Concentration Camps and Culture

Ghettos The overall function, cause and purpose of ghettos varies a lot throughout history. However, the ghettos in Poland and other parts of what eventually became Nazi-controlled had a defined and definite purpose. Indeed, they were a way to separate and control the Jews that the Nazis wanted to confine and kill. Even with all of that, there were variations and performance reasons that led to the Nazis massaging and changing their tactics.

A few things that will be answered in this brief report was how things were for the different groups living in the ghettos, how the ghettos operated overall and so forth. Even things like whether the Nazi control over the areas was accepted or resisted shall be covered. While the results of the Nazis and their efforts are widely known, they didn't get as far as they wanted (or as fast) with the ghettos.

Analysis As indicated in the introduction, the ghettos were a way for the Nazis to control and even kill the Jews. The overall purpose of the Nazis was to kill as many Jews as possible but they realized just shooting them was not going to work as well as they wanted, for a number of reasons.

They started off trying to kill them in huge number by putting them in ghettos but this did not work like the Nazis wanted and the Jews were eventually shifted to the concentration camps that everyone knows about. In any event, the ghettos of the United States are definitely real and something of review but the Nazi ghettos for the Jews were different in that the poverty and squalor was so much worse and this was by design.

It also made them much easier to arrest and corral in the form of mass arrest of the gypsies and others as described by Guenter Lewy when it came to the shifting of those people from the ghettos to the concentration camps (Levy, 2016). As noted above, there were dueling influences, standards and goals when it came to ghettos. While the Jews were not the only people there, the purpose of having them were to waste away and die.

Even with that, though, the Jews did their best to resist that outcome by banding together and against their oppressors, even if the performance of that was mixed at best. In many ways, the people in the ghettos became hopeless and eventually accepted that the Nazis were going to accomplish what they wanted, no matter how insidious it might be. The resistance of the ghettos was somewhat effective in that the Nazis eventually threw up their hands and moved towards more effective killing habits, as mentioned before.

Just as just shooting them was eventually disregarded as a tactic, so too was the slow hell of letting them waste away in ghettos. Even with that, the life that was experienced by people in ghettos was surely nasty and vile. However, it was deemed not to be cruel or efficient enough in terms of killing for the Nazis and they eventually shifted to different tactics.

Indeed, once of the facets of anti-Semitic actions of the Nazis, as defined and explained in their legislation in the late 1930's, had three to four dozen points and was quite extensive (USHMM, 2019). As partiall noted above, the Jews would not just go quietly and forsake their lives when they were in the ghettos. Indeed, David Roskies talks about Jewish cultural lives in the ghettos despite what the Nazis were clearly trying to do.

Indeed, the culture was intricate enough that the culture was not understandable unless one knew the relevant languages. In the case of the Warsaw ghetto, that meant knowing Polish. In other ghettos such as Vilna, knowing Yiddish and Hebrew was sufficient. In other words, the normal and widely known languages of a given area had to be known for the cultural norms of the area to be known. The Jews were indeed able to resist the Nazis in subtle and real ways.

It was successful to the point that some ghetto life even got better even if the end results after the Nazis got tired of waiting for the Jews to die were quite vile. In any event, the resistance (albeit muted) against the ghetto was real and it was a source of consolation for a number of Jews. This was true from the 1930's all the way through to the early 1940's before things started to get very advanced in terms of the Nazi using mass death as a weapon (Roskies, 2012).

The last question that really has not been fully answered was whether people and groups accepted the ghettos or not and how well it was accepted. As has been stated before, the Jews were much better overall than other affected groups. It certainly was not universal but they absolutely resisted in their own ways.

Indeed, open and armed resistance was not going to work but the Jews, at least some of them, were able to live their lives and have their culture (also as noted above) even with the oppression and problems. Jews or not, there were others that just accepted their fate. Some might disagree or agree about which one was better or more effective.

The author of this report (and based on the sources) would say that the resolute and measured resistance in the form of keeping up with one's culture was the better approach as it did not incur a violent response but the Jews.