In the picture above a Hungarian gendarme (a police officer) checks a woman entering the Munkacs ghetto. This ghetto shows how there were large wooden fences and on the top they are lined with wiring to make sure that no one got out. The German police often forced the Jews to wear an identification badge saying 'Jude" to signify that you were Jewish.
A ghetto was a part of a neighborhood which was isolated especially to contain the jews- but this didn't last for more than 2-6 weeks. The life in the ghettos was horrible; they were overcrowded with terrible sanitary conditions. One apartment would often have many families living inside it.
The plumbing occasionally stopped functioning, which meant that you would often find human waste and garbage on the streets of the ghettos. This caused a lot of diseases to spread thorough the population contained.
Food was scarce, people were always hungry. The Germans deliberately underfed them. They had to buy their own food using their money; in most cases they had none because they had their valuables stolen. Adequate clothing wasn't worn in winter, so people were left freezing in the cold. The children often had to look after other smaller children. Everyday children would be orphaned. To keep themselves occupied, the children made toys out of cloth, played cards using disposed cigarette boxes, or attended classes organized by the adults in the ghettos.
The plumbing occasionally stopped functioning, which meant that you would often find human waste and garbage on the streets of the ghettos. This caused a lot of diseases to spread thorough the population contained.
Food was scarce, people were always hungry. The Germans deliberately underfed them. They had to buy their own food using their money; in most cases they had none because they had their valuables stolen. Adequate clothing wasn't worn in winter, so people were left freezing in the cold. The children often had to look after other smaller children. Everyday children would be orphaned. To keep themselves occupied, the children made toys out of cloth, played cards using disposed cigarette boxes, or attended classes organized by the adults in the ghettos.
The largest ghetto in Poland was the Warsaw Ghetto. More than 400,000 Jewish were crowded into a 1.3 square miles. The other major ghettos were located in the cities of Lodz, Krakow, Bialystok, Lvov, Lubin, Vilna, Kovno, Czestochowa and Minsk.
The Germans did not hesitate to kill Jewish policemen who failed to carry out orders. There were more than 1000 ghettos located in Europe. The ghettos were very small; each Jewish group would be separated from another Jewish group by high brick walls. If anyone tried to escape, immediate orders to shoot were established.In total, the German's established 365 ghettos in Poland itself. The ghettos in small towns were often not sealed off, and the larger cities had closed ghettos with brick walls, wooden fences and barbed fence surrounding the outside. In 1943 7000 Jews were persecuted and 56065 Jews captured, who later were moved to different death camps, where a half of these captured residents were sent to concentration camps whilst the other half, were sent to death camps.