Death in the Ghettos
A Very 'UnEasy' Death"Jer 9:21 For death is come up into our windows,& is entered into our palaces, to cut off the children from without, & the young men from the streets. " Death in the Ghettos was a very visible event. It is said that in modern society, one of our greatest sins is the hiding of death, and the refusal to deal with it as a natural event. Death in the Ghettos during the Shoah made this sin of omission impossible: deaths occurred in the streets, in the homes, in public places. Deaths occurred by shootings and beatings,and other brutalities, but most occurred by disease,malnutrition and starvation.
Ringelblum and other eyewitnesses noted the daily 'death carts' in which bodies were piled high
in wooden hand-push carts, the bodies gathered from the streets and apartments in the ghetto. The reason for such
a callous treatment of death even by the residents was not really one of apathy or unconcern: the Judenrat of the Ghettos,
especially .
Death, Hunger & DiseaseMany who do not believe the Shoah really happened try to argue that the deaths in the Ghettos were normal attrition, or in other words, were the deaths that would normally occur in that size population. They argue that both disease and death are part of war, and they try in sophistry then to conclude that the Jews suffered no less than others. While it is true that by the end of the war all suffered, there is not a doubt that Ghetto deaths were severe, increased, handled with perfunctory resignation. Further, while a great deal of the deaths in the ghetto were cause by the effects of starvation and war, there were also deliberate actions of poisonings and 'bacterial warfare' that were experimented with in some ghettos by the Nazis. One such example is in a Jewish ghetto outside of Kaunas near the 9th Fort: were an entire town had their water system poisoned. Typhus, a common contagious disease in the camps and ghettos was seen as a way of exterminating large numbers of Jews, and while the disease spread randomly, the failure to treat it, the exacerbation of it and even the causing of it facilitated "Endlosung" or the final solution.Hunger and Malnutrition were two constant companions in the ghetto. There was very simply not enough food. (See Politics of Food)This has been dealt with elsewhere. The effects of starving to death were even studied by the Nazis at Auschwitz and other camps. Starvation begins with hunger and even pain from hunger and over a length of time proceeds into the body's system 'shutting down'---there is a point at which hunger is not experienced as hunger, and faintness from hypoglycemia impairs cognition. Starvation processes also lower the immune system's ability to fight off disease. ...to be continued.... |
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the Warsaw Ghetto required payment for interment: most of the residents of the Ghetto had not even enough
for the little foo that was available for purchase. The gruesome scene of bodies each morning carried away in the 'business'
of death only further added to the unreal experience of ghetto life.