Warsaw Ghetto

The Warsaw Ghetto was established by Nazi occupation authorities in November 1940, confining approximately 400,000 Jews — nearly a third of the city's population — to an area comprising 1.3 square miles, roughly 2.4 percent of Warsaw's territory. Sealed off by walls and fences, the ghetto became the largest Jewish ghetto in occupied Europe and functioned as a site of deliberate starvation, disease, and organized exploitation prior to its liquidation through deportations to Treblinka. Dom Sierot was moved into the ghetto in November 1940 — first to 33 Chłodna Street, then to 16 Sienna as the ghetto was compressed — and continued to operate its children's parliament, court, and newspaper under conditions of extreme deprivation until the August 1942 deportations liquidated the institution. The ghetto uprising of April–May 1943 marked one of the first major Jewish armed resistance actions of the Holocaust; the ghetto was destroyed and its remaining inhabitants killed or deported by May 1943.