Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland
The Holocaust
The liquidation of the Jewish ghettos across occupied Poland was closely connected with the construction of secretive death camps—industrial-scale mass-extermination facilities—built in early 1942 for the sole purpose of murder. The Nazi extermination program depended on rail transport, which enabled the SS to run and, at the same time, openly lie to their victims about the "resettlement" program. Jews were transported to their deaths in Holocaust trains from liquidated ghettos of all occupied cities, including Łódź, the last ghetto in Poland to be emptied in August 1944. In some larger ghettos there were armed resistance attempts, such as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Białystok Ghetto Uprising, the Będzin and the Łachwa Ghetto uprisings, but in every case they failed against the overwhelming German military force, and the resisting Jews were either executed locally or deported with the rest of prisoners to the extermination camps. By the time Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe was liberated by the Red Army, not a single Jewish ghetto in Poland was left standing. Only about 50,000–120,000 Polish Jews survived the war on native soil with the assistance of their Polish neighbors, a fraction of their prewar population of 3,500,000.
Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland-3