What is the ghettoes?

Answer 1

Every city and sizable town in eastern Europe had a Jewish ghetto. This was the traditional part of town where the Jews had lived in those Christian nations. Not all the Jews still lived in that part of town anymore, necessarily, put just about all the people living in that part of town were Jews. In several cities, most famously in Warsaw, the Germans forced all Jews living in other parts of the city to move into the old ghetto, which soon became tremendously overcrowded. Fences and walls were built to enclose the ghetto, and the Jews were not allowed out, and the amount of food and medical supplies allowed in was insufficient to sustain the life of all in the Ghetto. Some smuggling and clandestine traffic in and out went on through the city sewer system. Streetcars still ran through the ghetto, but they did not stop as they transited the area, and nobody could get on or off. As Russian troops arrive on the far bank of the river across from Warsaw, the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto made a heroic uprising against the Germans, using the few inadequate weapons they had been able to obtain. They expected the Russians to come on across and soon liberate Warsaw, but the Russians waited six weeks on the far bank, as the Germans finally resorted to bringing in batteries of field artillery and air force bombers to batter the ghetto to rubble. Only after allowing the Germans time to do this did the Russians come on. For the entire Iron Curtain period of Soviet domination of eastern Europe, more than forty years after the war, it was not a good idea for a Pole to mention that he was one of the few surviving heroes of the Warsaw uprising. The Russians did not want any local heroes making leaders of themselves in the eyes of other Poles. The Russians had their own tame Poles, communists, who had spent years in Moscow before the war, carefully indoctrinated puppets and lap dogs for the Soviets, whom they intended to install as the new rulers of Poland, and that is exactly who ran Poland during the entire era of the Warsaw Pact.