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Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Learn about Poland’s capital, Warsaw, home to the largest Jewish community in Europe before WWII.
The Warsaw ghetto uprising was the largest, symbolically most important Jewish uprising, and first urban uprising in German-occupied Europe.
Ghettos in Poland Millions of Jews lived in eastern Europe. After Germany invaded Poland in 1939, more than two million Polish Jews came under German control. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, several million more Jews came under Nazi rule. The Germans aimed to control this sizable Jewish population by forcing Jews to reside in marked-off sections of towns and cities the Nazis called "ghettos" or "Jewish residential quarters." Altogether, the Germans created at least 1,000 ghettos in…
At its height, the Warsaw ghetto held over 400,000 people living in horrendous and worsening conditions. Learn about deportations both to and from the ghetto.
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Many Jews in ghettos across eastern Europe tried to organize resistance against the Germans and to arm themselves with smuggled and homemade weapons. Between 1941 and 1943, underground resistance movements formed in about 100 Jewish groups. The most famous attempt by Jews to resist the Germans in armed fighting occurred in the Warsaw ghetto. In the summer of 1942, about 300,000 Jews were deported from Warsaw to Treblinka. When reports of mass murder in the killing center leaked…
Emanuel Ringelblum was a Warsaw-based historian and social welfare worker before WWII. Learn about the secret archive he would establish in the Warsaw ghetto.
Songs, verses, and writings of writers and poets in the ghettos reflect efforts to preserve culture, humanity, and documentation, as well as acts of defiance. Explore examples.
Yitzhak Gitterman (1889-1943) was a director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) in Poland, and a member of the underground Jewish Fighting Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa; ZOB). Gitterman was born in Horonstopol, Ukraine, and began a career of supporting refugees and other victims of persecution during World War I. In 1921, he was appointed director of the JDC in Poland. He took part in the rehabilitation of the Jewish population and the establishment of welfare…
Janusz Korczak ran a Jewish orphanage in Warsaw. He and his staff stayed with the children even as German authorities deported them to their deaths at Treblinka in 1942.
Spiritual resistance during the Holocaust refers to attempts by individuals to maintain their...
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