"What has today brought us?" wrote Chaim Kaplan, a Jew, on November 5, 1939. "A ghetto in Jewish Warsaw!"

First used in Venice, Italy, in 1516, the word "ghetto" originally referred to a city area occupied only by Jews who had segregated there. The Germans made that concept much more deadly. The ghettos they established soon after their 1939 invasion of Poland initially were intended to be transitional concentration areas to hold Jews, all of whom were to be excluded from Aryan resettlement of desirable, formerly Jewish areas. Later, the only possible Jewish "escape" from the ghettos was via deportation to extermination/slave-labor camps built by the Nazis in Poland.

The Nazis established their first ghetto on October 8, 1939. It stood at Piotrków Trybunalski in the Lódz district of Occupied Poland. A year later Kaplan was among about 500,000 Jews in Warsaw, Poland, who struggled to survive in constantly deteriorating ghetto conditions. Afflicted by hunger, squalor, overcrowding, sickness, and despair, the Warsaw Ghetto and others like it--in cities such as Lódz and Lublin (Poland), Lvov and Minsk (Soviet Union), Kovno and Vilna (Lithuania), and Riga (Latvia)--became places of immense suffering and death.

During 1942 and 1943, the Nazis "liquidated" the ghettos by deporting and murdering their inhabitants. Kaplan was gassed at the Treblinka, Poland, extermination camp.
Photo: Not for release without permission of the Life Picture Service, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive