Research Paper Holocaust English

Research Paper The Holocaust: Life in the Ghettos

S College English Mr. Neuberger 10 September, 2008

Smith 2 The Holocaust remains to be one of the most tragic and terrible events ever to take place in recorded history. Millions of people lost their lives due to a horrid series of events put into motion by one very disturbed man and his equally evil followers. However, many aspects of this monstrous event are not well known and sometimes even completely overlooked. One such example is the plight of those who lived in the various miserable ghettos throughout Europe during World War II. During Hitler’s reign in Germany, ghettos could be described as dirty, overcrowded, and often disease and lice infested sections of cities in which Nazis forcefully imprisoned Jews and other victims of the Holocaust. There they lived until they began being deported via cattle cars to extermination camps or, less likely, slave labor camps. Jews, and other victims of the Holocaust, were gathered up from all over occupied Europe, stripped of all personal belongings, torn from the lives they had worked so hard to achieve, and shipped off to the thousands of ghettos throughout Eastern Europe, often splitting up families, friends, and communities. These ghettos could be found throughout Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, and other countries and territories occupied by or allied with Germany. Describing life in the ghettos as hard is an understatement. The scarcity of food forced people to do desperate things to avoid dying of starvation. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (ushmm) contains many survivor testimonies on their website that illustrate the hardships endured in the ghettos. One such testimony is reported by a survivor from the Lodz ghetto in Poland named Paula Garfunkel: “In early 1940 our family was forcibly relocated to the Lodz ghetto, where we were assigned one room for all six of us. Food was the main problem. At the women’s clothing factory where I worked, I at least got some soup for lunch. But we desperately needed to find more food for my younger brother, who was very sick and bleeding internally. From the window at my factory I looked out at a

Smith 3 potato field. Knowing that if I was caught, I’d be shot, I crept out one night to the field, dug up as many potatoes as I could, and ran home.” (Module 261) Another account is told by Charlene Schiff, another Holocaust survivor, in a 1993 interview: “Ingeniously, we dug out two holes in the fences, below the fences, so that a child could sneak out to the other side and, you know, take off the Star of David and try to act like a normal human being and see if we could obtain food. And now and then children brought home some food back to the ghetto. I did it many times. It was very dangerous, because if one was caught one would pay with life. I mean this was the order, to shoot, to kill the person, the perpetrator. I was very lucky, and now and then I would bring a slice of bread, I would bring a carrot, or a potato, or an egg, and these were very, very great achievements. My mother made me promise that I wouldn’t do it any more, but I disobeyed.” (Module 1111) And yet another report of the starvation endured in the ghettos is given in this 1996 interview by Leah Hammerstien Silverstien, a survivor from the Warsaw ghetto in Poland: “We came to live in the ghetto in, in October 1940. By, by March my father was dead, starved to death, literally. Because, uh, once cut off from the ghetto, he was cut off from his clientele and from his, from his subsistence, you know, he, and a terrible hunger was in my father’s house because sometimes I was running from the kibbutz to see how my father is doing. And it was a sight which I will never forget. And I run to see my grandmother, whom I loved because she was the substitute of my mother, you know… These sights of my father and of my grandmother dying from starvation, in terrible hygienic conditions, is a picture that haunts me till this very day, you know. And this is over half a century ago, and it torments me in terrible nightmares to this very day.” (Module 1180) Walls and fences surrounded most of the ghettos, cutting the people within off from the outside world. Anyone who dared to try to escape or disobey in any way would be shot immediately. German soldiers and police guarded the streets day and night. Nazis established curfews and other rules and regulations to prohibit public assemblies of any kind. Most, if not all, inhabitants of the ghettos were forced to perform hard manual labor, working long hours for no pay. Sam Itzkowitz, a survivor of the Makow ghetto, described this in a 1991 interview: “And everyday…Jews had to go out from the ghetto, line up in groups of a hundred and perform work for the Germans. In the wintertime, we had to shovel the snow on the roads. In the summertime, we had to help build the roads. We had to demolish houses that were in the Germans’ way. Dig ditches, clear swamps.

Smith 4 They found work that just wasn’t suitable for human beings but they just did it for meanness. Somehow we survived longer than they thought we ought to do.” (Module 1219) When the German guards or officials thought that the ghetto became too overcrowded to be easily handled, or new shipments of Jews came in, they would kill off as many of the current residents as they deemed necessary. The soldiers usually killed either the very young, very old, or the very ill, as they posed the least resistance and accomplished less work. Very brutal mass murders occurred often. David J. Selznick, a survivor from the Kovno ghetto, reports one such instance in his own words: “…In summer 1941 the Germans occupied Kovno and we were forced into a ghetto. Conditions worsened in 1943. The murder of Jews in the ghetto escalated in March 1944. I saw some Ukrainians and Lithuanians helping the Nazis. I 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. He then picked them up and knocked their heads against the wall until each child was dead.”(Module 252) In 1942, the Nazis decided that the best way to rid themselves of people they did not approve of was to simply kill them off. This became known as the “final solution” plan. The Nazis now believed they no longer needed the ghettos, so they began to liquidate them. One by one the ghettos began being shut down and their residents transported to extermination camps. People often did not know what lied ahead of them. The deportation process itself was carried out with a complete lack of compassion. Cecilie Klein-Pollack tells of her experience with deportation in this 1990 interview: “They told us the day before that we can pack one small suitcase and we should be ready to leave the ghetto. When we came to the, it was a, um, at one time a factory for, um, bricks, and there they started to search us again. The SS was they also, and every woman had to, and every girl had to undress, naked, and we were searched internally for valuables. My mother was a very religious person, and all I could think of was how terrible this is for my mother to go through something such, such a terrible ordeal. When we were finished my mother took the baby from my sister, she, because she was holding the little boy, Danny, and she had a bottle of milk for the child. And the SS grabbed the bottle of milk and said, “Let’s

Smith 5 see, you cow, what you have there.” My mother pleaded, “Please, this is, the child needs the milk. Please don’t take the milk from, from my grandson.” He started to beat her with a horse whip, and when I saw that she was being beaten, so I screamed, so at least I got the attention from my mother. So my mother ran into the, because the trains were, were right there, we were just, you know, going into those, uh, cattle trains. So I took away the attention away the attention from my mother, and he started to beat me with that whip and finally, um, I was able to run away also, and we were finally in the cattle trains.” (Module 1107) Another example of the deportation from the ghettos is this 1994 interview with Blanka Rothschild: “When we walked through the ghetto to work after the entire ghetto was empty, it was a very weird feeling. Empty streets, open windows, flowing curtains blowing with the wind. No people. Once we thought we saw a glimmer of somebody in the window, or a candle or something and, of course, we averted our eyes not to give away to the German escorts that somebody was there. In November of 1944 came our time, we had to be taken out. The entire population of our hospital was walked to the place where the cattle cars were, and we were loaded. It was a horrible thing because people had to stand. There was no place to sit or squat. If somebody was sick or even dying, he died on his feet, standing up. It was just unbearable. Water was the worst…the lack of water, the thirst was the worst.” (Module 1125) The ghettos are a major part of the Holocaust. In many ways, the establishment of the ghettos represented the first major step in tearing apart the spirit of the Jewish people. Millions of people fought so hard to survive the ghettos only to be faced with unavoidable death at concentration camps. Yet even through all the hardships, people still managed to hold on to some scraps of humanity and dignity. To hear and read the testimonies of these people is truly a humbling and amazing experience. For these reasons I believe that it is important to remember the plight of those who lived, and died, in the ghettos.

Bibliography

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Garfunkel, Paula. "Testimonies-Holocaust Encyclopedia." ushmm.org. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 7 Sept 2008 . Hammerstien, Leah. "Testimonies-Holocaust Encyclopedia." ushmm.org. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 08 Sept 2008 . Klein-Pollack, Cecilie. "Holocaust Encyclopedia-Testimonies." ushmm.org. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 9 Sept 2008 <(http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/media_oi.php?lang=en&ModualeId=1107)>. Rothschild, Blanka. "Testimonies-Holocaust encyclopedia." ushmm.org. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 8 Sept 2008 . Schiff, Charlene. "Testimonies-Holocaust Encyclopedia." ushmm.org. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 6 Sept 2008 . Selznick, David J. "Holocaust Encyclopedia-Testimonies." ushmm.org. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 9 Sept 2008 <(http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/media_oi.php?lang=en&ModualeId=259)>.