World War 2 Ghetto Essay

For the average Jew living in a World War II ghetto, life would generally consist of a mix of overcrowding and malnutrition; these factors both contributed the regularity of Jews not leaving the ghettos alive. Overcrowding was common in Jewish ghettos, the average house would hold three to four families at a time even though the houses were especially small, this would prove to be very dangerous for these families. The Nazis would purposefully provide the Jews with a lack of food causing them to go to extreme measures just to feed their families. Disease and smuggling became commonplace for the people living in these places. Due to the overcrowding, the ghettos were overrun with disease, illness ended up being one of the main causes of death …show more content…
The typical overcrowded house would frequently hold up to as many as four to five, and in some cases even more, families living in there at the same time, even though they may have only a limited number of beds and only a modest amount of rooms. This meant that, partially due to a lack of medicine and cleanliness, if one person in the house fell sick, everybody else became infected as well. Fatal illnesses like the flu, typhus, and small pox overran the ghettos, infecting a large percentage of the people that lived there. “This, along with malnutrition, turned out to be the element that killed the vast majority of Jews living in these ghettos” (Ghettos: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). Disease was not the only considerable cause of death in these Overpopulation became an extensive dilemma in some of the larger ghettos like Warsaw and Lodz. An investigation of the Lodz ghetto, done by the Judenrat, discovered a household that had a room with “only three small beds in it that had 17 people sleeping in there at once. The report stated that there were an astonishing four people sleeping in each bed whereas everyone else had to find comfort on the floor” (The Holocaust Explained, Conditions within the