The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest of the Nazi ghettos during World War II and the Holocaust. It was established in November 1940 by the German authorities within the new General Government territory of occupied Poland. At its height, as many as 460,000 Jews were imprisoned there, in an area of 3.4 km2 (1.3 sq mi), with an average of 9.2 persons per room, barely subsisting on meager food rations. Jews were deported from the Warsaw Ghetto to Nazi concentration camps and mass-killing centers. In the summer of 1942, at least 254,000 ghetto residents were sent to the Treblinka extermination camp during Großaktion Warschau under the guise of "resettlement in the East" over the course of the summer. The ghetto was demolished by the Germans in May 1943 after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising had temporarily halted the deportations. The total death toll among the prisoners of the ghetto is estimated to be at least 300,000 killed by bullet or gas, combined with 92,000 victims of starvation and related diseases, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the casualties of the final destruction of the ghetto.
The history of the Jews in Poland dates back at least 1,000 years. For centuries, Poland was home to the largest and most significant Ashkenazi Jewish community in the world. Poland was a principal center of Jewish culture, because of the long period of statutory religious tolerance and social autonomy which ended after the Partitions of Poland in the 18th century. During World War II there was a nearly complete genocidal destruction of the Polish Jewish community by Nazi Germany and its collaborators of various nationalities, during the German occupation of Poland between 1939 and 1945, called the Holocaust. Since the fall of communism in Poland, there has been a renewed interest in Jewish culture, featuring an annual Jewish Culture Festival, new study programs at Polish secondary schools and universities, and the opening of Warsaw's Museum of the History of Polish Jews.
Tosia Altman was a courier and smuggler for Hashomer Hatzair and the Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB) during the German occupation of Poland and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was the 1943 act of Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto in German-occupied Poland during World War II to oppose Nazi Germany's final effort to transport the remaining ghetto population to the gas chambers of the Majdanek and Treblinka extermination camps.
Olyka is an urban-type settlement in Lutsk Raion, Volyn Oblast, western Ukraine. It is located east of Lutsk on the Putylivka Rriver. Its population is 3,032.
Playhouse 90 is an American television anthology drama series that aired on CBS from 1956 to 1960 for a total of 133 episodes. The show was produced at CBS Television City in Los Angeles, California. Since live anthology drama series of the mid-1950s usually were hour-long shows, the title highlighted the network's intention to present something unusual: a weekly series of hour-and-a-half-long dramas rather than 60-minute plays.
Holocaust (1978) is an American television miniseries which aired on NBC over four nights, from April 16 — April 19, 1978.
Zaklików is a town in Poland, located in the Subcarpathian Voivodeship, in Stalowa Wola County. It is located 113.1 miles (182 km) SSE of Warsaw and 50 miles (80 km) from Lublin. For about 300 years of its early history Zaklików was incorporated as a city, but it lost its city charter in punishment for the January Uprising against the imperial rule. It was reinstated as a city on 1 January 2014. Zaklików lies approximately 21 kilometres (13 mi) north of Stalowa Wola and 82 km (51 mi) north of the regional capital Rzeszów.
Following the establishment of the Second Polish Republic after World War I and during the interwar period, the number of Jews in the country grew rapidly. According to the Polish national census of 1921, there were 2,845,364 Jews living in the Second Polish Republic; by late 1938 that number had grown by over 16 percent, to approximately 3,310,000, mainly through migration from Ukraine and the Soviet Russia. The average rate of permanent settlement was about 30,000 per annum. At the same time, every year around 100,000 Jews were passing through Poland in unofficial emigration overseas. Between the end of the Polish–Soviet War of 1919 and late 1938, the Jewish population of the Republic grew by nearly half a million, or over 464,000 persons. Jews preferred to live in the relatively-tolerant Poland rather than in the Soviet Union and continued to integrate, marry into Polish Gentile families, to bring them into their community through marriage, feel Polish and form an important part of Polish society. Between 1933 and 1938, around 25,000 German Jews fled Nazi Germany to sanctuary in Poland.
The Warsaw Jewish Cemetery is one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Europe and in the world. Located on Warsaw's Okopowa Street and abutting the Christian Powązki Cemetery, the Jewish necropolis was established in 1806 and occupies 33 hectares of land. The cemetery contains over 250,000 marked graves, as well as mass graves of victims of the Warsaw Ghetto. Although the cemetery was closed down during World War II, after the war it was reopened and a small portion of it remains active, serving Warsaw's existing Jewish population.
The Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye was a Jewish resistance organization based in the Vilna Ghetto in Lithuania that organized armed resistance against the Nazis during World War II. The clandestine organisation was established by communist and Zionist partisans. Their leaders were writer Abba Kovner, Josef Glazman and Yitzhak Wittenberg.
Kalonimus Kalman Szapiro, was the Grand Rabbi of Piaseczno, Poland, who authored a number of works and was murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
Josef Blösche was a convicted war criminal and a member of the Nazi Party who served in the SS and SD during World War II. Blösche shot and killed many Jews, and helped send many more Jews to their deaths in extermination camps. He also participated in several massacres.
In the early modern era, European Jews were confined to ghettos and placed under strict regulations as well as restrictions in many European cities. The character of ghettos fluctuated over the centuries. In some cases, they comprised a Jewish quarter, the area of a city traditionally inhabited by Jews. In many instances, ghettos were places of terrible poverty and during periods of population growth, ghettos had narrow streets and small, crowded houses. Residents had their own justice system. Around the ghetto stood walls that, during pogroms, were closed from inside to protect the community, but from the outside during Christmas, Pesach, and Easter Week to prevent the Jews from leaving at those times.
ŁachwaGhetto was a Nazi ghetto in Łachwa, Poland during World War II. The ghetto was created with the aim of persecution and exploitation of the local Jews. The ghetto existed until September 1942. One of the first Jewish ghetto uprisings had happened there.
In the Presence of Mine Enemies is a 1997 Showtime TV movie about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in World War II.
Rokhl Auerbakh was an Israeli writer, essayist, historian, Holocaust scholar, and Holocaust survivor. She wrote prolifically in both Polish and Yiddish, focusing on prewar Jewish cultural life and postwar Holocaust documentation and witness testimonies. She was one of the three surviving members of the covert Oyneg Shabes group led by Emanuel Ringelblum that chronicled daily life in the Warsaw Ghetto, and she initiated the excavation of the group's buried manuscripts after the war. In Israel, she directed the Department for the Collection of Witness Testimony at Yad Vashem from 1954 to 1968.
Action Ghetto was the code name for the armed actions of the Polish Underground State during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising aimed at helping the insurgents. The name was given to a series of combat actions carried out by the Home Army during the uprising between 19 April 1943 and May 16, 1943.
The American Memorial to Six Million Jews of Europe, also referred to as the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial, is a public Holocaust memorial situated at Warsaw Ghetto Memorial Plaza in Riverside Park, within the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York City. It is a monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust. Dedicated on October 19, 1947, it is one of the first memorials to the Holocaust in the United States.
"A Town Has Turned to Dust" is an American television play broadcast live on June 19, 1958, as part of the second season of the CBS television series Playhouse 90. Rod Serling wrote the teleplay, and John Frankenheimer directed. Rod Steiger and William Shatner starred.
