By: Drew Johnson and Lindsay Whittington
Definition
The word ghetto derived from an island in Venice called Ghetto where Jews were
made to live in the 1600s. During the Holocaust, Jews were forced to live in
Ghettos after being kicked out of their own homes.
Definition
Today, the word ghetto is used loosely. It can mean anything from someone who
fulfills the black stereotype of being loud and obnoxious, something gaudy, or a
poor neighborhood.
This is a map of all the
ghettos Jews were
forced to live in during
the Holocaust.
This is the entrance to a
concentration camp in
Europe.
•In “closed” ghettos, Jewish
parents often had to send
their children sneaking off in
the middle of the night to
get them to find some food.
•Even when they did find
food, they often didn’t find
near enough to feed their
whole families.
•The same problem arises
nowadays, except that
parents are willing to go to
more extremes such as
robbing a store or bank to
get money for food.
•Here modern day ghetto
resident are being
rounded up because of
choices they made, unlike
the Jews.
•Here Jews are
unknowingly being
transported to the ghetto.
•The sad truth is that they
won’t even know what is
going on until it is to late to
stop.
•After the beginning of World War II, Nazis began ordering all Jews to live within certain,
very specific, areas of big cities, called ghettos.
•To get them to cooperate, the Nazis told the Jews they were being transported to another
place for labor.
•A few of the major ghettos were located in the cities of Kovno, Lodz, Minsk, Vilna, and
Warsaw.
•445,000 Jews were living in the ghetto in Warsaw, and conditions deteriorated rapidly.
•Ghettos had narrow streets and tall, crowded houses.
•Some ghettos started out as "open“, which meant that Jews could leave the area during
the daytime but often had to be back within the ghetto by a curfew. Later, all ghettos
became "closed," which meant that Jews were trapped within the confines of the ghetto
and not allowed to leave.
•The largest ghetto was in Warsaw, with its highest population reaching 445,000 in March
1941.
•When the Nazis decided to kill the remaining Jews in a ghetto, they would "liquidate" a
ghetto by boarding the last Jews in the ghetto on trains. When the Nazis attempted to
liquidate the Warsaw Ghetto on April 13, 1943, the remaining Jews fought back in what has
become known as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The Jewish resistance fighters held out
against the entire Nazi regime for 28 days, longer than many European countries had been
able to withstand Nazi conquest.