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`THE NAZI GHETTOS OF THE HOLOCAUST`

IN A MEMOIR ABOUT HIS YEARS AS A CHILD in the Warsaw Ghetto, the Polish Jewish literary scholar Michał Głowiński recalls hearing the word ghetto for the first time. It happened “at the very beginning of the war, right after the defeat” of the Polish army, when he overheard people around him debating, “Will they lock us in the ghetto or not?” The author writes, “I didn’t know what this word meant, yet I realized that it was connected with moving.” Out of this mystery he spun a fantasy that the ghetto was a “many-storied carriage riding through the streets of the city, pulled by some umpteen horses.” Głowiński imagined that this carriage would contain “all kinds of staircases, so that one could run freely from one floor to the next, and many windows as well, so that nothing would stand in the way of looking out over the unknown world.” Only with his family’s confinement in the ghetto would he learn “the precise meaning of this word.” What had initially “sounded so mysterious, so exotic, so intriguing” would be revealed as a chaotic, “discolored” labyrinth where the near-ubiquitous corpses “belonged to the permanent landscape, as the street was a place of death.”¹

The revival of officially segregated Jewish quarters by the Nazis had significant implications for the history of the ghetto concept as the Nazi segregation of Jews and how Jews experienced and represented this segregation evolved. From the beginning of the Third Reich to the eve of World War II, from 1933–1939, amid mounting legal and social exclusion of German Jews from German life and rising antisemitism throughout East Central Europe, an intra-Jewish discourse about the “ghetto” coalesced that extended well beyond German Jews to include an international cohort of Yiddish writers. During this period, the ghetto metaphor that had taken shape in the nineteenth century and had become a constituent element of Jewish consciousness reached the peak of its cultural prominence. The creation of obligatory and exclusive ghettos in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe marked a new phase in the Nazi war against the Jews. During the Holocaust, the Nazi ghetto underwent a process of defamiliarization, as what were in most cases sites of mass starvation and disease and ultimately deportation to the death camps and killing fields became unmoored from any convincing historical precedent or prototype. This was followed by a partial refamiliarization of the ghetto after the war, as the ghetto experience was reinserted into a meaningful framework of events with heroes and martyrs and a message for future generations.

In her discerning study of how middle-class German Jewish families from 1890 to 1932 typically constructed their life stories, the German historian Miriam Gebhardt writes the following:

The emancipation story was the most important element in the individual historical narratives. It formed the horizon, against which the particular family story played out. On the basis of the emancipation epoch a before-and-after story was established. “Before” was the traditional world. Discriminatory laws restricted the Jews’ room to move and their possible career choices. Though it was a long time since they had lived in ghettos, the word “ghetto” was metaphorically applied to this time in the sense of spiritual and social isolation. The ghetto was an ahistorical and unchanging space. Intellectual closure above all was seen as characteristic of the premodern era.… In contrast, the transition to the modern [was represented] as an abrupt reversal.²

While there were certainly German Jewish observers in the latter years of the Weimar Republic who took issue with the mythic structure of this modernization story—including not only Zionists skeptical of emancipation to begin with but also some liberals who remained broadly committed to the idea of progress—this master narrative was still basically intact on the eve of 1933.³ The Nazi seizure of power appeared to pose a threat not only to German Jewish legal and social status but also to the fundamental story German Jews had been telling themselves about their past, present, and future. It raised the prospect of a reversal and a return to the “ghetto.”

Over the next six years, in an uneven yet inexorable process, German Jews saw their emancipation revoked and their removal from every niche of German public life steadily magnified. Legally, the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, in addition to outlawing mixed marriages, redefined German citizenship as a matter of German blood and reduced German Jews (previous converts to Christianity included) to state subjects. Earlier, the civil service had banned all “non-Aryans,”⁴ and a growing number of professional and voluntary associations followed suit by barring Jews from membership. Businesses of Jewish entrepreneurs had begun to suffer due to Nazi boycotts and harassment and the loss of “Aryan” clientele; some businesses had already been “Aryanized” as their owners were effectively forced to sell at below-market prices. In the arts, stage companies and orchestras had dismissed all their Jewish actors, directors, musicians, and conductors.

The persecution of German Jewry had a clear spatial dimension as well. Even before the state in the late 1930s began to prohibit Jews from attending public schools, entering public parks, and shopping during all but a few circumscribed hours, German Jews had grown accustomed to being turned away from municipal swimming pools, restaurants, hotels, spas, and even entire towns and villages. Signs and placards with variations of Juden nicht erwünscht—“Jews not wanted”—had become a regular part of the built environment and social landscape throughout the Reich. The proliferation of spaces from which Jews were excluded was, to a limited degree, compensated for by the creation of distinctively “Jewish spaces.” Early on, the Nazi authorities agreed to the creation of a Jewish Kulturbund (Cultural Federation) that would consist of the tens of thousands of then-unemployed Jewish performers and would be permitted to stage a censored repertoire of theatrical performances, concerts, operas, and exhibitions (with most German classics forbidden) to a “Jewish-only” audience. But the trade-off was not equal: the spaces that were designated off-limits to Jews easily outnumbered the shrinking number of spaces available to them.⁵

Scholars commonly invoke the word ghetto to convey the snubbing and growing seclusion of German Jewry in the Nazi period. Avraham Barkai has described Nazi Germany as a “ghetto without walls” for Jews; one of the chapters of Saul Friedländer’s Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 1: The Years of Persecution (1997), is titled “The New Ghetto”; and Michael Brenner has repeatedly depicted German Jews after 1933 as living in a “cultural ghetto” or “modern ghetto.”⁶ Such language echoes how German Jews at the time thought about their predicament.⁷ For liberals who identified primarily as “Germans of the Jewish Faith,” the efforts to exclude Jews from German culture and society came as an especially hard blow. Some counseled patience and a refusal to concede German identity. Writing in August 1933 in The Morning, the principal periodical of the Central Organization for German Citizens of the Jewish Faith, Heinz Kellermann portrayed Jewish history as a perennial seesaw “between the two poles of emancipation and ghettoization” and the present moment as simply a swing in the latter direction that was bound to be temporary. While acknowledging that the “external emancipation” of German Jews had come to an end, Kellerman urged his coreligionists to hold fast to their “internal emancipation,” their sense of themselves as deeply German irrespective of the state’s current attitude toward them.⁸ A year and a half later, a contributor to The Morning sounded a more pessimistic note on the ability of Jewish youth in Germany to retain this inner consciousness. The author, Karl Julius Riegner, distinguished between two generations of Jewish youth: those older than twenty who had already acquired an immersion in German high culture (Goethe, Dürer) before the Nazis came to power, when “they didn’t have to ask whether it was permitted,” and a younger crowd that felt estranged from a “world of education (Bildungswelt), in whose development they could no longer have an undisputed share.” Around this second group there “rose inconspicuously the walls of an invisible ghetto,” a “frightful image” for those who had already widened their horizons. “The older [generation] play in the meantime Beethoven and seek to fathom Bach and Händel—the younger shrug their shoulders and retreat, only half consciously and without resignation.” Yet the latter group could plausibly ask just how enmeshed in German culture even their elders could boast of being: “does a ghetto cease to be a ghetto, because one takes the German classicists within it? Can we escape it?”⁹

Perhaps the most famous example of a reworking of the ghetto metaphor to apply to the German Jewish plight came in a sermon by Rabbi Joachim Prinz in April 1935. Prinz was, by the standards of the day, unconventional: a young, brash liberal rabbi in Berlin who was simultaneously an avid Zionist.¹⁰ In 1933, he had made a stir in German Jewish letters with a tract, We Jews, that turned the abovementioned “emancipation story” on its head. Prinz treated the modern Jewish break with the past and quest for assimilation not as a triumphant narrative, but as a sickness, a form of self-denying, even self-hating, pathology that had resulted only in marginality and a blindness to antisemitism and the nationalism of others. “The history of the Jews of the last century and a half,” he wrote, “is in good measure a medical history, indeed the history of a strange patient: the fever chart is identical with the chart of the development of the world.” It was actually the medieval ghetto Jew who belonged to the pantheon of authentic Jewish heroes. “The ghetto did not always breed the humpback and a beggarly humility,” Prinz opined, “but the valiant Jew, who preferred to go to the pyre than to betray his Judaism.” Beyond that, there was a question of the degree to which the modern Jew had truly escaped the ghetto. The Middle Ages had shut the Jew up in a ghetto, but this was a reflection of where things truly stood between the Jews and the peoples among whom they lived. Liberalism, however, had created an “anonymous ghetto.”¹¹ Anonymous, in that it demanded of Jews a certain discretion, that they be emancipated as “cultivated Europeans” but not as Jews; yet anonymous also in the sense that it was only a narrow segment of the host population—not the peasantry, not the civil service, not the petit bourgeoisie—that was willing, conditionally, to accept the Jew as “one of them.”

Prinz’s 1935 sermon can be seen as a reflection, based on the experiences of the previous two years, of what happens when this façade of “anonymity” collapses. Excerpted in an April edition of a Zionist newspaper, it was titled “Life without Neighbors: A First Attempt at an Analysis. Ghetto 1935.” “That we live in the ghetto,” Prinz opened, “now begins to penetrate our consciousness.” This ghetto was different, both conceptually and practically, from how the term had traditionally been understood. As a state of mind, “ghetto” captured a general feeling of unwantedness:“that we live in a country, we Jews in Germany, where it is made clear to us in many places that our existence is a burden to the German people.” The previous two years, Prinz went on, had demonstrated that regardless of our intentions or our positive qualities, our abilities, or anything we might do or not do, many people of this country perceive us as an albatross on their national life. Our race, spirit, religion, the physiognomy of our faces, our basic way of life—all these make the Volk unhappy. This sense of being unwelcome almost everywhere had changed the very location of the “ghetto” in German Jewish consciousness:

The medieval ghetto was sealed at night. The gate was shut harshly and aggressively; the bolts were forced carefully into place. One left the “world” and entered the “ghetto.” Today the situation is reversed. When the door of our house closes behind us, we leave the ghetto and enter our homes. This is the basic difference. The ghetto is no longer a geographically defined district, at least not in the medieval sense. The ghetto is the “world.” It is outside that the ghetto exists for us. In the markets, in the street, in hotels—everywhere is the ghetto. It has a sign. The sign is: being neighborless.¹²

The flipping of inside and outside when it came to the ghetto had resulted in a profound disorientation. For the Jews of the Middle Ages, Prinz had insisted, the ghetto, its gates and walls notwithstanding, had been a miniature homeland. For German Jews of 1935, pariahs everywhere, the open German landscape and culture they thought was their homeland had been transformed seemingly overnight into a ghetto, retaining only the isolation the word connoted and none of the comfort of being among one’s own. In a “life without neighbors,” Prinz maintained, “the ghetto is the ‘world.’ ”

By the second half of the 1930s, the crisis of emancipation had metastasized to other parts of Europe. The situation in Poland, which with its three million Jews (10 percent of the total Polish population) had the largest Jewry in interwar Europe, was especially grim. Antisemitism, simmering from the moment Poland grudgingly approved a constitution in 1921 that gave Jews full civic and political equality while also recognizing their rights as a national minority, reached an outright boil after 1935. A confluence of factors, stemming from the example of Nazi Germany to the need for a scapegoat for the prolonged economic slump to the death in 1935 of Marshal Józef Piłsudski, the de facto leader of the Second Polish Republic who generally resisted antisemitism, opened the door to a vast escalation of antisemitic propaganda and anti-Jewish violence. Openly antisemitic parties like Roman Dmowski’s National-Democratic (Endek) Party, with its slogan “Poland for the Poles,” renewed their crusade for a cap on the number of Jews who could study in universities, arguing their representation should not exceed their percentage of the whole society—and the Ministry of Education largely capitulated as universities began to adopt quotas on their own. Universities, long hotbeds of anti-Jewish demonstrations, became the site of the most concerted effort at segregation. The phrase “ghetto benches” entered the Polish lexicon, as radical nationalistic students rioted and demanded—successfully in several Polish universities—that Jewish students be restricted in lecture halls to special sections reserved exclusively for them. The word ghetto played a pivotal role in antisemitic propaganda and discourse from 1935 to 1939, arguably more so in Poland than in Germany itself. The anti-Jewish clerical press was especially enthusiastic about restoring the ghetto “as an age-old Catholic tradition dating from the Middle Ages.”¹³

Poland was far from the only East Central European state where reactionary right-wing antisemitism was ascendant in the interwar period. The second half of the 1930s in Hungary witnessed a tightening alliance with Nazi Germany and the rising clout of the fascist, vituperatively antisemitic Arrow Cross Party led by Ferenc Szálasi. In 1938 and 1939, the more conservative, established (though still antisemitic) right-wing government of the former Habsburg admiral Miklos Horthy, seeking to co-opt the extreme right, passed two successive anti-Jewish laws aimed at curbing the high percentage of Jews in Hungarian commercial, industrial, and professional life. The 1939 law, though unevenly enforced, was especially draconian; among other things, it called for limiting Jewish membership of the liberal and academic professions to 6 percent, excluding Jews from the civil service, compelling Jewish professors and teachers to retire within four years, and abolishing the right of Jews to buy or sell land. Moreover, the definition of “Jew” in both laws was at least partly racial; the first law excluded Jews who had converted to Christianity, but only if they had done so before 1919, while the second regarded children one of whose parents was a nonconverted Jew as Jews. In Romania, meanwhile, one of the most virulent antisemitic fascist movements in Europe, the Iron Guard, flourished in the 1930s, and as in Hungary, a moderate right-wing government increasingly took steps to appease the extreme right by implementing aspects of their antisemitic program. In 1937, the Romanian king went so far as to appoint a government led by two stalwarts of the Iron Guard, who proceeded to issue sweeping measures against the “Jewish enemy,” targeting their role in Romanian economic and cultural life and even their citizenship. While this government lasted a mere two months, the moderates who replaced it did not completely revoke the anti-Jewish campaign the Iron Guard had initiated. A country that had long been regarded as among the most antisemitic in all of East Central Europe was increasingly living up to its well-deserved reputation as the 1930s drew to an end.¹⁴

In March 1938, German troops marched into Austria without resistance and to cheering crowds. The Anschluss—the annexation of Austria to Nazi Germany to form the Greater Reich—had begun. While this represented yet another violation of the Treaty of Versailles on Germany’s part, the Allies responded with barely a whimper. The Austrian Nazis quickly set about expropriating Jewish assets, eliminating Jews from the economy and public life, and driving a wave of emigration so massive that it resembled—and in some cases was—an expulsion. A campaign to isolate and segregate the Jews that had been rolled out over a period of years in the so-called Altreich (Germany within the 1937 borders) and was far from complete by the time of the Anschluss was basically accomplished in Austria in a matter of months. Moreover, scenes of public humiliation of Jews erupted immediately following the entry of German soldiers into Austria. Cameras and newsreels recorded images (promptly suppressed by the Nazi propaganda authorities) of Nazis or simply ordinary Austrians forcing Jewish men and women to scrub pro-independence slogans from the streets and walls of Vienna. Some used toothbrushes, others their bare hands.¹⁵

A month later, Jacob Glatstein, one of the foremost Yiddish poets of the day, published his most searing and memorable poem, “Good Night, World.” Four years earlier, Glatstein, from his home in New York, had traveled across the Atlantic and the European continent to visit his native Lublin—a trip he would later fictionalize in his two autobiographical novels, whose portrait of a Jewish Poland in its “autumnal phase” would prove eerily prescient.¹⁶ Whether he wrote “Good Night, World” as a response to the Anschluss specifically, or to the sheer accumulation of antisemitic legislation, activity, and violence rampant throughout the Greater Reich and East Central Europe in the 1930s, is unknown. But the poem was clearly a cri de coeur that conveyed profound disenchantment and even disgust with the modern world. It began,

Good night, wide world.

Big, stinking world.

Not you, but I, slam the gate.

In my long robe,

With my flaming, yellow patch,

With my proud gait,

At my own command—

I return to the ghetto.¹⁷

Glatstein’s poem was a farewell to the “big, stinking world” that continued to treat Jews so abominably and to “flabby democracy” that responded to such oppression in muted terms. It was also, by implication, a secession from the entire project of Jewish modernity. Since the Enlightenment, advocates for Jewish modernization had tirelessly fought to dismantle the barriers that hemmed in premodern Jewish society and had pinned their hopes on acceptance by the gentile world, whether as individual citizens, a national minority, or even a separate sovereign entity. Turning his back on all these aspirations, Glatstein seemed to be turning back the clock. His poem trafficked in various metaphors of Old World Judaism—the “long robe,” the “flaming, yellow patch,” the “humpbacked Jewish life,” the “stray papers” of the “Twenty-Four-Books” (the Hebrew Bible) and the “Talmud,” the “Law”—but the line that made the deepest impression and would ultimately inspire a whole literature was the defiant claim: “At my own command / I return to the ghetto.” No symbol better captured the image of Jewish separation from the world and the extent of Glatstein’s seeming resolve to take leave of Jewish modernity by “go[ing] back to my four walls” than the word ghetto.

The poem evidently caused an immediate stir, to the point that Glatstein felt compelled to clarify his vision in an essay that appeared in the next edition (May 1938) of the Yiddish periodical Introspection, which had published his poem the month before. In a short article, “Among One’s Own: In Defense of the Ghetto,” Glatstein fleshed out his understanding of “ghetto.” He opened by expressing surprise that the mention of “ghetto” would cause such shock to Jews at a time when antisemitism was violently uprooting and destroying Jewish life in many lands. In response to the “masochistic Jews” who deemed the worst setback to Jewish life to be the “cultural ghetto” into which Jews were being forcibly driven, Glatstein disagreed strongly. Yiddish writing itself was as good a parallel as any to “ghetto life,” he retorted. “In a Jewish business, in a purely Jewish neighborhood, a Christian customer will occasionally drop by, but in the Yiddish literary environment, no ‘Aryan’ ever comes in—it’s a purely Jewish territory.” Glatstein thus indicated that returning to the ghetto was less about reclaiming an abandoned rabbinic observance than it was about affirming a mother tongue that the outside world did not know. Referring to his long-time residence on the Lower East Side and his abiding commitment to a Yiddish literature deemed by many to be doomed to extinction, Glatstein wrote, “When one lives for a long time in a ghetto the terrifying nature of the word disappears instantly. It is perhaps a great tragedy for those who have left to return, but for people who live and will end their lives among their own it is difficult to conceive [of this] as such as tragedy.” Glatstein added, “Of all the blows to fall on the shoulders of the German and now the Austrian Jews, the least of them for me is the fear of the ghetto. For them this must be the peak of misfortune, because it is a retreat from the heights of secular culture, but for me, the ghetto-professional, I have no sympathy for this kind of fright, and, if I can put it this way, for the fear of this fright.” It was not that he failed to see the horror of forced confinement: “it is a tragedy,” he wrote, “when one violently grabs and shoves people together in crowded conditions among themselves alone.”¹⁸ But absent the coercion, Glatstein had spent his entire life in such crowdedness and had made it his task to glorify his “four walls” as finely as possible.

If Glatstein indicated that his poem’s call for a return to religious law and practice was not to be taken literally, the poet did not step away from the general thrust of a call for separation. The fallout in the press was not immediate, but after the colossal failure of the Évian Conference in July 1938 to address the plight of Jewish refugees and then the appeasement of Hitler in the Munich Agreement that September, the “return to the ghetto” question rapidly became a central topic of discussion among Jewish and in particular Yiddish writers. It provoked a host of articles in the press; served as the focus of a special evening forum in Yiddish in Paris in December 1938; and even underlay the creation of a new and short-lived Yiddish journal, At the Crossroads, in early 1939.¹⁹ What did it mean to go back to the “ghetto”? The word ghetto was so malleable that no one could agree on exactly what it meant. As a result, participants in the debate invariably had to provide some kind of definition of the term in the course of staking out a position.

Those who supported, broadly speaking, the idea of a return to the ghetto—including the founding editors of At the Crossroads, the former Yiddishists and Diaspora nationalists Elias Tcherikower and Israel Efroykin—shared several features.²⁰ These supporters’ mood tended to be one of profound pessimism, at times to the point of resignation. They were disenchanted with the Western democracies, which they saw as having failed to mount any kind of meaningful resistance not only to Hitler’s assault on Jewish life but also to the virulent, at least indirectly state-sanctioned antisemitism of states like Poland and Romania. Equally, they had lost faith in the ideology of emancipation, with its promise of individual rights and full citizenship. Emancipation, by encouraging assimilation, had sapped the Jews of their national character and solidarity. They saw the ghetto as a site of asylum, where the Jews could at the very least survive the coming storm, while also insulating themselves from external influences and thereby achieving a national regeneration. The researcher Shmuel Feigin, writing from America, offered one of the most unwavering defenses of Glatstein’s separatist vision. In a Hebrew article titled “Let Us Be Ready for the Middle Ages,” which, somewhat surprisingly, appeared in the official Zionist organ The World in October 1938, Feigin asserted the need to return to the ghetto of our own will. “It is better,” he wrote, “that we imprison ourselves in the ghetto before they drive us in there. When we will be crowded together, tightly cleaving to one another in the ghetto we will be able to exist and to live a reduced life, without honor and external radiance, but we will not be destroyed.”²¹ Yet Feigin also believed that the ghetto could function as a site for the Jews to rebuild a sense of national pride and even superiority, revivifying the biblical idea of divine election and the liturgical phrase recited by traditional Jews thrice daily, “You have chosen us.” Practically speaking, the Jews should respond to the Polish ghetto benches with indifference, demonstrating to the Poles that they consider it no dishonor to sit among fellow Jews. Taking a less extreme position than Feigin, Tcherikower explained that the proponents of a “ ‘return to the ghetto’ do not mean by this to close themselves off from the world. Rather it is a feeling of coming back to oneself, of strengthening the national discipline.”²²

Those who opposed the phrase “return to the ghetto” represented a range of ideologies, but struck a few recurring notes. They rejected the idea that Jews, of their own will, had ever sought enclosure in ghettos. The acclaimed Yiddish poet H. Leyvik maintained, “We Jews have never freely accepted the ghetto. We were always forced therein, we were violently locked up, like in prisons.” He argued, “We can’t believe in God simply because it’s not good without God.”²³ The New York Yiddish novelist and short story writer Joseph Opatoshu, in an article titled “What Is Jewishness?,” asserted that when Jewish life hangs in the balance, “it is laughable and harmful … to see our only salvation in the ghetto, between the four walls of the House of Study.”²⁴ Even those who admitted to a feeling of loneliness and betrayal by the democracies, and who agreed that world Jewry needed to fortify its internal cultural and spiritual reserves, continued to insist that Jews were too entwined with the world to secede from it and could not capitulate in the fight against fascism. Leyvik, for one, hedged his opposition to the “return to the ghetto” mantra. If the slogan simply meant rooting ourselves in our folk history and culture—“that is, ghetto in the broadest sense of the term”—then Leyvik had no issue with it; this was a “ghetto” that Jews should never have left in the first place. But even if the world had abandoned the Jews, the Jews could not abandon the world by sequestering themselves in a ghetto.²⁵ The Yiddish writer Shmuel Niger took an even stronger line on the subject of the Jews’ responsibility to the world. “We are a world-people,” he wrote, “and will remain a world-people. We cannot help it. If we must improve the world, then we cannot take leave of it … our fate is bound up with the fate of humanity.”²⁶ Believing that Judaism or Yidishkayt could not be reduced to a mere particularism, the Yiddish poet and publicist Dovid Eynhorn declared, “Jews have had a world-idea and have always sent messengers, emissaries into the world to preach this idea.… The tendency of Jewish history is going into the world, not ‘ghetto.’ ”²⁷

Strikingly, this “return to the ghetto” discourse remained almost exclusively limited to Yiddish writers living in either New York or Paris. There were some echoes of the controversy in the Yiddish press of Eastern Europe, but they were faint. Tcherikower acknowledged that “here [i.e. in Eastern Europe], where the question of a forced ghetto is not theoretical, but a pitilessly concrete political reality, there is no one, not even in the non-leftist press, who has stepped forward with a call to renounce the struggle, who has given up on Jewish rights to return to the ghetto of [his or her] free will.”²⁸ Fewer than six months later, the Nazis would invade Poland, and the meaning of “ghetto”—which had never been the subject of as much discussion as it was from the early spring of 1938 to the early spring of 1939—would assume the “pitilessly concrete” dimensions Eastern European Jews had feared. The “return to the ghetto” debated in the newspapers and cafés would, throughout Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, become a literal return to the ghetto.

Up until the Anschluss, the Nazis had taken various steps to degrade German Jews and set them apart. They had driven them from the civil service, stripped them of their German citizenship, and generally promoted their social and spiritual ostracism. They had not, however, segregated them residentially. Hitler is said to have told a small circle of party members in 1935 that he wished to drive the Jews “out of all the professions, into a ghetto, enclosed in a territory where they can behave as becomes their nature, while the German people look on as one looks at wild animals.”²⁹ And a slide from a Hitler Youth educational presentation from the 1930s titled “Germany Overcomes Jewry” contains a picture of a Jew with the caption, “As a member of an alien race, the Jew in the Middle Ages had no rights of citizenship. He had to live in a separate quarter, the ghetto.” But this fantasy was not acted on.

Therefore, it seems that before 1938 both the concept and indeed specter of “ghettoization”—as well as the word ghetto itself—were much more a part of an intra-Jewish discourse than of German policy or propaganda. Even Nazi uses of the term tended to be metaphorical. In February 1937, for example, Reinhard Heydrich, the head of both the Security Police and the SS Security Service, proposed in a letter to Rudolf Hess, the Deputy Führer and Minister without Portfolio, barring Jews from vacationing at all but segregated “Jewish” resorts. This, he suggested, would build on the Nuremberg Laws and serve as another means “to return the Jews to the ghetto.”³⁰ Yet this usage of the term was clearly figurative; the “ghetto” for Heydrich was simply a metaphor for the separation of Jews from the community of German blood.

Nazi propaganda slide from a Hitler Youth educational presentation titled “Germany Overcomes Jewry,” circa 1934–1937. The text reads, “As a member of an alien race, the Jew in the Middle Ages had no rights of citizenship. He had to live in a separate quarter, the ghetto.”

The Nazis began to entertain the forced enclosure of the Jews more seriously in 1938. In the wake of the Anschluss, the seeming stabilization of Jewish legal status post-Nuremberg collapsed, and a wave of anti-Jewish legislation, humiliation, and violence aimed at isolating and segregating Jews more fully—and encouraging the hundreds of thousands of Jews who remained in the Greater Reich to emigrate posthaste—began in earnest. Ghettoization was first deliberated at the highest level in the immediate aftermath of Kristallnacht (Night of the Broken Glass), the massive pogrom on November 9–10, 1938, throughout the Greater Reich that saw hundreds of Jews killed, thousands of synagogues and Jewish businesses destroyed, and tens of thousands of Jews arrested and sent to concentration camps. The setting was a November 12 meeting of members of the Nazi leadership convened by Hermann Göring, then plenipotentiary of the Four-Year Plan to prepare Germany for war and, in that capacity, deeply involved in the campaign to “Aryanize” Jewish-owned businesses; this meeting was charged with addressing the Jewish Question in a sweeping and comprehensive fashion. The subject of ghettos arose in discussing how to increase the pressure on Jews to emigrate and to dramatically intensify the isolation of those who remained. Heydrich proposed various measures, including the introduction of a special insignia Jews would have to wear that would facilitate their identification. Göring responded to Heydrich’s proposals for marking the Jews and separating them from German economic life in a thoroughgoing manner by claiming that they would ultimately force the “creation of ghettos on a very large scale, in all the cities.” Heydrich balked at this particular suggestion:

As for the matter of ghettos, I would like to make my position clear right away. From a police point of view I think that a ghetto, in the form of a completely segregated district with only Jews, is not possible. We would have no control over a ghetto where the Jew gets together with the whole of his Jewish tribe. It would be a permanent hideout for criminals and first of all [a source] of epidemics and the like. The situation today is that the German population [which lives together with the Jews] forces the Jews to behave more carefully in the streets and the houses.31

Though he had been perfectly willing to speak of “return[ing] the Jews to the ghetto” a year earlier with respect to the establishment of Jewish resorts, Heydrich opposed the creation of actual ghettos unequivocally. This seeming turnabout may have stemmed from his discovery in the intervening period that the ghetto was not merely a historical phenomenon or a metaphor in the present for isolation and segregation, but a real, and very much contemporary, place. A 1938 book titled Jewry in the Territory of Eastern Europe by Peter-Heinz Seraphim, a leading practitioner of Nazi “academic” research into the Jewish Question,³² used the term ghetto as a label for the voluntary Jewish ethnic neighborhoods and quarters found in virtually all the midsized and major Polish, Lithuanian, and Latvian cities.³³ These enclaves were “a city within a city, the Jewish ghetto,” Seraphim wrote. But where Louis Wirth and his Chicago School colleagues viewed the modern Jewish urban ghetto as a temporary settlement where immigrants and newcomers began a process of assimilation that would ultimately weaken the centripetal force of community, Seraphim saw the ghetto as a permanent, noxious feature of the East European urban landscape. The East European Jewish ghetto served as a bastion for the strengthening of Jewish national feeling where “the Jewish essence is molded in its particular form.” Of greater concern, the ghetto, because of its “overpopulation” and “social misery,” was a base for Jewish expansion that, left unchecked, threatened to colonize ever larger sections of the city. It thus appeared to be entirely at odds with the Nazi goal of removing Jews from the economic and cultural life of their host societies.³⁴

Heydrich’s position prevailed for the time being.³⁵ At the November 12 meeting, it was decided to further separate Jews from Aryans by concentrating Jews in special “Jewish houses” instead of in a single quarter.³⁶ In April 1939, the “Law Concerning Tenant Relations with Jews” stripped Jewish tenants of their rights of occupancy and sanctioned the eviction of Jews from Aryan-owned buildings on the condition that housing could be found for them in Jewish-owned buildings. It also stipulated that from that point on Jews were to sign leases only with Jewish landlords. Aryans in turn were encouraged to move out of Jewish-owned buildings to “Jew free” houses—in many cases to vacancies newly created by emigrating or evicted Jewish families. Since there were nowhere near enough houses to accommodate the influx of Jews seeking refuge, multiple individuals were forced to share single apartments and even rooms. Living conditions became appallingly cramped and unsanitary. Eventually, these “Jewish houses” came to serve as collection points and holding centers for the deportations of Jews from the Greater Reich to ghettos and camps that would emerge in 1941.

The creation of ghettos proper only began in the wake of the German invasion, defeat, and partition of Poland in September 1939. The largest and best known of the ghettos were located in the cities with the two largest Jewries in prewar independent Poland: the Łódź Ghetto, founded in February 1940, where more than 165,000 Jews were forced into an area of 1.5 square miles, and the Warsaw Ghetto, created in October 1940, which initially incarcerated roughly 380,000 people in an area of 1.3 square miles.³⁷

Yet, for all their size and importance, these ghettos were only two among more than one thousand that the Nazis would create, in different waves, between 1939 and 1944.38 Formerly, Holocaust scholars generally construed the establishment of ghettos as a conscious prologue to genocide, and this view continues to inform popular understandings of Nazi ghettoization policy. Some interpreted the ghetto as a coherent strategy for interning Jews prior to their deportation to the death camps, others as an essential, if not necessarily premeditated, preparatory stage that laid the foundation for mass murder.³⁹ Advocates of this “intentionalist” narrative (the view that ghettoization was implemented with the “Final Solution” already in mind) tend to cite a directive issued by Heydrich, the head of the newly created Reich Main Security Office, on September 21, 1939, which established guidelines for addressing the Jewish Question in the newly occupied territories.⁴⁰ The memorandum made a distinction between the areas of western Poland that were to be directly annexed to the Reich—from which Jews were to be expelled as much as possible—and the occupied part of Poland that would become known as the Generalgouvernement. In the latter area, Heydrich called for the concentration of Jews in cities that were rail junctions or were at least located on railroad lines. He also called for the creation of a Council of Jewish Elders (a Judenrat) in each community that would be responsible for implementing German decrees, conducting a census, and facilitating the evacuation of the Jews under their oversight. Today, the Heydrich memo notwithstanding, most scholars reject the notion that ghettoization was a top-down initiative conceived as a preliminary step toward genocide. Heydrich called loosely for concentrating Jews in cities, not for the creation of involuntary and segregated ghettos.⁴¹ Ghettos were almost universally created at the behest of local Nazi civilian, military, and SS leadership and not as a result of calculated central planning. While ghettos were established as early as the fall of 1939, most scholars today believe that the Nazis did not decide on a policy of genocide against the Jews—the Final Solution—before 1941. Focusing on the Łódź Ghetto and the Warsaw Ghetto, Christopher Browning has shown how, through 1942, Nazi officials were split over the purpose of ghettoization, between “attritionists” who believed the objective was to steadily decimate the Jews through impoverishment, starvation, and disease and more pragmatic “productionists” who saw the ghetto as a means of exploiting Jews as slave labor for the benefit of the Nazi war economy and had a stake in maintaining a rudimentary level of nourishment.⁴²

There is growing recognition today of the diversity of Nazi ghettos and how the very concept of the ghetto evolved over the course of the war. Ghettos differed on the basis of a whole set of variables; for instance, on when and where they were created; on the degree to which they were “open” or “closed,” set off from the surrounding area with a few poles or placards or physically enclosed by walls, fences, and barbed wire, like the iconic ghettos of Łódź and Warsaw; on the extent to which, by virtue of the location chosen for the ghetto or the preservation of a structure of Jewish communal leadership, there was some form of continuity with prewar Jewish life, or whether the ghetto was situated in an area with no prior Jewish connection and with an internal leadership created from scratch. Meanwhile, debate over how to understand the Nazi decision to create ghettos in the first place shows no sign of abating. Browning sees the formation of the first wave of ghettos (e.g., Łódź and Warsaw) as a response, above all, to frustrated hopes of a solution to the Jewish Question that would entail the deportation of the Jews of Nazi Europe either to a vast “reservation” in Nazi Poland (the so-called Lublin Reservation or Nisko Plan) or outside Europe altogether (the Madagascar Plan).⁴³ Dan Michman, conversely, underscores the perception, fostered by Peter-Heinz Seraphim’s 1938 book, that the ghetto was the natural habitat of the despised and dangerous East European Jew. “Conceptually speaking,” Michman argues, “the ghettos were not established as some new ex nihilo creation, because … ghettos, as the Germans understood them, already existed and were the hallmark of Eastern European Jewry. The Germans merely demarcated their boundaries and forced those Jews who had moved elsewhere in the city to return ‘home.’ ”⁴⁴ Others have sought to locate and understand ghettoization within the context of the larger German colonial project for “Germanification” and ethnic cleansing of Eastern Europe to create Lebensraum (living space), which prioritized the clearing of real estate for ethnic Germans and displaced Poles as well as Jews.⁴⁵

Perhaps the single most important shift in the essential nature of the ghetto came after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Up until that point, ghettos were certainly the site of Nazi plunder, violence, and killings, but they were not a cog in a planned annihilation. Ghettos in the conquered areas of the Soviet Union (including eastern Poland, the Baltic states, Belarus, and Ukraine), in contrast, were typically created both after and in the midst of mass shootings of Jews on the Eastern Front. It was only with the decision to exterminate the Jews of Europe that ghettos became holding centers for the Final Solution, even if some survived into 1943 and even 1944 as in essence slave labor camps.

While most of the Jewish ghettos of the Holocaust were created in Poland and the parts of the Soviet Union conquered by the Nazis, there were two major exceptions. The first was Theresienstadt. Established in November 1941 on the site of a dilapidated eighteenth-century Hapsburg fortress around sixty kilometers north of Prague, Theresienstadt (Terezin) functioned primarily as a holding center for Jews from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia as well as from Germany and Austria. Many of the internees from the Altreich in particular were elderly, often decorated war veterans and their spouses, who had been cynically promised that they were being sent to a kind of “Reich old-age home” in “Theresienbad.”⁴⁶ From the outset, Theresienstadt occupied a gray zone between “camp” and “ghetto.” Unlike most ghettos, it was not created on the site of a traditional Jewish neighborhood; Jews were deported there by train or bus. Moreover, deportations from Theresienstadt to the “East”—whether to other ghettos, to the extermination camps of “Operation Reinhard,” and eventually to Auschwitz, where virtually all those sent were gassed on arrival—began in January 1942 and continued through October 1944. It thus served as a transit camp for deportation similar to other such camps in Western Europe. At the same time, unlike most camps, Theresienstadt had an elaborate Jewish internal administration led by a Council of Elders, and except during deportations, the SS generally left the maintenance of order in the ghetto to the Jewish Order Guards. In the spring of 1944, the Nazis notoriously “beautified” Theresienstadt (in part by thinning out the population through deportation) for a June visit by the International Red Cross, all with the aim of presenting the camp as a “Jewish settlement” (not a “ghetto”) that was a “paradise” for Jews. Their deception was mostly successful, and those who had contributed to the “beautification” efforts were subsequently deported. By the time the Soviets liberated Theresienstadt in May 1945, there were nearly 30,000 Jews living there, more than one-third of whom had arrived the month before amidst the vast shuffling of Jews between camps at the end of the war. From its creation to its dismantling, some 87,000 Jews were deported from Theresienstadt to the camps; only 3,600 of those deported survived.

The other major site of ghettoization outside of Poland and the Soviet Union was Hungary after the Nazi occupation of March 1944. Beginning that April, German and Hungarian officials initiated a crash ghettoization of Hungary’s 800,000 Jews, starting with the more rural and provincial Jews in the northeastern parts of the country. With incredible speed, the Jews of a region were rounded up and concentrated either in poor, slum-like Jewish neighborhoods of towns or in the even more deplorable and unsanitary conditions of open brickyards or deserted mills or factories. These ghettos proved in the end to be simply way stations, where Jews, on average, spent three to five weeks before being deported to Auschwitz, beginning in mid-May.⁴⁷ The Germans and Hungarians moved systematically throughout Hungary to first ghettoize, then deport Hungarian Jewry. Only Budapest, where roughly one-third of the Hungarian Jewish population lived before the Nazi occupation, proved something of an exception to this pattern. For a variety of reasons, though mainly because the central authorities wished to avoid a prolonged process of population relocation for a ghettoization then understood as a mere prelude to a mass deportation that would soon be forthcoming, Budapest Jews, beginning in June 1944, were segregated at the apartment level—in nearly two thousand buildings marked by a yellow star—rather than in specific Jewish enclosures (of which seven were initially planned). This setup was much closer to the German model of “Jewish houses” than to the Polish model of segregated Jewish quarters. After the Hungarian regent Miklos Horthy suspended the deportations in July 1944, Budapest Jews were largely spared from being sent to Auschwitz, though tens of thousands were killed after the Arrow Cross coup d’état in October 1944. Late that November, under the Arrow Cross, the Jews of Budapest were forced to relocate to a walled ghetto established on the site of the old Jewish quarter in Pest. For nearly two months, until Budapest was liberated by the Soviets on January 17, 1945, the “non-protected Jews” who had avoided deportation under the new government to labor battalions and concentration camps lived in harsh conditions marked by hunger, overcrowding, disease, and squalor, along with the constant fear of execution in Arrow Cross raids.⁴⁸ The only Budapest Jews spared internment or deportation were the sizable minority who had obtained protective certificates by various neutral powers (most notably, the Swiss and the Swedish) and lived in yellow-star houses in the so-called International Ghetto.⁴⁹

In light of all the evidence of the variety of Jewish ghettos during the Holocaust and of their conceptual and functional change over time, it is increasingly difficult to speak of the “Nazi ghetto” as a uniform phenomenon. What is clear, however, is that the Nazi ghetto bore little in common with the early modern ghetto beside the name. The Nazis in some areas sought to bar the use of the word ghetto, most notably in Warsaw, where they insisted that the ghetto be officially referred to as the Jewish Living District; names employed elsewhere included Jewish Living Area and Jewish Settlement. The goal was to present the all-Jewish area as a kind of natural region or habitat rather than the coercive enclosure that it was. The Nazis thus sought disingenuously to avoid the pejorative connotations of the word ghetto, but even before the Nazi ghettos turned deliberately genocidal, they were intended to segregate, marginalize, control, and exploit Jews well in excess of anything the founders of the early modern ghetto could have envisioned. From a functionalist perspective, the early modern ghetto and Nazi ghetto were clearly divergent institutions, whatever superficial similarities they may have shared.

But this gulf between past and present would only become clear to the Jews forced to live in ghettos in the course of time. “Most ghetto inmates,” Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt have written, “whatever their personality traits, tried to understand their existence by viewing it within a continuum of Jewish history.… The concept of the ghetto had a past in Jewish memory and the ghettos themselves had a Jewish past. It was logical that, at least initially, there was hope for a Jewish future.”⁵⁰

The Nazi creation of ghettos was usually preceded by a period of extreme and seemingly arbitrary persecution. In the case of the ghettos established on the Eastern Front after the invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, this took the form of mass shootings by mobile killing squads (Einsatzgruppen) in front of open graves, but even in the two years beforehand—in both the part of Poland annexed by Germany (the Warthegau) and the Generalgouvernement—ghettoization came on the heels of both official and informal humiliation and violence. Mass arrests and the grabbing of men and women off the streets to perform forced labor, surprise visits at night by a Gestapo officer or Volksdeutsche (ethnic German) to extort money and valuables, even—in the case of Łódź—the slaughter of Jewish intellectuals and representatives of the Jewish community and the peremptory expulsion of thousands over the border into Nazi-occupied Poland—all these became part of the daily experience of Jews in the initial months of living under Nazi rule. Before ghettoization, Jews were physically marked in a way that, intentionally or not, suggested a “return” to the Middle Ages. The prescribed badge differed by region—a yellow star on the chest and back shoulder in Łódź, an armband with the Star of David in Warsaw—but the upshot was to make a racial definition of Jewishness legible and the inferior status of Jews visible. Not that all Jews allowed themselves to experience their branding as a mortification. On November 30, 1939, the Warsaw diarist Chaim Aron Kaplan, a Zionist, contrasted the demeaning “yellow badge” of the “Middle Ages” imposed on Łódź Jews with the “national colors, which are our pride” represented by the blue and white armband with the Star of David.⁵¹ The thirteen-year-old Vilna diarist Yitskhok Rudashevski chronicled his memory, from early July 1941, of the introduction of the “yellow circle and inside it the letter J.” At first, he recoiled from it: “The large piece of yellow material … seemed to be burning me and for a long time I could not put on the badge. I felt a hump, as thought I had two frogs on me.” Yet by the time he wrote about it, he had ceased to feel embarrassed. “Let those be ashamed,” he declared, “who have hung them on us. Let them serve as a searing brand to every conscious German who attempts to think about the future of his people.”⁵² Whatever response it engendered, the “badge” had come to be symbolically linked to the “ghetto” in the popular image of pre-emancipated Judaism. Its implementation may not have been a premeditated step in the direction of ghettoization on the part of the Nazis, but one can see why the later and even contemporary perception of the two as part of a conceptual package could have taken shape.

Because of the constant terror and disorientation the Nazis instilled in the Jewish populace, and because the ground had already been laid for segregation via the badge and other discriminatory measures, the ghetto appeared to some Jews, at least initially, as a relief of sorts. This feeling was far from universal, but for many the ghetto seemed to promise an end to the random violence or the threat of total expulsion. Some even saw ghettoization as a kind of “ingathering” that would bring Jews together and provide security in numbers. Mark Dworzecki recalled an easing of tension and even hope for the future on the first night of confinement in the Vilna Ghetto in September 1941. “It is hard to believe,” he later recounted, “but it was nevertheless so.” People greeted each other not plaintively, but with a smile and with a degree of optimism. Even if they would be poor and hungry, the thinking went, in the ghetto they would at least be free to breathe. The snatchings off the street and from people’s homes would end (in the near term, an entirely vain hope as it turned out), and the Jews would be able to wait for better times in seclusion, among their own.⁵³ The Vilna Jewish intellectual Zelig Hirsch Kalmanovich, the first acquaintance Dworzecki remembered running into in the ghetto, captured this mood by repeating the phrase “as long as we are among Jews.”⁵⁴ The writer Isaiah Spiegel, who survived the Łódź Ghetto, sounded a similar, if more socially acerbic, sentiment of “among Jews” in a story he wrote in early March 1940, by which point the herding of Łódź Jews into the site of the ghetto, the old Jewish slum neighborhood of Bałuty, was mostly complete. Later published in edited form as “The Family Lipschitz Goes Into the Ghetto,” the story portrays the migration into the ghetto of an upper-middle-class Jewish family that, to that point, had held its poor relatives still living in Bałuty at arm’s length. They are consequently surprised when they are received with such warmth and solicitude by Uncle Yankl and his two daughters, who scurry to move all the possessions the Lipschitz family was able to carry into their small and rundown apartment. Fending off the protests of their formerly well-off relatives, Uncle Yankl responds, “Are we strangers? All Jews are today a family … a misfortune has struck us.”⁵⁵ In the weeks leading up to the establishment of a formal ghetto in Warsaw, the Zionist Kaplan consistently viewed the creation of any segregated quarter, let alone a sealed one like that in Łódź, as a catastrophe for the four hundred thousand Jews of the city, yet read carefully, his diary indicates that some of those uprooted were more hopeful. “Those who come to seek refuge in the ghetto,” he wrote on October 2, 1940, “imagine they can save themselves and their property and come to ‘rest’; perhaps only in one room, but at least they will be able to dwell there in peace.” They failed to see, Kaplan claimed, that the ghetto would remain vulnerable to Nazi depredations of all kinds.⁵⁶

If the ghetto was viewed as a return, albeit involuntary, to a Jewish neighborhood that could potentially serve as a buffer and would, one might hope, represent the point at which Nazi persecution would peak, it was also seen by many as a reversion to the Jewish past, in a way that was jarring but could also provide some inkling of precedent and familiarity. On November 8, 1940—one week before the closure of the Warsaw Ghetto—the historian Emanuel Ringelblum wrote in his diary, “There’s been the growth of a strong sense of historical consciousness recently. We tie in fact after fact from our daily experience with the events of history. We are returning to the Middle Ages.”⁵⁷ In fact, this surge in historical consciousness had already been evident months earlier in the secret publication of the first book in Jewish Warsaw under Nazi occupation, released when the question of whether a closed and mandatory ghetto would be established in the city still appeared to hang in the balance. Issued in four hundred copies between July and August 1940 by the pioneering socialist Zionist youth movement Dror, Suffering and Heroism in the Jewish Past in the Light of the Present was an anthology of martyrologies, translated into Yiddish, stretching from the eleventh-century Hebrew Crusade chronicles to contemporary Hebrew poetry. The introduction, written by the leader of the movement Yitzhak Zuckerman, wavered between acknowledging the radical novelty of the current Jewish plight and seeking consolation and encouragement in the Jews’ survival of previous spasms of persecution. “The darkest days of the new Middle Ages have come upon us,” he wrote. All the “rotten nightmares of the Middle Ages” had returned: “hermetically sealed Jewish ghettos, the yellow badge in front and back, the distinguishing signs of special Jews—armbands on the sleeve and mass murder.” In many ways, he conceded, “Our troubles of today exceed … those of the past.” And yet, by familiarizing themselves with earlier trials that the Jewish people had suffered, Warsaw’s Jews (and the pioneering youth in particular) could acquire the resolve to meet the present-day threat to the Jewish future. Without admitting any tension between his claims, the author stated that “in the course of our existence of three thousand years we have already endured countless difficult hours like these—and perhaps even more difficult than these—and we have continued to exist, to the anger and wrath of our enemies and oppressors.”⁵⁸ For all the ambiguity of the introduction about how grave the current moment was relative to the past history of Jewish suffering, the implication was that this moment had a pedigree, a prototype. It was the latest chapter in the tragic yet heroic saga of Jewish martyrdom.

In the months after the closure of the Warsaw Ghetto on November 15, 1940, at least three articles in competing branches of the vast underground Jewish press, which was splintered along ideological lines, portrayed the Nazi ghetto as a revival of a medieval concept. In December 1940, the underground publication of the socialist Zionist Poale Zion (The Workers of Zion) Right party ran in its first (and only) volume a short historical overview of the ghetto from the Middle Ages to the present, written by an anonymous “Spectator.” “The clouds of our Middle Ages have once again begun to establish themselves over our heads,” the article opened. “All the evil decrees and oppressive measures that had grown moldy and been almost completely forgotten—of interest only to the professional historian—have floated back over the territory of our bleak daily lives and become a part of our bitter reality.”⁵⁹ A month later, the underground monthly of Poale Zion Left printed a terser survey of the ghetto’s lineage that was broadly similar to the earlier article in its periodization and details. Stressing the medieval origins of the ghetto, the anonymous author expressed disbelief that “in the twentieth century, the age of the telephone, the radio, and—by contrast—the ‘Stuka’ bombers, Warsaw, like a long string of cities beforehand, has had the merit to see within its borders a ‘cultured’ achievement like this: walls, fences, and guard posts, all with the aim of cutting off half a million people from the entire world because of their origin.”⁶⁰ Finally, in April 1941, the secret organ of the pioneering left-wing Zionist movement Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa’ir (The Young Guard), published in Polish a piece titled “Between the Ghetto Walls,” with the subtitle, “The Eternal Nightmare.” “This ghetto,” the author wrote, “is not the first in history. It already existed, in the Middle Ages; in the course of time it was annulled, and here it is again.” Compared to the previous two articles, the essay stressed that the ghetto was symptomatic of an economic antisemitism that would endure so long as Jews did not live as farmers and workers on their own land. “The ghetto of our days,” the author underscored, “is neither new nor exceptional. It is a direct result of the abnormal situation of the Jewish people.” Only with the restoration of the Jewish people to its agrarian and pioneering origins in its homeland would there come “an end to the nightmare of the Jewish ghetto.”⁶¹

All three of the clandestine articles provided a genealogy for the Nazi ghetto, implying that it was a historically familiar institution for Jews, even if the confinement it imposed was a complete novelty in the contemporary Jewish experience. There were analogies with prior episodes in Jewish history that could be made, antecedents that could serve as life rafts, preventing ghetto readers from feeling as if they had become wholly unmoored from the past. The German historical theorist Reinhart Koselleck’s twin concepts of the “space of experience” and the “horizon of expectation” are helpful in making sense of this phenomenon. For Koselleck, the individual at every moment of her existence is always subject to two fundamental tugs: a backward tug toward the “space of experience,” replete with historical and biographical archetypes, and a forward tug toward the “horizon of expectation,” the realm of anticipation and projection that, to a greater or lesser degree, is informed by what the past has led the person living in the present to think likely or probable to happen in the future. Koselleck’s central argument is that, in modernity, the “space of experience” gradually shrinks, as the perceived relevance of previous exemplars for the present diminishes, while the “horizon of expectation” continually expands, as the future becomes increasingly open-ended, no longer imagined as a repetition of the past. Bracketing this argument, we can view the three essays in the underground Warsaw press as efforts to assimilate the Nazi ghetto to the Jewish “space of experience,” in a way that could sustain a “horizon of expectation” characterized by hopes of continuance and survival.⁶²

Yet, even from the outset, not everyone believed that there were grounds for comparison between the Nazi ghetto and the premodern ghetto. Kaplan, who consistently equated the prospect of a closed ghetto to the creation of a “concentration camp,” was especially skeptical. On November 28, 1940, just two weeks after the closure of the Warsaw Ghetto, Kaplan wrote of the unprecedented nature of the ghetto in its current form. Jews, he noted, had had a taste of the ghetto more than once in their history. Indeed, there were times the Jews themselves established the ghetto as an asylum from the mischief of the enemy. But even when it was forced on them, its goal was not to achieve their economic ruin. “The gates of the ghetto were open all day,” Kaplan wrote, “and only closed at night.… During the hours of the day Jews exited the gates of the ghetto in order to trade and do business. Mutual commerce between Jewish ghetto dwellers and their gentile neighbors never ceased throughout the existence of the ghettos.” The same could not be said for the ghettos the Nazis had created in Łódź and Warsaw and throughout Poland.⁶³ Meanwhile, it did not take long for Ringelblum to walk back his initial suggestion of a “return to the Middle Ages.” As a result of the continued streaming into the ghetto of Jews expelled from provincial towns, coupled with the woefully insufficient caloric rations supplied by the Nazis, the Warsaw Ghetto was direly affected by homelessness, hunger, and disease by the early months of 1941. Corpses on the streets were already a commonplace. In a diary entry from March 1941, Emanuel Ringelblum describes an “interesting argument” among several leading ghetto intellectuals on the subject of the ghetto. From his later writings, it is clear this was a debate that stretched over several Saturday afternoons. “The participants in the discussion,” Ringelblum noted, “stressed that it was impossible to compare the ghettos of old and today, since the ghetto in our days was a ghetto in name only. In truth it is a concentration camp.”⁶⁴ Oskar Rosenfeld, a Central European Zionist intellectual, was among the wave of deportees from Prague to the Łódź Ghetto in November 1941, by which point the ghetto had already existed for more than a year and a half. He found a position in the ghetto’s official “statistics department” set up by the “Eldest of the Jews,” Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski and thus was saved from subsequent deportation to the death camps until the final dissolution of the ghetto in August 1944. Throughout his confinement, Rosenfeld kept a diary rich in both empirical description and philosophical reflection, which he hoped one day—should he survive the war—would be the basis for a cultural history of the ghetto. One of his chief concerns was language, specifically how the “transformations of forms of living” wrought by the ghetto had altered the lexicon, generating a situation where “new words had to be created” and “old ones had to be endowed with new meaning.” Together with the head of the statistics department, his fellow Prague deportee Oskar Singer, he compiled in secret an Encyclopedia of the Ghetto that contained entries on everything from ghetto personalities to ghetto argot. In two of the earliest of his twenty-one notebooks, Rosenfeld mused on the significance of the word ghetto, claiming that it functioned “to mark Jews as a piece from the Middle Ages with a yellow star.” Yet Rosenfeld quickly recognized that this was mere symbolism, not reality: “In contrast to the medieval ghettos,” he wrote in another early notebook, “the present-day ghetto is ‘closed’ through a misunderstanding of the term on the part of the Eldest and the Ashkenes [Rosenfeld’s codeword for the Germans].”⁶⁵

Even with the growing sense of a chasm between past and present, the perception of the ghetto as a return to the Middle Ages proved tenacious. Though native to Warsaw, Stanisław Różycki was living in Lwów (Lviv) when the Nazis overran it in June 1941; that September he returned to Warsaw and began collaborating with Ringelblum’s secret Oyneg Shabes group dedicated to amassing a clandestine archive that would record for posterity the history of the ghetto from the vantage of its victims.⁶⁶ Three months later Różycki wrote a report about daily life in the Warsaw Ghetto and the city’s appearance titled “This Is the Ghetto! Reporting from the Inferno of the 20th Century.” For Różycki, the war as a whole and the slaughter of innocents it had inspired were proof “that in 1941 we are regressing several centuries backwards, systematically and consistently.” The ghetto, however, which Różycki observed with the unfathoming eyes of a newcomer, was the epitome of this winding back of the clock:

No evidence is needed to prove that the ghetto fully and absolutely resembles the Middle Ages; it can be seen at a glance. The idea of creating separate districts sealed by walls—this is a repetition and a deliberate imitation of the Middle Ages. Not only the walls but the fate of the imprisoned resembles medieval times. The yellow badge, never mind whether it is a white-blue or a yellow band, whether it is worn on the right arm, in the front or in the back—the intention remains the same, to stigmatize with a symbol of disgrace.

In spite of presenting the ghetto as a picture of the Middle Ages in miniature, even Różycki conceded at the end of his piece that the Nazis had surpassed “all the persecutions of medieval and earlier times.”⁶⁷ The analogy could only be taken so far.

Perhaps the most arresting example of the “return to the Middle Ages” motif in ghetto literature—one that moves in the direction of the perception of an absolute historical rupture—appears in Josef Zelkowicz’s agonized depiction of the most traumatic period in the history of the Łódź Ghetto: the mass deportation of 20,000 Jews, including nearly all children ten and under and all adults sixty-five and older, in early September 1942 to the killing center at Chełmno. To prevent anyone from escaping the order, the Germans imposed house arrest for days, as they, with the assistance of the Jewish police, methodically proceeded building by building, inspecting all the residents and snatching young children, the elderly, and anyone who appeared too infirm as a result of the terrible undernourishment to contribute to the ghetto’s economic productivity. Like Rosenfeld, Zelkowicz was employed in the statistics department and contributed to the semi-official archive’s daily Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto, which ran from January 1941 through July 1944. A trained rabbi, he also kept a Yiddish diary in which he reported, in brutally frank fashion, on how hunger, starvation, and disease were wreaking an utter breakdown in Jewish family relations, traditional bourgeois values, and religious life. “In Those Nightmarish Days,” his fastidious day-by-day, blow-by-blow narration of the September 1942 deportations, is among the most significant accounts we have of this event.

In his entry for Sunday, September 6, 1942, after the roundups had begun in earnest and the house arrest was still in effect, Zelkowicz comments on the dreadful slowness of time’s passage, such that mere hours seemed days and even longer:

What time must it be? Only ten o’clock in the morning. How large can the ghetto be? All told, the size of a single stride. But how many days feel as if they’ve passed during those few early morning hours? Just days? Years! Centuries! How much time will it take for the ghetto to finish its return to the Middle Ages? Just a few days more, and maybe just a few hours!⁶⁸

The line about a “return to the Middle Ages” at first resembles a familiar reference to Nazi savagery and bloodthirstiness. But then the passage gives this idea an unanticipated twist. Zelkowicz explains how the curfew has effectively balkanized the ghetto into separate buildings and streets, “making them feel as if they’re located on different continents.” Thus, when rumors arrive from two buildings over, it is not only as if they have “come from over the sea”: they seem to emanate from the distant past as well. “So you listen to these various stories as if they were chronicles from some ancient, bygone era. You listen to them as if they were legends read out from old, musty scrolls and end up shrugging your shoulders. ‘Are these stories true or false? Where does the truth end and fantasy begin?’ ” The seeming “medievalism” of these reports (“chronicles from some ancient, bygone era”) feeds doubt that they can in fact be true. Zelkowicz goes on to cite earlier massacres from Jewish history—the massacre of Jews in the Rhineland during the Crusades, the massacre of Jews in Ukraine by Bohdan Chmielnicki’s Cossacks in 1648–1649—that later generations related to with a sense of disbelief. Even the reports of the cruel persecution of Jews in Germany in the 1930s before the war were met with skepticism. The remoteness of all these events from a familiar human reason and logic—from what the intellect was capable of grasping—meant that they ran into a “steel wall of doubt and disbelief.” Zelkowicz goes so far as to suggest that the very ghetto inmates “who have seen with our own eyes and heard with our own ears the senseless actions and measures we’ve been subjected to”—if they are fortunate enough to survive the war—will one day relate to their own eyewitness memories with similar distrust. “A few years will be all it takes before we too begin to shake our heads doubtfully once again, and in just the same way.” The “return to the Middle Ages” that once anchored the ghetto within a distinctively Jewish “vale of tears,” and implied the existence of a continuum to Jewish historical suffering, transforms into a perception of the utter untranslatability of horror across time: “There exists no pen and no language with the vocabulary to convey every range of emotions that overtake a human being forced to see and hear all that has occurred in the last few days.”⁶⁹

This sense of wordlessness—and of the absence of any historical precedent for the current trial—became magnified in other ghettos as well during the period of mass deportations to the death camps. The Łódź Ghetto remained mostly in the dark about the annihilation of Polish Jewry in Operation Reinhard, starting with the deportation of the vast majority of the Jews of Lublin to Bełżec in March 1942. Yet news of the mass killing soon reached the Warsaw Ghetto and inaugurated a harrowing period of awaiting Jewish Warsaw’s turn, coupled with continued disbelief on the part of many that the Nazis would ever expel, let alone destroy, a community of hundreds of thousands of Jews. Writing on June 3, 1942, seven weeks exactly before the beginning of the Great Deportation of Warsaw Jewry, Kaplan contrasted the Jewish expulsions of the medieval past with those of the present. In the Jewish imagination to that point, expulsion had represented the most severe punishment that the state could inflict on its Jews, but no longer:

For these days are not like the days of old. Even the original expulsions were distinguished by their cruelty and by all the terrible troubles and awful misfortunes that were wrapped up in a sweeping decree like this; but the expelled remained alive. Every exile had the permission to go to wherever his feet led him.… It is not this way now: the exiles are transported like captives in closed and sealed cars under the watch of Nazi oppressors and are given over into the hands of the angels of destruction until they reach the site of the scaffold where their lives are taken.⁷⁰

When the Great Deportation finally began on July 22, Kaplan—whose last entry was made on August 4 and who apparently was deported with his wife on that date to Treblinka—was so overcome by his personal fear and the scenes of unspeakable chaos and wickedness (“the ghetto has turned into hell,” he wrote) that he struggled to find words that could describe the situation: “There are no words to express what has befallen us from the day the deportation was announced and the hour it began. Those whose notion of the subject of historical deportation comes from the pages of books know nothing. We, the children of the Warsaw Ghetto, are now tasting it.”⁷¹ The teacher Abraham Lewin, a contributor to Ringelblum’s secret archive who survived the first deportation and kept a diary throughout, echoed Kaplan’s insistence on the radical singularity of the present destruction. The ancient Roman war against the Judeans portrayed in Josephus and the Eastern European pogroms of 1905–1906 and 1918–1919: Lewin invokes them all only to reject the possibility of comparison. It was “a slaughter the like of which human history had not seen. Even in the legend of Pharaoh and his decree: every newborn boy will be thrown into the river.”⁷²

Of all the passages in ghetto literature on the ultimate irrelevance of the legacy of the Middle Ages or any historical past for making sense of the Nazi ghetto, arguably the most memorable is the most oft-quoted excerpt from Oskar Rosenfeld’s Łódź Ghetto diary. It follows his description of the first wave of deportations of Western and Central European Jews in May 1942, who had arrived in the ghetto only around six months earlier (“the outsettlement of the insettled”):

The tragedy is tremendous. Those in the ghetto cannot comprehend it. For it does not bring out any greatness as in the Middle Ages. This tragedy is devoid of heroes. And why tragedy? Because the pain does not reach out to something human, to a strange heart, but is something incomprehensible, colliding with the cosmos, a natural phenomenon like the creation of the world. Creation would have to start anew with berajshit [Hebr., “In the beginning,” the first word in the Hebrew Bible.] In the beginning God created the ghetto.⁷³

As with many of Rosenfeld’s observations, this one resists a simple explanation. The claim that the tragedy of the ghetto “does not bring out any greatness as in the Middle Ages” may refer to the lack of opportunity for choosing death and saving the soul at the expense of the body. There is no place for martyrdom here, Rosenfeld implies.⁷⁴ The pain of the ghetto “is something incomprehensible”; it cannot be mitigated because it dwarfs the human capacity for imagination and understanding. It is instead akin to “a natural phenomenon like the creation of the world.” The Nazi ghetto is such a radical novelty, such a rupture with “reality,” as to demand a new cosmogony: “In the beginning God created the ghetto.”

On April 20, 1943, a representative of the Polish underground cabled the Polish Government-in-Exile in London to report that the Germans had entered the Warsaw Ghetto the day before to liquidate it and deport its remaining population—and the ghetto had fought back. “The Jews are defending themselves; we can hear shots and grenade explosions,” the cable noted. “The Germans have used bombs and armored cars. They have losses.”⁷⁵ Thus began a series of messages—some penned by delegates of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ŻOB)—that would be cabled to London in the days and weeks that followed and, through regular coverage in the international and Jewish press, brought the “battle of Warsaw’s Jews” to the attention of the world. A Jewish vanguard with little formal military training and scarce ammunition held out against the tanks and artillery of the Germans for nearly four weeks. By May 16, when the SS commander of the suppression of the uprising declared that “the Jewish residential quarter of Warsaw is no more,” virtually the entire ghetto had been burnt to the ground.⁷⁶ Of the 40,000 Jews who had still been living in the ghetto on the eve of the German Aktion, only a small number managed to survive the demolition by escaping to the “Aryan” side.

Even as the war still raged and the destruction of European Jewry continued apace, the commemoration of the ghetto uprising and the shaping of its collective memory began in earnest. Before the full dimensions of the catastrophe were known, before the “Holocaust” even existed as a concept, the Warsaw revolt had emerged as the prime symbol of Jewish heroism and martyrdom during World War II. The consensus that quickly formed around the uprising’s iconic status was accompanied from the start by ideological conflict over its meaning and the most exemplary fighters of the revolt.⁷⁷ The ŻOB had briefly brought together movements that were otherwise steadfast opponents; it was a coalition of a consortium of left-wing Zionist parties with the anti-Zionist and socialist Bund. In the aftermath, members of these streams offered different accounts of the battle and of its true heroes. What would prove most consequential for the subsequent history of the word ghetto was the widely shared view of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as a paradigm of resistance.

This perception was evident in a name for the revolt coined in the first year after the revolt, only to vanish from the collective memory soon afterward: “Ghettograd.” It first appeared in a June 1943 report sent by the surviving members of the Jewish Labor Underground in Poland, which reached the Bund in the United States through London channels. “What was going on in April and May,” the report stated, “that Jewish-German war … named the Battle of Ghettograd—this really does surpass any analogy from the history, either of our own or of any other nation.”⁷⁸ Shortly before the first anniversary of the uprising in April 1944, the Chicago Jewish newspaper The Sentinel published a page-long article about the revolt titled “The Battle of Ghettograd.” According to the editor, the Nazis themselves had been the first to dub the resistance the “Battle of Ghettograd or Jewgrad, remembering their bitter retreat at Stalingrad.”⁷⁹ Later that year, the U.S. representation of the Bund in New York published a volume, Ghetto in Flames, that labeled “Ghettograd” the “new symbol” that had inspired Jews living “under Hitler’s yoke” to rebel in ghettos like Białystok and Częstochowa and in camps including Treblinka and Trawniki. “Ghettograd,” the first chapter concluded, “possesses far more than transient value. It gives a new content and meaning to life, for when it is dark all around, when the heart writhes in pain because of the great misfortune, and the world is rolling around in a burning shame—there is a warm and radiant point, to which one can raise one’s eyes: that is Ghettograd.”⁸⁰

The date of the outbreak of the uprising, April 19—starting with the very first anniversary in 1944—regularly became the occasion of commemorative events and moments of silence, first in the United States, Palestine, and the United Kingdom and eventually in liberated Europe and Jewish communities around the globe.

The World Jewish Congress—and in particular the head of its Organization Department, Ignacy Schwarzbart, a Polish Zionist who had survived the war as one of two Jewish members of the Polish Parliament-in-Exile in London—pressured its various branches to organize memorials each anniversary and collected reports about events held from Latin America to India.⁸¹ By the tenth anniversary of the revolt in 1953, so much had already been written about the Warsaw Ghetto, in multiple languages, that the pioneering Holocaust historian Philip Friedman claimed to have amassed a bibliography of some 740 works on the subject.⁸² For that anniversary, Schwarzbart authored and the World Jewish Congress published a special pamphlet titled The Story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: Its Meaning and Message. Schwarzbart asked,

Will this uprising become an eternal source of national pride in our history? I think it will. But the eternal meaning and purpose of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising will be realized only if the Jewish people, and particularly the coming generations, feel and understand that the spirit which animated the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is an integral, inseparable part of the eternal spirit which keeps our people alive and active, creative and optimistic despite all disillusionment and ever recurring suffering.⁸³

For the ghetto inmates, as we have seen, the daily experience of starvation, disease, corpses on the streets, and eventually the deportations—together with the spreading awareness that deportation meant annihilation—had appeared to vitiate the possibility of bringing the Nazi ghetto under the rubric of any antecedent in the history of Jewish persecution. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in contrast, made Jewish history relevant again. The “deeper meaning of the revolt,” Schwarzbart stressed, “is part and parcel of the spirit of the Maccabees, of the fighters of Massada, of the generations who died in the Middle Ages for the sake of our faith and religion, as well as centuries later for true humanity and morality in the relations between men and nations.”⁸⁴ Because they had chosen to die in battle, the ghetto fighters had reclaimed, it was implied, the mantle of true martyrdom. The singling out of the Warsaw Ghetto as the prism par excellence through which the murder of the six million was remembered—especially in the early decades of Holocaust commemoration—may have been driven at least in part by a desire to find a counterpoint to what appeared otherwise (however dubiously) as a history of Jewish passivity.⁸⁵ Its appropriateness as a symbol of the scale of the destruction (especially once that scale was known) was questionable from the start. Yet the ramifications of this decision for the connotations of the word ghetto were profound. Speaking at the eighth Ghetto Uprising anniversary commemoration in New York in 1951, Israel Goldstein, an American Conservative rabbi and Zionist who was then chairman of the Western Hemisphere Executive of the World Jewish Congress, evoked this change:

We are meeting on a day which elicits historic and tragic memories. It is the anniversary of the battle of the Warsaw Ghetto, a battle fought by those who knew it was hopeless but sacrificed their lives to demonstrate that the Jewish courage to die “al Kiddush Hashem” is not dead, that Jews will not let themselves be led like sheep to the slaughter, that the barbarity of the Nazi beast in human form must not be cheaply perpetrated.

Thus a new and proud connotation was given to the word “ghetto,” a connotation not of humiliation and passive submission, but of dignity and active resistance.⁸⁶

Poster created by the Congress for Jewish Culture, in Yiddish and English, encouraging the lighting of six candles in memory of the six million martyrs on the eighth anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

The ghetto itself had yielded a foil to the “ghetto Jew” in the form of the fighting martyr, whose bravery was so remarkable as to transform the very meaning of ghetto. When the word would be mentioned going forward, it would conjure not only thoughts of weakness, domination, capitulation, and genocide. It would also function as a symbol of resistance.

The ghetto thus could serve as a symbol of the legacy of Christian maltreatment of the Jews and of the perceived insularity and backwardness of Old World Judaism wherever it was found, an emblem of darkness, narrowness, and physical and mental closure. The ghetto could also represent an authentic, holistic, autonomous Jewishness buffeted by the universalizing and corrosive forces of modernity. While this discourse continued in the years of persecution leading up to World War II and the Holocaust, the Nazi ghetto ultimately could not be fit into this framework, for the simple reason that for anyone sane it could not be the object of nostalgia. In a tribute to “The Spirit in the Ghetto” he wrote but was never to deliver for the second anniversary of the Vilna Ghetto in September 1943 (he was deported to a labor camp in Estonia first, where he ultimately died in 1944), Zelig Hirsh Kalmanovitch conceded, “The only wish that united all the inhabitants of the ghetto, from the first to the last, is that the ghetto should soon disappear.”87 At most the confined population could pride itself on maintaining a society with children’s homes, a library and reading hall, a theater, and youth clubs against all the odds; “that,” Kalmanovitch concluded, “is clearly a victory of spirit over matter.”⁸⁸ Eventually, in the wake of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Nazi ghetto would come to evoke images of armed resistance. But none of this could change the fact that the primary associations of the Nazi ghetto were overwhelmingly pejorative. The old ambivalence, at least as applied to this latest iteration of the concept, was gone.

Right around the time the Nazis were transforming the significance of the word ghetto in Europe, American blacks were increasingly appropriating the term to represent their own segregation and exclusion. In the postwar period, Jews would have to reckon not only with the new baggage that “ghetto” bore as a result of the Holocaust. They would also have to respond to its assimilation into the experience and jargon of another people—a people, moreover, with whom they were ensconced in a relationship that was growing more and more fraught. The final major migration in the odyssey of the word ghetto was its migration from Jews to blacks.