During World War II, ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe were set up by the Third Reich in order to confine Jews and sometimes Gypsies into tightly packed areas of the cities. In total the Germans established at least 1,000 ghettos in German-occupied and annexed Poland and the Soviet Union alone. Therefore, the examples are intended only to illustrate their scope and living conditions across Eastern Europe. Although the common usage in Holocaust literature is ´ghetto´, the Nazis most often referred to these detention facilities in documents as ´Jüdischer Wohnbezirk´ or ´Wohngebiet der Juden´ (German); both translate as Jewish Quarter.
Soon after the 1939 Invasion of Poland, the German Nazis began to systematically move Polish Jews away from their homes and into designated areas of larger Polish cities and towns. The first ghetto at Piotrkow Trybunalski was established in October 1939, the one in Tuliszkow was established in December–January 1939–1940, followed by the first large scale ghetto, the Lodz Ghetto in April 1940, and the Warsaw Ghetto in October, with many other ghettos established throughout 1940 and 1941. Many Ghettos were walled off or enclosed with barbed wire. In the case of sealed ghettos, any Jew found leaving them was shot. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest ghetto in Nazi occupied Europe, with over 400,000 Jews crammed into an area 1.3 square miles large located in the heart of the city. The Lodz Ghetto was the second largest, holding about 160,000.
The situation in the ghettos was brutal. In Warsaw, 30 percent of the population was forced to live in 2.4 percent of the city´s area, a density of 7.2 people per room. In the ghetto of Odrzywol, 700 people lived in an area previously occupied by five families, between 12 and 30 to each small room. The Jews were not allowed out of the ghetto, so they had to rely on smuggling and the starvation rations supplied by the Nazis: in Warsaw this was 253 calories (1,060 kJ) per Jew, compared to 669 calories (2,800 kJ) per Pole and 2,613 calories (10,940 kJ) per German. With crowded living conditions, starvation diets, and little sanitation (in the Lodz Ghetto 95 percent of apartments had no sanitation, piped water or sewers) hundreds of thousands of Jews died of disease and hunger.
There were three types of ghettos in existence. Closed or sealed ghettos were situated mostly in German-occupied Poland and the occupied Soviet Union. They were surrounded with brick walls, fences or barbed wire stretched between posts. Jews were not allowed to live in any other areas under the threat of capital punishment, as announced by the German authorities. In the closed ghettos the living conditions were the worst. The quarters were extremely crowded and unsanitary. Starvation, chronic shortages of food, lack of heat in winter and inadequate municipal services led to frequent outbreaks of epidemics such as dysentery and typhus and to a high mortality rate. Most Nazi ghettos were of this particular type.
THIS PROPAGANDA STAMP SET WAS ISSUED BY THE POLISH UNDERGROUND SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT AS A DIVERSIFICATION STATEMENT AGAINST MARTIAL LAW WHICH HAD BEEN DECLARED BY THE COMMUNIST AUTHORITIES IN POLAND. IT IS A VERY RARE AND COLLECTABLE ITEM . THE UNDERGROUND MEMBERS WHO ISSUED THIS STAMP RISKED A LOT, BECAUSE IF CAUGHT THEY WOULD HAVE BEEN IMPRISONED WITHOUT TRIAL.
THIS IS AN OPPORTUNITY TO OWN A UNIQUE PIECE OF HISTORY. IT IS A MUST FOR EVERY SERIOUS HISTORIAN AND COLLECTOR OF THIS PERIOD AND WILL MAKE AN INTERESTING ADDITION TO YOUR COLLECTION.
General Wojciech Jaruzelski announced the introduction of martial law in a speech first broadcast on radio and television at 6:00 am on December 13, 1981. In order to isolate members of the opposition (from the Solidarity movement), 52 internment centers were created. A total of 10,132 internment orders were issued against 9,736 people during the period of martial law.
