities.
Like other Jews, the Lewents were confined to the Warsaw ghetto. In 1942, as Abraham hid in a crawl space, the Germans seized his mother and sisters in a raid. They perished. He was deployed for forced labor nearby, but escaped to return to his father in the ghetto. In 1943, the two were deported to Majdanek, where Abraham's father died. Abraham later was sent to Skarzysko, Buchenwald, Schlieben, Bisingen, and Dachau. US troops liberated Abraham as the Germans evacuated prisoners.
In 1939, Gerda's brother was deported for forced labor. In June 1942, Gerda's family was deported from the Bielsko ghetto. While her parents were transported to Auschwitz, Gerda was sent to the Gross-Rosen camp system, where for the remainder of the war she performed forced labor in textile factories. Gerda was liberated after a death march, wearing the ski boots her father insisted would help her to survive. She married her American liberator.
Paula was one of four children born to a religious Jewish family in Lodz, an industrial city with a large Jewish population. As a child, Paula attended public schools and was tutored at home in Jewish studies three times a week. Her father owned a furniture store.
1933-39: Paula, her brothers, and sisters spent a lot of time at the clubhouse of their Zionist group, Gordonia. Their group believed in humanistic values, Jewish self-labor, and in building a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Paula liked to work with her hands and did a lot of knitting, crocheting, and sewing. In September 1939, when she was in secondary school, her studies were cut short when Germany invaded Poland and seized Lodz on September 8th.
1940-44: In early 1940 Paula's family was forcibly relocated to the Lodz ghetto, where they were assigned one room for all six of them. Food was the main problem. At the women's clothing factory where Paula worked, she at least got some soup for lunch. But her family desperately needed to find more food for her younger brother, who was very sick and bleeding internally. From the window at her factory she looked out at a potato field. Knowing that if she was caught, she'd be shot, she crept out one night to the field, dug up as many potatoes as she could, and ran home.
In 1944 Paula was deported to Bremen, Germany, as a forced laborer. She was freed in the Bergen-Belsen camp in 1945. After the war, she immigrated to the United States.
Idzia was the older of two girls born to Jewish parents who lived 35 miles east of Warsaw in the small predominantly Jewish town of Kaluszyn. Idzia's father owned a liquor store and her mother was a housewife. Idzia was close friends with a group of Jewish teenagers who went to the same public school and spent much of their free time and vacations together.
1933-39: Normally, Idzia goes out with her friends on pleasant summer evenings. They like to stroll down the main street together and visit the sweets shop. Sometimes they go to the school building, which is open at night for recreational activities, and play dominoes or checkers. But now, everyone is afraid that war will break out and is staying at home. Every day there's more news about border skirmishes between Polish and German forces.
1940-42: The Germans have occupied Kaluszyn. Acting under German orders, the town mayor has chosen a Jewish council which includes Idzia's father and her friend Majlich's father. They, in turn, chose Majlich, Idzia, and some other young adults to work on the Jewish sanitation committee. One of Idzia's jobs is to take women to the one remaining Jewish bathing facility in town so that they can wash themselves. They've already seen several cases of lice-borne typhus, and they're trying to limit the spread of the deadly disease.
In September 1942 Idzia's parents and some 3,000 other Jews were deported to a killing center. That December, 22-year-old Idzia was also deported to the same camp, where she perished.
The village in Lithuania where David grew up was located near the Latvian border. His father was a peddler. At age 6, David was sent to Ukmerge, a town known to Jews by its Russian name, Vilkomir, to study traditional Jewish texts at the rabbinical academy there. Six years later, David was called to return home to head the Selznik family because his father had died.
1933-39: David lost his job in 1933, so he left Lithuania and went to the United States and then Portugal. But in 1936 the Baltic states were vulnerable to Stalin and Hitler, and David decided to return home to help his mother and sisters, who had since moved to the city of Kovno. The threat of war loomed over them, but the Jews could not leave. Through business contacts he found a job in a retail outlet for office supplies.
1940-44: In summer 1941 the Germans occupied Kovno and David was forced into a ghetto. Conditions worsened in 1943. The murder of Jews in the ghetto escalated in March 1944. He saw some Ukrainians and Lithuanians helping the Nazis. David watched as they took children to the top floor of a building and dropped them out the window to a guard who stood on the street. The guard then picked them up and knocked their heads against the wall until each child was dead.
In 1944 David fled from a transport as it left the ghetto and hid in a nearby forest for three weeks until the area was liberated. He immigrated to the United States in 1949.
As a young man, Beno used his foreign language skills to land small movie roles. He and his family were deported to the Lodz ghetto, where they struggled daily to find food. In the underground, Beno became an expert at derailing trains. The family was sent to Auschwitz and was separated. All but Beno and one sister, whom he found after the war, died. Beno survived a series of camps and later helped to track war criminals.
Zofia Burowska (Chorowicz) donated this doll, which dates from the 1930s, to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Zofia's parents gave her the doll before the war and she kept it with her in the Wolbrum and Krakow ghettos, Poland. The doll and some of her family's other belongings were left with non-Jewish friends for safekeeping. Zofia was deported to a forced-labor camp for Jews near Krakow, to the Skarzysko-Kamienna camp (also in Poland), and then to the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, where she was liberated. After the war, she returned to Krakow and retrieved her doll.
During World War II, the Germans established ghettos mainly in eastern Europe (between 1939 and 1942) and also in Hungary (in 1944). These ghettos were enclosed districts of a city in which the Germans forced the Jewish population to live under miserable conditions. The Germans regarded the establishment of Jewish ghettos as a provisional measure to control, isolate, and segregate Jews. Beginning in 1942, after the decision had been made to kill the Jews, the Germans systematically destroyed the ghettos, deporting the Jews to extermination camps where they were killed.
Life in the ghettos was usually unbearable. Overcrowding was common. One apartment might have several families living in it. Plumbing broke down, and human waste was thrown in the streets along with the garbage. Contagious diseases spread rapidly in such cramped, unsanitary housing. People were always hungry. Germans deliberately tried to starve residents by allowing them to purchase only a small amount of bread, potatoes, and fat. Some residents had some money or valuables they could trade for food smuggled into the ghetto; others were forced to beg or steal to survive. During the long winters, heating fuel was scarce, and many people lacked adequate clothing. People weakened by hunger and exposure to the cold became easy victims of disease; tens of thousands died in the ghettos from illness, starvation, or cold. Some individuals killed themselves to escape their hopeless lives.
Every day children became orphaned, and many had to take care of even younger children. Orphans often lived on the streets, begging for bits of bread from others who had little or nothing to share. Many froze to death in the winter.
In order to survive, children had to be resourceful and make themselves useful. Small children in the Warsaw ghetto sometimes helped smuggle food to their families and friends by crawling through narrow openings in the ghetto wall. They did so at great risk, as smugglers who were caught were severely punished.
Many young people tried to continue their education by attending school classes organized by adults in many ghettos. Since such classes were usually held secretly, in defiance of the Nazis, pupils learned to hide books under their clothes when necessary, to avoid being caught.
Although suffering and death were all around them, children did not stop playing with toys. Some had beloved dolls or trucks they brought into the ghetto with them. Children also made toys, using whatever bits of cloth and wood they could find. In the Lodz ghetto, children turned the tops of empty cigarette boxes into playing cards.
Key Dates
February 8, 1940 Lodz Jews ordered into ghetto The Germans order the establishment of a ghetto in the northeastern section of Lodz. Over 160,000 Jews, more than a third of the entire population of Lodz, are forced into a small area of the city. The Jews of Lodz formed, after Warsaw, the second largest Jewish community in prewar Poland. The Lodz ghetto is separated from the rest of the city by barbed-wire fencing. The ghetto area is divided into three parts by the intersection of two major roads, which are excluded from the ghetto. Footbridges are constructed to connect the three segments of the ghetto. Streetcars for the non-Jewish population of Lodz traverse the ghetto but are not permitted to stop within it. Living conditions in the ghetto are horrible. Most of the area does not have running water or a sewer system. Hard labor, overcrowding, and starvation are the dominant features of life.
January 16, 1942 Lodz Jews deported to Chelmno killing center Deportations from the Lodz ghetto to the Chelmno killing center begin. German police will carry out roundups in the ghetto. Hundreds of Jews, mainly children, the elderly, and the sick, are killed on the spot during the deportations. By the end of September 1942, approximately 70,000 Jews and about 4,300 Roma (Gypsies) will have been deported to Chelmno, where they are killed in mobile gas vans (trucks with hermetically sealed compartments that serve as gas chambers).
June 23, 1944 Germans resume deportations from Lodz ghetto Between September 1942 and May 1944, there are no major deportations from Lodz. The ghetto resembles a forced-labor camp. In the spring of 1944, the Nazis decide to destroy the Lodz ghetto. By then, Lodz is the last remaining ghetto in Poland, with a population of about 75,000 Jews. On June 23, 1944, the Germans resume deportations from Lodz. About 7,000 Jews are deported to Chelmno and killed. The deportations continue in July and August; most of the remaining ghetto population is deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. The Lodz ghetto is eliminated.
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