Jessalyn: The Ghetto

Today we had out first field trip to Krakow, Poland. It was an exciting time for me because I’ve been looking forward to traveling to this city since before we got here due to the city’s history.

Being the second largest city in Poland with almost one third of its population of Jewish descent, Krakow was largely affected by the Germans invading Poland. As I learned today in Schindler’s Factory, a historical museum named after Oscar Schindler, an opportunist who ended up showing surprisingly good care toward his Jewish workers, the Jews in the beginning of the war were banned from using public transportation and later on were not allowed to attend school past the primary grades. Many basic rights such as these were taken away; however, I believe the worst action taken against them before being forced into labor camps or being killed due to the gas chambers, being shot, or starvation, was being required to live inside the Krakow ghetto.

To me, the ghetto was the first real action the Nazis executed when dehumanizing the Jews. To take away one’s public transportation privileges or the right to attend school is ludicrous, but the thought of being forced out of one’s home to move into a zoned area is worse to me. A home is a place where memories are made and families are started. It is a place of comfort and familiarity.

As Alexander Donat explains in his memoir “The Holocaust Kingdom”, he describes how being sealed off from the rest of the world affected the Jewish people in the city of Warsaw. “When the ghetto was officially sealed off, a sociological ‘experiment’ without parallel began. Half a million people, locked behind walls in the heart of a great city, were increasingly isolated from the city and from the rest of the world… [with] the real purpose of the Warsaw ghetto… [being] to exterminate its inhabitants after robbing them of all their worldly goods” (26).

Although the Jewish people received worse actions against them then being forced into living inside a ghetto, I wanted to point out how important the first real action against them was. As Lao Tzu once said, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” The ghettos established all over Europe were the first vicious steps the Nazis accomplished on their path to destroy the Jewish race and therefore this should never be forgotten.