Catherine Hokin looks at why ghettos were created in the cities of occupied Europe during the Second World War – places of segregation and also of suffering.
My latest World War Two novel, The Secret Locket, tells a story that’s very much tied to its settings. Part of the book takes place in the Bavarian countryside, part takes place in a number of cities deeply connected to the war, including Warsaw.
I’m a city lover. I live in one, I visit more of them on my holidays; I spend a lot of time thinking about what makes them work. According to the principles laid out in the book The Ideal City, a successful city is one which is “resourceful, accessible, shared, safe, and desirable.” Which is the complete opposite of the ghetto and the bombed cities of occupied Europe.
There is a debate over the origin of the word ‘ghetto’. According to researcher Jennifer Popowycz, it dates from Venice and 1516 and is derived from the Venetian verb gettare, meaning to throw or to cast because the area assigned to Jewish residents was located close to the city’s old copper foundry. Separation rather than segregation was inherent in the word then.
By the 19th century, however, as the Venetian ghetto and those in other European cities were dissolved, the word had become synonymous with more general Jewish residential spaces whose communities weren’t cut off – socially, economically or physically – from non-Jewish groups. Its next shift in meaning, but not its last, came in 1939.
On 21 September, 1939, following the invasion of Poland, Reinhard Heydrich, the then Chief of the German Security Police, issued his Schnellbrief order to the chiefs of the Einsatzgruppen. This set out the general provisions by which Jews from all areas of the occupied country were to be brought together and concentrated in large towns and cities, in areas near railway lines. It also decreed that these “concentrated cities” were to be administered by councils of Jewish leaders, implementing Nazi orders.
The first ghetto was opened at Piotrków, on 8 October ,1939. By the time mass deportations began in 1942, at least 1,143 further ghettos had been established across occupied eastern Europe, with the largest – holding just under half a million Jews, Roma and Sinti – in Warsaw.
It would be a mistake to assume that the ghettoisation policy of 1939 was a planned step towards the Final Solution. As Holocaust historian Christopher Browning has argued, ghettos were established to segregate and control the Jewish population while that solution was being found.
Because they were under the control of local authorities, ghettos were different in some respects: Łodź was intended to have a self-sustaining economy; Theresienstadt was depicted as a haven for older, wealthy Jews. But what they all shared were degrading, disgusting conditions. Unimaginable overcrowding, starvation, lack of heating, executions and beatings, the unchecked spread of disease.
And citizens outside the walls who largely carried on with their lives as if the ghettos were invisible, as the bridge built over the horrific sights of the Warsaw Ghetto – where people lived nine to a tiny room and children froze in the streets – testifies.
There was resistance. Young Jewish women known as Kashariyot, from the Hebrew word Kesher meaning connection, risked incredible danger by acting as couriers, bringing news, weapons and medical supplies in and out of the ghettos. Food was smuggled in, often by children or by using devices such as coffins to bring in bread.
And, after the deportation of its population to Treblinka began, the last inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto – led by Mordecai Anielewicz, commander of the Jewish Fighting Organisation – rose up in rebellion, an event brilliantly described by Dan Kurzman in his aptly titled book, The Bravest Battle. A fight its leaders expected to last for a day or two at the most before they were slaughtered raged for 28, sending smoke and flames pouring over the ghetto walls into the city.
The Germans sustained their own losses but they won in the end: 13,000 Jews were killed and of the 50,000 who were left, almost all were deported to Madjanek and Treblinka. The ghetto was razed to the ground.
All the ghettos were liquidated in the end, the vast majority of their inhabitants perished.
As plans for the Final Solution took shape, the ghettos moved from being a place of separation to a place of persecution and death and were then transformed into deportation centres.
A year after the ghetto uprising, the city of Warsaw itself followed suit and rose up, many believing that the Russian troops who were close enough to enter the city would come to their aid. The Soviets unfortunately held back and the city was completely destroyed in what many historians believe was an act of reprisal by the Nazis who already knew their plans to colonise eastern Europe for the Reich were a failure. Warsaw’s citizens were deported to transit camps and by January 1945 almost 90 per cent of the city’s buildings had been burned or demolished, reducing the city to a wasteland.
And a month later, the combined Allied forces of Britain and America dropped almost 4,000 tons of bombs and incendiary devices onto Dresden and – in a firestorm that killed 25,000 people – another city learned the meaning of apocalypse.
I read a quote while I was researching this novel, which I’m paraphrasing here, to the effect that cathedrals were the legacy of the medieval period and bombed-out ruins were the legacy of the modern. It’s a sobering thought. Terrible things were done in and to cities in World War Two and what are cities if not people?
Nowadays we read the reports of the Blitz and the fire-bombing of Dresden and the annihilation of Warsaw and its ghetto, count the human cost and – quite rightly – shudder. The cry then was, “Never again”, and yet…
Here I am, sitting down at my laptop to write and switching on the news because who can’t do that first nowadays? Watching cities burn and wishing that the war crimes of the past weren’t so painfully still alive in the present.
The Secret Locket by Catherine Hokin is published on 7 July, 2025.
Find out more about this book.
Catherine writes emotionally powerful novels set during and around the Second World War in Europe. Her research has inspired several Historia features, including:
Kindertransport and other responses to the WWII refugee crisis
Making room for the master race: the true scope of Himmler’s Lebensborn programme
Language and the Nazi propaganda machine
The legacy of the village of Lidice
Concentration camps and the politics of memory
The lost cities of Berlin
You may also be interested in these related features:
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising by Elisabeth Gifford
How I discovered my war hero uncle’s secret and Living in the minds of monsters by Douglas Jackson
The Paradise Ghetto by Fergus O’Connell
In search of a Holocaust survivor’s past by Kate Thompson
Torn from home and Picking up the Pieces by Jason Hewitt
Fifty years of fake news; the cover-up of the Katyn Massacre by Carolyn Kirby
Images:
- Jews captured by the SS during the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising march to the Umschlagplatz for deportation to Treblinka, Stroop Report, 19 April to 16 May, 1943: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Warsaw Ghetto, Leszno St, May 1941: Deutsches Bundesarchiv via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Warsaw Ghetto, footbridge over the wall at Chłodna Street, from Walka. Śmierć. Pamięć 1939-1945. W dwudziestą rocznicę powstania w warszawskim getcie 1943-1963 edited by Stanisław Poznański via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Resistance fighters surrender to SS troops after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; taken at Nowolipie street looking East, near intersection with Smocza street, the ghetto wall with a gate behind, Stroop Report, 19 April to 16 May, 1943: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Warsaw Ghetto after WWII, 1945–6: Wikimedia (public domain)
