Warsaw Ghetto - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The Warsaw Ghetto was established by the German Governor-General Hans Frank on October 16, 1940. At this time, the population of the Ghetto was estimated to be 440,000 people, about 37% of the population of Warsaw. However, the size of the Ghetto was about 4.5% of the size of Warsaw. Nazis then closed off the Warsaw Ghetto from the outside world on November 16, 1940, building a wall with armed guards.
During the next year and a half, thousands of the Polish Jews as well as some Romani people from smaller cities and the countryside were brought into the Ghetto, while diseases (especially typhoid) and starvation kept the inhabitants at about the same number. Average food rations in 1941 for Jews in Warsaw were limited to 253 kcal, compared to 2,325 kcal for gentile Poles and 5,613 kcal for German people. The life in the ghetto was chronicled by the Oyneg Shabbos group. In 1942 Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski reported to the Western governments on the situation in the Ghetto and on the extermination camps.
Over 100,000 of the Ghetto's residents died due to rampant disease or starvation, as well as random killings, even before the Nazis began massive deportations of the inhabitants from the Ghetto's Umschlagplatz to the Treblinka extermination camp during Operation Reinhard. Between Tisha B'Av, July 23, 1942, and Yom Kippur, September 21, 1942, about 254,000 Ghetto residents were sent to Treblinka and murdered there.
By the end of 1942, it was clear that the deportations were to their deaths, and many of the remaining Jews decided to fight.
Read for yourself. The Warsaw Ghetto is not Gaza. But Gaza is a walled camp and the Israelis are starving its residents of food, fuel and medicine.
Why build walled ghettos to confine a whole people?
Why would the children of the ghetto survivors build a walled ghetto to confine a whole people? The only humane answer is that victims of trauma act out their abuse on others unless they confront and resolve their own wounds.
The madness must stop.
It continually amazes me that this obvious bit of truth is so rarely articulated in all the discussion/arguing/parsing of this conflict.
The cycle of violence unexamined, continues.
Posted by: Judy | January 26, 2008 at 04:22 AM
Blogged about the same thing, except to me it is more of a Berlin Wall.
Of course mistreatment of Palestinians by IDF, and really the world's indifference, makes them angry, pissed off, radicalized, which leads to results like Hamas...
Posted by: americangoy | January 26, 2008 at 05:29 PM