The Shoah (1939–1945)
Famine in the Warsaw ghetto
1940-1942·Varsovie
The toll is reproduced exactly as the source states it — never rounded, never added to another. Tolls overlap from one event to the next.
Rations of a few hundred calories, overcrowding and typhus: mortality claims tens of thousands of people even before the deportations.
Sealed in autumn, the Warsaw Ghetto was conceived from the outset as a place where one dies slowly. The official rations amounted to a few hundred calories per day, well below the minimum required to sustain life; the crowding into a few streets, the absence of heating, and contaminated water made typhus endemic. People died in the streets, and the bodies were collected each morning by community teams.
Between 1940 and 1942, even before the deportations to Treblinka began, hunger and disease carried off a considerable portion of the enclosed population. The clandestine medical service, led by physicians of the ghetto, undertook a scientific study of hunger in those it was killing, and managed to smuggle its findings out; Emanuel Ringelblum's clandestine archives recorded its days.
- Period :
- The Shoah (1939–1945)
- Type :
- Shoah
- Region :
- Central and Eastern Europe
- Country :
- Pologne
Archives clandestines Oneg Shabbat du ghetto de Varsovie ; travaux du service de santé clandestin sur la maladie de famine.