UNIT THree: The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: Ghettos and Deportation TABLE OF CONTENTS learning objectives 3 survivor biographies 4 classroom activities • About the Warsaw Ghetto 23 • About the Lodz Ghetto 26 • About the Kovno Ghetto 28 iwitness activities (downloadable mini lessons) • Responsa: Not a Slave 14 • Responsa: Preserving Life 15 • Work in the Łódź Ghetto 16 • Responsa: Keeping Kosher in the Ghettos 16 • Hunger in the Łódź Ghetto 16 • Responsa: Charity Saves from Death 17 text for teachers • Introduction 6 • The Warsaw Ghetto 10 • Jewish Leadership and Rabbi Shapira’s Writings 14 • The Łódź Ghetto 15 • The Kovno Ghetto 18 ADDITIONAL RESOURCES • Map: Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 31 • Clips about Jewish Culture and Religious Life in the ghettos 31 • Escape from the ghetto 31 • Final discussion questions 34 2 LEARNING OBJECTIVES UNIT 3 LEARNING OBJECTIVES Through testimony, students will: 1. Learn about the role of ghettos during the Holocaust 2. Understand the similarities and differences among the different ghettos 3. Appreciate what daily life was like in the ghettos 4. Recognize the challenges facing Jewish leadership in the ghettos 5. Study examples of Rabbinic responsa that emerged from the Kovno Ghetto 3 SURVIVOR BIOGRAPHIES In this unit, students will have the opportunity to watch testimony from: • Frieda Aaron was born on January 4, 1928 in Warsaw, Poland. She describes her childhood growing up in a traditional Jewish home and recounts her experiences in the Warsaw Ghetto and in concentration camps. While in the ghetto she recalls being involved in setting up a clandestine school. Her interview was conducted in New York in 1995. • Benjamin Meed was born on February 19, 1922 in Warsaw, Poland. He describes his childhood as a religious Jewish person and recounts his experience in the Warsaw Ghetto, his involvement with resistance groups and the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and his ultimate escape from the ghetto. His interview was conducted in New York in 1999. • Vladka Meed was born in Warsaw in 1922. She describes her childhood in a traditional Jewish family and recalls her experience in the Warsaw Ghetto, her memory of watching the Warsaw Ghetto uprising from an apartment window outside of the ghetto, and her ability to conceal her identity and to organize a way to stay on the Polish side. Her interview was conducted in California in 1996. • George Topas was born on November 3, 1924 in Warsaw, Poland. He describes his experiences growing up as an Orthodox Jew in Poland, his family’s attempt to maintain their traditional observances, and recounts his experiences in the ghetto and in the camps. His interview was conducted in New Jersey in 1998. • Pinchas Gutter was born on July 21, 1932 in Łódź, Poland. He describes his experiences growing up Ger Chassidic and his family’s attempt to maintain their traditional observance in the Warsaw Ghetto and in the concentration camps. His interview was conducted in Canada in 1995. • Mordechai Glatstein was born on March 14, 1917 in Lipno, Russia. He recounts his family’s effort made to maintain their religious observance in the ghettos, the sacrifices he and his brother made to try and find food for his parents, and his experiences in the concentration camps. His interview was conducted in Pennsylvania in 1998. • Reuben Drehspul was born March 18, 1930 in Lithuania. He describes his religious Jewish upbringing and the challenge of maintaining his religious observance in the face of Nazi oppression. He describes Nazi’s interrupting his Bar Mitzvah and the effort his mother took to honor the importance of the moment regardless of the interruption with a blessing for him. He was deported to concentration camp. His interview was conducted in South Africa in 1995. 4 • Nechama Shneorson was born May 29, 1929 in Lithuania. She shares her experiences as a child in a traditional Jewish family, the trauma of Nazi’s rounding up Jewish children, their effort to hide her little sister, and their experience in the concentration camps. Her interview was conducted in New York in 1995. • Jacob Brauns was born May 21, 1924 in Riga, Latvia. He describes his childhood before the war and the effort people made to maintain their religious observance and identity during the war. He survived concentration camps and hiding. His interview was conducted in California in 1998. • Berel Zisman was born on March 5, 1929 in Lithuania in a Lubavitch Chassidic family. He describes the effort of his family to maintain their religious observance despite increasingly difficult conditions. He was deported to concentration camp and survived a death march. His interview was conducted in New York in 1998. 5 TEXT FOR TEACHERS INTRODUCTION The Holocaust occurred in stages. The first pre-war phase included Hitler’s rise to power and attack on the Jews of Germany – and, after March 1938, Austria – culminating in the violence of the November 1938 Pogroms, collectively known as Kristallnacht. World War II began and the conquest of Western Poland, and the Soviet Union’s invasion and conquest of Eastern Poland, marking Germany’s next phase in its assault on the Jews: confinement to ghettos. With the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Germany implemented the last and most radical phase: organized mass murder, known as the “Final Solution”. On September 1, 1939, German troops invaded Poland. WW II had begun. Within weeks, the Polish army was destroyed, and Poland surrendered to Germany. According to the German-Soviet Pact, named the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact after the two participating Foreign Ministers, Poland was divided up between the two countries. Germany occupied Central and Western Poland, while the Soviet Union received the Eastern and Southeastern areas, (as well as the Baltic States, Bessarabia, and northern Bukovina). This pact lasted until Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, occupying the Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Copyright © United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC 6 With the advent of war, the Polish Jewish population of 3.3 million was now under German and Soviet rule. There were over two million Jews in the area occupied by Germany, and over one million Jews in the Soviet sector. Germany immediately implemented a new policy to isolate, and contain the Jews in restricted areas, which were called ghettos. The decree to establish ghettos also stipulated that daily life would be run by a Judenrat (Jewish council), composed of 24 men, preferably known Jewish leaders, personally answerable to the Germans. The word ghetto originally referred to the Jewish quarter in Venice, established in 1516 (in Italian, the word means foundry; the area had been the site of a cannon foundry). Ghettos were traditionally permanent places of Jewish residence, but in occupied Poland the Nazis viewed the ghettos as a transitional measure. From the German point of view, the ghettos—or “Jewish residential quarters,” as they were euphemistically called—were holding pens for a subjugated population that had no rights. Jewish labor was to be exploited, goods and property were confiscated. IWITNESS WATCH PAGE GHETTO LIFE Ghettos existed from the time they were first established, after Germany occupied Poland, until the policy of annihilation was firmly in place and the instruments of destruction i.e. the killing centers - were established. In the Soviet Union, and those areas of Poland that had been annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939, ghettos were formed only after the German invasion of June 1941, only following the first wave of mass murder, in which mobile killing squads rounded up and killed hundreds of thousands of Jews. The ghettos present in certain areas of occupied Poland but were established at different times, and existed for varying time periods. They were used for different purposes. Some Jewish ghettos were set up in haste but with great efficiency. The Piotrków Trybunalski Ghetto, established on October 28, 1939 was the first. The Łódź ghetto in Warsaw soon followed as did others. In Kovno, first occupied by the Soviet Union, the ghetto was created later, in 1941, soon after Germany invaded the Soviet Union. By 1942, most of the Jews in occupied Poland and in the German-controlled territories of the Soviet Union were confined to ghettos, living in hiding, or on the run. 7 Copyright © United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC IWitness Connection – IWitness 360 Some ghettos were closed, while others were relatively open. The Warsaw Ghetto was surrounded by eleven miles of walls; and the Łódź Ghetto was sealed, enclosed by wooden fences and barbed wire. Warsaw had a sewer system that could be used to smuggle food and materials into the ghetto, whereas the Łódź Ghetto was isolated; there were few ways in or out. Piotrków Trybunalski was an open ghetto. Poles could go back and forth, and at first Jews had little difficulty leaving. Before the final deportations, however, all ghettos were sealed. There were no ghettos in Western Europe, though the Germans had established something similiar to a ghetto in Amsterdam. During the war, Jews in Germany were forced to live in Jewish houses, but these were not ghettos. Moving large numbers of widely dispersed people into ghettos was a chaotic and unnerving process. In Łódź, where an area designated as the ghetto already housed 62,000 Jews, an additional 100,000 Jews were crowded into the quarter from other sections of the city. Bus lines had to be rerouted. To avoid the disruption of the city’s main transportation lines, two streets 8 IWitness Connection – Meet Roman Kent Roman Kent reflects on different types of resistance in the ghetto and how they impacted everyone involved. were fenced off, so that trolleys could pass through. Polish passengers rode through the center of the Łódź Ghetto on streets that Jews could cross only by way of crowded wooden bridges overhead.