Many of the ghetto photographs you have seen were taken by Germans.

Each of these has a fuller answer below.

The Warsaw ghetto was a sealed district in the middle of German-occupied Warsaw where the city's Jews were made to live. Ludwig Fischer, the German governor of the district, signed the order on October 2, 1940, and street loudspeakers announced it ten days later, on Yom Kippur. The move displaced 138,000 Jews and 113,000 Poles. On November 16 the district was closed: about 400,000 people on roughly 1.2 to 1.3 square miles, almost 30 percent of Warsaw's population inside 2.4 percent of its area. Refugees driven in from the surrounding towns pushed it toward 450,000.

The Jewish council had been ordered in March 1940 to wall in what the Germans called an epidemic area, and to pay for it out of its own funds. The wall went over ten feet high, topped with barbed wire, twenty-two guarded gates at the closing and six by June 1942. Ringelblum recorded the phrase going around the street: we have been buried alive.

The official German ration for Jews came to 181 calories a day, 8 percent of what Germans in occupied Poland got and a quarter of what Poles got. Between 1940 and mid-1942, 83,000 people died there of starvation and disease, and later estimates run higher. A 2020 study in Science Advances argues registered deaths substantially understate the toll, and the head of the ghetto hospital's typhus ward put the peak at about 9,000 a month.

Adam Czerniakow headed the Warsaw Jewish council from October 1939. On July 22, 1942 Hermann Hoefle told him that all Jews would be sent east, that 6,000 had to be supplied by four o'clock, and privately that if the operation failed his wife would be shot first. Czerniakow's last diary entry, the next day, includes these lines: "It is 3 o'clock. So far 4,000 are ready to go. The orders are that there must be 9,000 by 4 o'clock." He took cyanide shortly after. USHMM notes he did not call for resistance. Marek Edelman wrote in 1945 that the ghetto underground had thought at the time that he had no right to act as he did.

From July 22 to September 21, 1942, SS and police units cleared the ghetto block by block and marched people to the Umschlagplatz, a loading yard on Stawki Street. Freight cars ran to Malkinia, where a spur turned off to Treblinka. About 265,000 people were sent there and about 35,000 killed inside the ghetto during the operation.

On the morning of August 5 or 6, 1942, German police ordered Janusz Korczak's orphanage evacuated, and nearly two hundred children walked to the Umschlagplatz. Korczak had been offered false papers and a hiding place and would not consider it. Stefania Wilczynska walked with him. The date and place of his death are not known, and the story that the Germans offered to spare him is probably a myth.

People already inside a ghetto boundary had to take in the people driven in. Paula Garfinkel's family of six got one room in Lodz. In Warsaw the average was about seven people to a room. Forced labor filled factories and workshops, and once the deportations began a work permit could decide who lived. The ration was not survivable. Smuggling supplemented it and, in USHMM's words, kept the death rate from increasing still further. Children carried much of it, small enough to get through a hole in the wall. The Germans shot smugglers in public and in private.

Typhus followed the crowding. Warsaw logged 20,160 reported cases across two waves, a small one from late 1939 and a major one from early 1941, and the ghetto's own epidemiologists thought reporting caught a fifth to a quarter of infections. In late October 1941, just as winter began, when typhus normally accelerates, it collapsed. The 2020 Science Advances study credits what the ghetto did for itself: sanitary courses that drew more than 900 people, hundreds of public lectures, home isolation, an underground university training medical students. Without that work the modeling puts infections two to three times higher.

Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, who headed the Lodz Jewish council, held that a ghetto indispensable to the German war economy would not be destroyed. Lodz outlasted the Warsaw ghetto by more than a year, and the strategy saved neither the ghetto nor the children.

Ghettos that lasted years built institutions. Hundreds of clandestine schools ran across occupied Poland, students carrying their books under their clothes. A public library opened in the first days of the Vilna (Vilnius) ghetto at 6 Strashun Street with 45,000 books, and on December 13, 1942 the ghetto marked the loan of its hundred-thousandth book. Warsaw's Jewish Symphony Orchestra played its first concert in November 1940, and community kitchens fed about a quarter of the ghetto. In Warsaw in 1940 there were 600 Jewish prayer groups, meeting in cellars and attics with people posted to watch. Rabbis ruled on questions Jewish law had never been asked: Ephraim Oshry answered them in Kovno, wrote the rulings down, hid them and dug them out after the war. Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Piaseczner Rebbe, buried his Warsaw sermons before the ghetto was destroyed, and they came out of the rubble.

The ghettos argued about it at the time. When Vilna announced its first concert in January 1942 the Bund boycotted it and put up placards reading "In a graveyard you do not do theatre." Herman Kruk, who ran the library, wrote that the invitation made him feel humiliated. By March he had changed his mind and recorded that the halls were full. In Horochow (Horokhiv), Charlene Schiff's mother and other women ran a clandestine school for a few months, bartering outside the fence for paper, until there was nothing left to barter with.

Jurgen Stroop, who commanded the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, had an album made for Heinrich Himmler: a narrative summary, the daily teletype reports of April 20 to May 24, 1943, and about fifty captioned photographs. It went in at Nuremberg as document 1061-PS. A Warsaw court sentenced Stroop to death in 1951 and he was hanged the following year, convicted largely on his own report.

One of the most reproduced photographs of the Holocaust is a page from that album. A boy in a cap, hands above his head, guns behind him. The album's own caption says the people in it were forcibly pulled out of bunkers. The child has never been identified with certainty. This page does not reprint it.

Andrzej Zbikowski, who edited the Polish scholarly edition, points out that the report's vocabulary is evidence too. Germans in it are heroic, fraternal, brave. Jews are rats, vermin, lice, or at best bandits. A photograph out of that album published with a neutral caption is a trophy reprinted as documentation.

The moving pictures have the same problem. On May 1, 1942 a German crew came into the ghetto to shoot an antisemitic film. Witnesses in the Ringelblum Archive describe the crew forcing people to act out staged scenes.

Jews made their own record. Emanuel Ringelblum began a chronicle in October 1939, and after the ghetto was sealed it became an underground operation with several dozen contributors, working under cover of the Jewish Social Self-Help office beside the Great Synagogue on Tlomackie Street. They called themselves Oyneg Shabes, and they collected with postwar justice in mind, gathering duplicate material from as many towns as possible so it could establish who gave which order, when, and who helped. Some 35,000 documents came out: diaries, underground newspapers, ration cards, tram tickets, candy wrappers, theater posters, restaurant menus, hundreds of postcards from Jews about to be deported. Nearly everyone who made it was murdered.

It went into the ground in three caches. Ten tin boxes under the school at 68 Nowolipki Street on August 3, 1942, buried by the teacher Israel Lichtensztajn and two of his former pupils, Dawid Graber and Nachum Grzywacz. Two milk cans in the same cellar in February 1943. The third at 34 Swietojerska Street on the eve of the uprising. The first came up in 1946, the second in 1950. The third has never been found.

The photographers worked the same way. Henryk Ross held a post in the Lodz ghetto's Department of Statistics, which gave him film and a darkroom, and used it to photograph what he had not been assigned. In 1944 he buried about 6,000 negatives and dug them up after liberation; somewhat more than half came out. Mendel Grossman and two friends hid about 10,000 negatives; his sister and the friends recovered them after the war. In Kovno a science teacher named Zvi Kadushin photographed through a buttonhole in his overcoat, and a Jewish policeman, Yehuda Zupowitz, hid the negatives. Zupowitz was tortured and killed at the Ninth Fort in March 1944 and never said where they were. Kadish recovered them.

Both records sit on the same UNESCO Memory of the World register, the Ringelblum Archive since 1999 and Stroop's report since 2017. Which of the two a reader has seen can be measured. Of 106 images in Project Witness's own ghetto learning modules, 49 were made by Germans and 3 come from the Jewish clandestine record. The pool gathered for this page runs the other way: 38 images made by Jews against 29 made by a German body, counting the SS, the propaganda companies, the occupation's civil administration and private German cameras together.

The Jewish Combat Organization, the ZOB, was founded on July 28, 1942 with roughly 200 members. By April it had about 500 fighters, and the Jewish Military Union, out of Betar, had about 250. The Polish Home Army sent ten pistols at the end of December and fifty more with fifty grenades at the end of January.

Stroop's own order of battle averages 36 officers and 2,054 men a day, with artillery and tanks, and lists the Polish Blue Police and the Polish fire brigade alongside the Waffen SS. The operation began at 6 a.m. on April 19, 1943, the eve of Passover. The first German force was driven back, and Stroop took over at 8 a.m. Unable to take the district street by street, he burned it building by building, and destroyed 631 dug-outs.

On May 8 the ZOB command bunker at 18 Mila Street was surrounded, and when it could not be stormed the Germans put gas into it. Roughly 120 people died there, Anielewicz among them; USHMM writes that he and many of his staff commanders "are thought to have committed suicide." About fifty fighters came out through the sewers on May 10. Edelman wrote: "Not all were able to get out."

Stroop ended it on May 16. The Great Synagogue on Tlomackie Street stood outside the ghetto boundary; he had it mined and set off the charges himself. We have found no photograph of the explosion.

Anielewicz had written to Yitzhak Zuckerman on the Aryan side on April 23: "The dream of my life has risen to become fact. Self-defense in the ghetto will have been a reality." What survives is the text that reached the underground press, not the letter as written.

The album claims 56,065 Jews caught, about 7,000 killed inside the ghetto and 6,929 sent to Treblinka, plus 5,000 to 6,000 more he estimated rather than counted. His phrase for the tally is "Jews whose extermination can be proved." He listed fifteen German dead. The fighters' own counts ran into the hundreds; Edelman and Lubetkin both said so after the war. Stroop was writing to impress Himmler; the fighters had no German records.

It was the largest Jewish revolt of the war and the first significant urban revolt against German occupation in Europe. It did not save the ghetto. At least 7,000 died fighting or in hiding, about 7,000 more went to Treblinka, and about 42,000 to Poniatowa, Trawniki and Majdanek, where most were shot over two days that November. See our page about the camps. This is not the Warsaw Uprising, which the Home Army fought in August 1944.

Lodz was the second largest, and it outlasted every other ghetto in occupied Poland. Sealed on April 30, 1940, it took in roughly 210,000 people, and more than a fifth of them died there of hunger and disease over its four years. Beno Helmer, a teenager there, said what that did to him: "First two, three or four, you find them as a shock. But later, you find them...it's...you get quite used to them."

Chaim Rumkowski, who chaired its Jewish council, worked to make the ghetto indispensable to the German war economy. In September 1942 the Germans demanded its children and its elderly. On September 4 he said this.

Over eight days German police and the Jewish ghetto police searched the buildings. More than 500 people were killed in the roundup. About 15,000 went to Chelmno, roughly 6,000 of them children under ten. In May 1944 Lodz was the last ghetto standing in occupied Poland; that August about 67,000 people went to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Theresienstadt, in the occupied Czech lands, was a ghetto the SS also ran as a transit camp. It is covered on our page about the camps.

The councils were a German invention, ordered into existence by Reinhard Heydrich on September 21, 1939. They carried out German orders and ran the schools, the kitchens and the hospitals. USHMM's formulation is that their members "faced impossible moral dilemmas," and what chairmen did with those dilemmas has almost nothing in common. Adam Czerniakow killed himself in Warsaw rather than fill the quotas. Jacob Gens in Vilna gave the underground's leader to the Gestapo. Elchanan Elkes in Kovno helped the underground.

Raul Hilberg in 1961 and Hannah Arendt in 1963 treated the councils as part of the destruction process. Isaiah Trunk's 1972 study of the councils in Eastern Europe called it forced cooperation rather than collaboration. Dan Michman and Laurien Vastenhout argue they could barely affect German plans. Project Witness does not issue a verdict.

Yitskhok Rudashevski was born in Vilna in 1927 and began his diary in June 1941, in Yiddish, in a small notebook. On December 13, 1942 the ghetto library marked the loan of its hundred thousandth book, and he wrote that night: "Books link us to freedom; books connect us to the world." He was shot at Ponary in 1943, a teenager. YIVO holds the notebook.

Dawid Sierakowiak began his in Lodz weeks before he turned fifteen and kept it into April 1943; he died there on August 8, 1943, probably of tuberculosis. Five notebooks survived, found by the Pole who had owned the apartment before the ghetto took it in. He wrote on April 15, 1943: "There is really no way out of this for us."

Miriam Wattenberg wrote in Warsaw and carried her notebooks out of Europe. Her mother was an American citizen, so the family was interned rather than deported. They held a privileged position inside the ghetto, and it is why she lived and why the notebooks got out. The diary appeared in February 1945 under the name Mary Berg, one of very few eyewitness accounts of the Warsaw ghetto available in English before the war ended.

The collective version of the same act was buried under Warsaw. Emanuel Ringelblum started a private chronicle in October 1939, and after the ghetto was sealed it became an underground operation with several dozen contributors who collected with postwar justice in view, so the record would show, in USHMM's words, "who gave the orders, and who helped them." Dawid Graber was nineteen when he helped bury the first ten tin boxes on August 3, 1942, and wrote his own testament while he did it: "What we were unable to shout out to the world, we have buried in the ground." Two of the three caches came out. The third has never been found.

Liquidation is the perpetrators' word, Liquidierung: the murder of a ghetto's people en masse, shot at nearby killing sites or deported to killing centers. The ghettos were where the trains were loaded.

Warsaw went to Treblinka. Between July 22 and September 21, 1942, about 265,000 people were put on freight cars at the Umschlagplatz on Stawki Street and about 35,000 more were killed inside the ghetto. Lodz, the last ghetto left in German-occupied Poland, went to Chelmno from January 1942 and then to Auschwitz-Birkenau, which took about 67,000 of its people in August 1944. Deportations from Lublin to Belzec began on March 17, 1942, the day mass killing began at Belzec.

Further east there was often no train. About 40,000 people were shot at Ponary, eight miles outside Vilna, by the end of 1941. At least 25,000 from the Riga ghetto were shot in the Rumbula Forest on November 30 and December 8 and 9, 1941. In Kovno, more than 9,200 people were picked out on a square inside the ghetto on October 28, 1941 and shot the next morning. Nearly 4,300 of them were children.

What was done at Treblinka, Chelmno, Belzec and Auschwitz-Birkenau is told on the camps page and the Auschwitz page. This page stops at the platform.

Warsaw ended twice. When the fighting stopped on May 16, 1943, at least 7,000 people had died fighting or in hiding, about 7,000 more were caught and sent to Treblinka, and about 42,000 were deported to Poniatowa, Trawniki and Majdanek, where most of them were shot that November in the operation the Germans called Erntefest, Harvest Festival.

The last ghettos were not in Poland. Hungarian authorities built more than sixty transit ghettos in the spring of 1944, none of them lasting three months, and about 437,000 Jews were deported from Hungary in eight weeks, most to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The last ghetto to be established was Budapest's, liberated in January 1945; Theresienstadt, the last still standing, was liberated in May 1945.

Emanuel Ringelblum, who had run the archive since 1939, was hiding on the other side of the wall in a bunker under a greenhouse on Grojecka Street, with his wife Judyta, their son Uri and other Jews, about forty people in all. Two Poles, Mieczyslaw Wolski and Janusz Wysocki, kept them there. The Gestapo came on March 7, 1944. Everyone in the bunker was taken to Pawiak prison and shot in the ruins of the ghetto. Wolski and Wysocki were also killed. There was a plan to bring Ringelblum out alone. He would not leave his wife and son.

Two of the three caches came back out of the ground. The first was found in September 1946. He had been dead two and a half years.

Twenty-four dates, from the order that created the Jewish councils to the year both records of the Warsaw ghetto reached the same UNESCO register. Five years of building, three of emptying, decades of digging things up.

The record of the ghettos survives in two forms. There is what the Germans made: Stroop's album for Himmler, the propaganda film shot in Warsaw in May 1942, the Bundesarchiv photograph of Jews being moved into the Lodz ghetto under a caption calling it a house move. Those survive because a state kept its paperwork and expected to be admired for it.

Then there is what Jews made and hid. The 35,000 documents of the Ringelblum Archive went into tin boxes and milk cans under a school on Nowolipki Street. Henryk Ross buried about 6,000 negatives at Lodz in 1944 and dug up somewhat more than half after the war. George Kadish photographed Kovno through a buttonhole in his overcoat and hid the negatives with Yehuda Zupowitz of the ghetto's Jewish police, who was tortured and killed in March 1944 and never said where they were. That half exists because people decided it should.

Both halves are on the same UNESCO register: the Ringelblum Archive in 1999, the Stroop Report in 2017. The report is held by the Institute of National Remembrance in Warsaw, which calls it evidence of a crime rather than a record of an achievement.