How do you use the term "GHETTO"?

A ghetto is described as a "portion of a city in which members of a minority group live especially because of social, legal, or economic pressure."

The term "ghetto" originated from the name of the Jewish quarter in Venice, established in 1516, in which the Venetian authorities compelled the city's Jews to live. Various authorities, ranging from local municipal authorities to the Austrian Emperor Charles V, ordered the creation of other ghettos for Jews in Frankfurt, Rome, Prague, and other cities in the 16th and 17th centuries.

During World War II, ghettos were city districts (often enclosed) in which the Germans concentrated the municipal and sometimes regional Jewish population and forced them to live under miserable conditions. Ghettos isolated Jews by separating Jewish communities from the non-Jewish population and from other Jewish communities. The Germans established at least 1,000 ghettos in German-occupied and annexed Poland and the Soviet Union alone. German occupation authorities established the first ghetto in Poland in Piotrków Trybunalski in October 1939.

The Germans regarded the establishment of ghettos as a provisional measure to control and segregate Jews while the Nazi leadership in Berlin deliberated upon options to realize the goal of removing the Jewish population. In many places ghettoization lasted a relatively short time. Some ghettos existed for only a few days, others for months or years. With the implementation of the "Final Solution" (the plan to murder all European Jews) beginning in late 1941, the Germans systematically destroyed the ghettos. The Germans and their auxiliaries either shot ghetto residents in mass graves located nearby or deported them, usually by train, to killing centers where they were murdered. German SS and police authorities deported a small minority of Jews from ghettos to forced-labor camps and concentration camps.

There were three types of ghettos: closed ghettos, open ghettos, and destruction ghettos.

The largest ghetto in Poland was the Warsaw ghetto, where over 400,000 Jews were crowded into an area of 1.3 square miles. Other major ghettos were established in the cities of Lodz, Krakow, Bialystok, Lvov, Lublin, Vilna, Kovno, Czestochowa, and Minsk. Tens of thousands of western European Jews were also deported to ghettos in the east.

The Germans ordered Jews residing in ghettos to wear identifying badges or armbands and also required many Jews to perform forced labor for the German Reich.



Daily life in the ghettos was administered by Nazi-appointed Jewish councils (Judenraete). A ghetto police force enforced the orders of the German authorities and the ordinances of the Jewish councils, including the facilitation of deportations to killing centers. Jewish police officials, like Jewish council members, served at the whim of the German authorities. The Germans did not hesitate to kill Jewish policemen who were perceived to have failed to carry out orders.

In some ghettos, members of Jewish resistance movements staged armed uprisings. The largest of these was the Warsaw ghetto uprising in spring 1943. There were also violent revolts in Vilna, Bialystok, Czestochowa, and several smaller ghettos. In August 1944, German SS and police completed the destruction of the last major ghetto, in Lodz.

During the Holocaust, ghettos were a central step in the Nazi process of control, dehumanization, and mass murder of the Jews.

We now know where the term came from. We still have GHETTOS all across America and throughout the world. ANNE: A Dance for Humanity! One Voice of 11 million.


Resources

Corni, Gustavo. Hitler's Ghettos: Voices from a Beleaguered Society 1939-1944. London: Arnold, 2002.

Kermish, Joseph, editor. To Live With Honor and Die with Honor!: Selected Documents from the Warsaw Ghetto Underground Archives "O.S." ("Oneg Shabbath"). Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1986.

Sterling, Eric J., editor. Life in the Ghettos during the Holocaust. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005.

Trunk, Isaiah. Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation. New York: Stein and Day, 1977.

Trunk, Isaiah. Lodz Ghetto: A History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.

ANN REINKING is now an Artistic Advisor for ANNE!

What a team we have built here--some of the best people in the business are involved with this project! Step by step!

Moose

Research and Development

We have such a great movement happening with ANNE! I spoke to Gail Kalver while in Chicago. We have selected our 6 cities and narrowed our budget down to be very realistic and feasible!

6 people have contributed on CHIPIN! I am convinced that people WILL give to causes, such as ours, that promote humanity and tolerance.

An enormous amount of money to raise is waiting for me for this project, but this gives me great hope.

I had coffee with the highly respected Dr. Patterson here in Memphis. He knows Elie Wiesel personally. Here are the recommended reading he gave me which I have just begun to gather while researching the project more:

**Go to the Jewish Heritage Museum in NYC as well as the USHMM in D.C.

**There is a great memorial in Miami (which I will see when I get down to FL soon!)

**Recommended Known Memoirs: Night, Elie Wiesel; Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi; Wrestling With The Angels, Tony Kushner

**Schindler's List

If I can do it--so can you! It is often by seeing our weakness as humanity that we gain our strength.

Moose

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum

There is an exhibit that many speak about at the USHMM. I highly recommend visiting it at least once in your life time, if you have not done so. I am working on trying to get help with "re-creating" one of the exhibits for our 6 city presentation. It will be magnificent if you can work it out! If you have any contacts there, please let us know!


http://www.ushmm.org/

In Chicago

Mr. Stickney, Executive Producer, and I are in Chicago. It is cold here! We will attend an event at the Spertus today. We are trying to get The Foundation For Jewish Culture involved in the project and we will meet the director at the event this evening.

CHARLA METZKER will join us! It is very, very exciting. She DANCED Anne! She has offered to help us raise money and work on the project! Who better to be involved than a dancer of this amazing work!

There is so much synergy around the producing of ANNE; So many people are becoming interested in it! It is of course completely impossible without that.

We meet with Gail Kalver (the mother of all arts management) on Monday. She has just finished an incredible project, the full opera about Margaret Garner, at the Auditorium Theater--we went last night. The opera was amazing and with a similar message of the need for human tolerance. Margaret Garner was a woman who perished as a result to American slavery--another very powerful example of one story speaking for many who suffered. Another message of the need for human TOLERANCE!

I could only keep thinking that I was in this massive theater in Chicago, where only a few blocks away several nights before, we made American history! Grant Park was full of eyes and tears on a man who would have been a slave because of how he looked, had he lived in Margaret Garner's time. He now will be the President of the United States!

Being in the theater inspired me! I remember being an 11 year old boy and dancing at the Auditorium Theater. The magic I felt just sitting in the audience--and to think we could be sharing the message of human tolerance and anti-hate in theaters like the Auditorium Theater throughout the country.

First things first: Engage each person one by one I encounter in a subject we all share in common that a young girl shared with the world. I am only another messenger, I suppose.

Andrew

The part that really struck me in my first entry... the words of this young lady, "too many." How can there be "too many" of any of us? Too many what? Gays, Jews, Jehovah Witnesses, triangles. Too many triangles.

Mr. Stickney and I are beginning to become immersed in the project little by little. I was reading about the Holocaust today. I can only stomach bits at a time--a normal human response I suppose. I have, like most people, been under the impression that this was primarily about Jews. I was misinformed. I think most people nowadays are.
There is something, as a human, to identifying with another who has been through similar circumstances. Pain is pain is pain.

I recently read this:
The pink triangle (German: das rosa Triangel) was one of the concentration camp badges, used by the Nazis, to identify male prisoners in concentration camps who were sent there because of their homosexuality. Prior to World War II, pink was historically a male color, as an offshoot of red, and pink was chosen not because it meant the wearer was feminine, but because they liked other men. Every prisoner had to wear a triangle on his or her jacket. The color was to categorize him or her according "to his kind." Jews had to wear the yellow badge (in addition to any other badge representing other reasons for incarceration), and "anti-social individuals" (which included vagrants and "work shy" individuals) the black triangle. There hasn't been any evidence for the persecution of lesbians under the "black triangle." Only one lesbian (Mary Pünjer) was mentioned in the Ravensbruck archives as being stigmatised with a black triangle, but the reason for her persecution was her Jewish heritage.

Between 5,000 and 15,000 homosexuals of German nationality are estimated to have been sent to concentration camps. After the camps were liberated at the end of the Second World War, many of the pink triangle prisoners were simply re-imprisoned by the Ally-established Federal Republic of Germany. An openly gay man named Heinz Dörmer, for instance, served 20 years in total- in a Nazi concentration camp and then in the jails of the new Republic. In fact, the Nazi laws, which turned homosexuality from a minor offence into a felony, remained intact after the war for a further 24 years. While suits seeking monetary compensation have failed, in 2002 the German government issued an official apology to the gay community.
Why bring this up now... we will get to that!

Andrew