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At this point we would ask the students to examine the first photograph: what do they
see? The most significant thing that can be seen
in this picture is the overcrowding. There are many, many people walking around, but
they're not walking on the sidewalks, they're walking in the street, and that's because
there is actually no room.
The population of the ghetto reached almost half a million people in the spring of 1941.
The ghetto was so crowded because this huge amount of people, which was like a small city
in and of itself, was crammed into just a few streets. As a matter of fact many diarists
wrote about the pushing and the shoving and the filth and the dirt of the city streets.
There were some streets that were even one-way streets only for pedestrians because of the
catastrophic overcrowding of the ghetto.
In the photo we can also see someone who is staring out her window at the crowded ghetto
streets below. Coincidentally, Chaim Kaplan, who was an educator in the Warsaw Ghetto,
wrote about exactly the same situation in his diary, on November 17th and 19th, 1940.
"The congestion is mind-boggling. If you stand on a balcony and look down on the ghetto streets
stretching in front of you, you see nothing but a vast expanse of human heads, the ebb
and flow of waves of tens of thousands of people. Almost everyone is dressed in the
same manner, nothing elegant, and every face wears the same expression of Jewish sorrow,
which has hardly changed since we were turned into dust.
We will moulder and rot within the narrow streets and the crooked lanes in which tens
of thousands of people wander idle and full of despair..."
The overcrowding in the ghetto was so catastrophic, that on average seven to nine people shared
each room, which meant that people were living with strangers. The cacophony and the stifling
atmosphere led people out onto the streets, but the jostling crowds were there as well.