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This learning unit allows us as educators to get a glimpse into the daily life of the
Warsaw Ghetto, right about at the midpoint of its existence. We see the escalating chaos.
We see the ghetto sealed off. We see it being isolated. We see it being flooded with Jews
and we see that they are deprived of everything. We see the hunger, the cold, the starvation,
the disease. But we see also that in spite of all that, the Jews still managed to build
a life for themselves within the walls by means of their own resourcefulness, and drawing
on their pre-war values.
Less than a year after Jost took his pictures, 300,000 of the ghetto's Jews were murdered
at the death camp of Treblinka. In April 1943, two brave groups of fighters rose up and fought
against the Germans in an uprising, but they were put down. Shortly thereafter, the Germans
came in, wiped out the ghetto completely, and that brought hundreds of years of Jewish
history in Warsaw to an end.