On this day: the Warsaw Ghetto is sealed

A month later, it was sealed off, with an estimated 400,000 Jews trapped in just 1.3 square miles. On average, 7.2 people lived in every room, and there were widespread food and medicine shortages. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands were deported to death camps or killed in the ghetto.

In April 1943, aware that the Nazis were starting the final deportations from the ghetto, Jewish fighters launched a resistance using weapons smuggled across the walls. They were initially successful but within four days the attempt had collapsed among all but small pockets of fighters and the ghetto was liquidated.

Soviet troops liberated Poland in January 1945. Just 11,500 Jews from Warsaw were believed to have survived the Holocaust.

What the JC said about the ghetto in 1940: An eight-foot concrete wall, “so secure that a cat could not get through it,” surrounds the Warsaw Ghetto…The Governor-General of Poland, Dr. Frank, has decreed that Jews must not appear in the streets between 6pm and 6am. The reason for this extension of the curfew is the discovery by the Gestapo that many Poles, contrary to the Nazi regulations, were secretly selling food to starving Jews under cover of darkness.

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