How+Ghettos

How did Ghettos affect the Jewish people? By Mary Fried
( picture found in "First Person Podcast Series Erika Eckstut")

There was not much the Jews could do about living in a Ghetto. Many Jews tried to plot an escape and break out. They also starved in the Ghettos. Jews responded to the ghetto restrictions with a variety of resistance efforts. The Germans ordered Jews living in Ghettos to wear badges or armbands to identify that they were Jewish. Also, Jews were required to perform forced labor for the German Reich. Daily life in the ghettos was managed by Nazi- appointed [|Jewish councils] (Judenraete). Ghetto police force ordered German powers and the ordinances of the Jewish councils. This included the facilation of transportation to killing centers. Jewish council members and police officials were controlled by German authorities.

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. In August 1944, German SS and police completed the destruction of the last major ghetto, in Lodz. People living in Ghettos frequently did illegal activities according the Nazis law, such as getting medicine, finding out information outside Ghetto walls, collecting weapons, and smuggling food. Erika Eckstut, a young girl living in the Ghettos, explains the food situation in the Ghetto she was residing in. " I said 'I didn’t pay attention.'He says 'why didn’t you pay attention?' I said 'I am dreaming of a piece of bread. If I would have a piece of bread, I would be very happy.'" Eckstut is talking to her father in this conversation that she recollects. "There was no food. There was nothing you can do. There was nothing you can eat."Some of the Jewish council members encouraged the “illegal” trade of goods in order to keep the residents alive. The Germans had little concern about how the Jews worshipped, cultural events, or youth movement participants in the ghettos. The Germans would view a “social threat” as any social gathering joined together by a leader and his or her participants. The Germans deprived Jews of any sort schooling or education. Leon Merrick, a Holocaust survivor talks with Bill Benson about his life in the Ghettos "Everybody had to have a job. Because if you had a job you get an extra bowl of soup in the place of wherever you work." This is a picture is found in "First Person Podcast Series Leon Merrick)

In Hungary, ghettoization did not happen until it was spring of 1944, after the Germans took over and controlled the country. The Hungarian gendamerie was in synchronization with German deportation experts from the Reich Main Office for Security. The Hungarian gendarmerie concentrated nearly 440,000 Jews from all over Hungary, with the exception of Budapest, the capitol in less than three months. Jews were transported from Budapest to Germans at the Hungarian border. Authorities required the Jews to confine themselves to marked houses (so-called Star of David houses). Leon Merrick also elaborates more on the transportations from the Ghettos. "I was always afraid, maybe the Germans come in and they were grabbing people and putting them on the truck and taking them away outside the ghetto to work." A few weeks after the leaders of the fascist Arrow Cross movement seized power in a German-sponsored coup on October 15, 1944, the Arrow Cross government formally established a ghetto in Budapest, in which about 63,000 Jews lived in a 0.1 square mile area. Approximately 25,000 Jews who carried certificates that they stood under the protection of a neutral power were confined in an "international ghetto" at another location in the city. In January 1945, Soviet forces liberated that part of Budapest in which the two ghettos were, respectively, located and liberated the nearly 90,000 Jewish residents.

(All information taken from "Ghettos" and information for quotes taken from "First Person Podcast Series | Leon Merrick." and "First Person Podcast Series | Erika Eckstut."