Disturbing Photos Captured Inside The Jewish Ghettos Of The Holocaust
Imagno/Getty ImagesA dead man lies in the street, surrounded by a crowd of people, in the Warsaw ghetto. Warsaw, Poland. Circa 1940.
Life in the Jewish ghettos of the Holocaust was indeed torture. After their invasion of Poland in 1939, the Nazis began setting up Jewish ghettos both in that country and across Europe.
Very young Ukrainian nationalists, in cooperation with the Nazi SS and armed with clubs, chase a Jewish woman through the streets of the Lviv ghetto, where at least 6,000 Jews were killed by militias and Nazi forces.
Lviv, Poland. 1941.
Jewish civilians were branded and forcibly deported into small, cramped quarters, often segregated from the rest of the city with walls or barbed wire. There they waited, hoped, and prayed, most unaware that this was nothing more than the first step in the Nazi plot for the systematic eradication of Europe’s Jewish population.
Wikimedia CommonsPolish Jews are forced out of hiding by the Nazis during the Warsaw ghetto uprising.
Warsaw, Poland. May 1943.
Before they could even be sent to concentration camps, however, many prisoners of the Jewish ghettos were starved out. They were given little to nothing to eat, leaving them to suffer through painful fits of hunger. Some died of starvation, and many more from the diseases that were allowed to spread wildly inside of the ghetto walls.
Millions of prisoners of the Jewish ghettos died at the hands of the Nazis — but the photos survive; a warning, showing us what life looks like at the start of a genocide.
