Two events made April 19, 1943, an especially tragic day in the history of the Holocaust: In an exclusive resort on the island of Bermuda, British and American delegates began a 12-day conference supposedly to consider what their countries could do to help the Jews of Europe. Very little, they concluded. At the very same time, on the other side of the global in Poland, the Nazis moved to liquidate the Warsaw ghetto. In a desperate last stand, the remaining Jewish inhabitants of the walled-in enclave began a hopeless month-long battle against the Nazis. It was the first time during the war that resistance fighters in an area under German control had staged an uprising. It would end in the complete destruction of the ghetto.
The Nazis had established the ghetto two and a half years earlier. In mid-November of 1940, after ordering all Jews in Warsaw to collect in a designated part of the city, they sealed it off from the rest of the city with a medieval-like 10-foot high wall. Moving to the ghetto was a ghastly experience; it was like moving to prison. One inhabitant wrote, “we are segregated and separated from the global and the fullness thereof, driven out of the society of the human race.” Jews weren’t allowed out. In November 1941 the Nazis went so far as to institute the death penalty for any Jew found beyond the ghetto walls. And very little knowledge was allowed in. Earlier in the occupation, the Nazis had already taken away radios. Now they also removed telephone lines, censored mail and frequently confiscated incoming packages.
Conditions in the ghetto were appalling. At one point, more than 400,000 Jews were crowded inside its walls. Typically several families lived in one apartment. Unable to buy food on the open market, they had to rely on the Nazis to supply the ghetto, and the Germans made it their policy to keep the inhabitants on the verge of starvation. The Nazi occupation authorities had instructions to provide Jews with half the weekly maximum food allowance needed by a “population which does nomor work worth mentioning.” Within months, the hunger, overcrowding, lack of medical supplies and fuel shortages had a devastating effect. In 1941, typhus epidemics, which started in the synagogues and institutional buildings housing the homeless, decimated the ghetto. Matters were made worse when the sewage pipes froze and human excrement was dumped onto the street. By the end of the year, disease had killed more than 43,000 people or ten percent of the ghetto population.