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Before World War II Warsaw was the center of the Jewish population of Europe. Jews had
lived there for over 500 years. By the eve of the war, fully 30% of the city was Jewish.
In 1939 the Germans conquered Poland very quickly and World War II began.
The Germans had planned to deport the Jews, however the plans didn't immediately succeed,
and so, as an interim measure, Jews were concentrated in cities and near railways and these became
ghettos. The ghettos were not an end in and of themselves, they were interim measures,
again, on the way to deportation and then later on to mass ***.
Once the ghetto became a reality, the Jews trapped inside were its prisoners - they could
no longer come and go freely as they wanted to. They literally went to bed one night and
woke up the next morning surrounded by walls. And now, at the entrance to the ghetto, stood
very intimidating symbols of authority: German guards and Polish policemen. Any Jew who was
found outside the ghetto was unceremoniously shot. The Jews were sealed inside the ghetto.
In September 1941, a German soldier who was stationed in Poland, named Heinz Jost, snuck
into the Warsaw Ghetto with a camera, even though he was not authorized to take pictures
there. Jost took over 150 pictures of the escalating chaos of the life and death in
the Warsaw Ghetto. We have used 27 of those pictures in our learning unit.
Nineteen forty-one, the year when Jost took the pictures in the ghetto, represents a kind
of midpoint in the life of the ghetto: It had been about a year since the ghetto was
established, and it would be almost another year until 300,000 of the Jews in the ghetto
were taken and murdered at the death camp in Treblinka. At this point in time the Jews
were still struggling to survive the horrific conditions in the ghetto, and yet as we will
see, they had managed to build a society behind the walls of the ghetto, with educational
institutions, cultural institutions and mutual assistance.