Most people know the stories of the concentration camps and death camps,and they even may know about the ghettos.

However what most people do not realize is the amount of ghettos created by the Nazis during WWII. In Poland alone there were more then 270 ghettos.

Life in the ghettos was usually unbearable. Overcrowding was common. One apartment might have several families living in it. Plumbing broke down, and human waste was thrown in the streets along with the garbage. Contagious diseases spread rapidly in such cramped, unsanitary housing.

Following the 1939 Invasion of Poland, the new ghetto system had been imposed by Nazi Germany roughly between October 1939 and July 1942 in order to confine Poland’s Jewish population of 3.5 million for the purpose of persecution, terror, and exploitation.The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest ghetto in all of Nazi occupied Europe, with over 400,000 Jews crammed into an area of 1.3 square miles (3.4 km²