The Atrocity of Hunger: Starvation in the Warsaw, Łódź, and Kraków Ghettos during World War II

During World War II, the Germans put the Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland into ghettos which restricted their movement and, most crucially for their survival, access to food. The Germans saw the Jews as 'useless eaters,' and denied them sufficient food for survival. The hunger which resulted from this intentional starvation impacted every aspect of Jewish life inside the ghettos. This book focuses on the Jews in the Łódź, Warsaw, and Kraków ghettos as they struggled to survive the deadly Nazi ghetto and, in particular, the genocidal famine conditions. Jews had no control over Nazi food policy but they attempted to survive the deadly conditions of Nazi ghettoization through a range of coping mechanisms and survival strategies. In this book, Helene Sinnreich explores their story, drawing from diaries and first-hand accounts of the victims and survivors.

Chapters:

The Nazi Invasion: Violence, Displacement, and Expropriation -- Jewish Leadership -- The Supply and Distribution of Food: Strategies and Priorities -- The Physical, Mental, and Social Effects of Hunger -- Hunger and Everyday Life in the Ghetto -- Socioeconomic Status and Food Access -- Relief Systems and Charity -- Illicit Food Access: Smuggling, Theft, and the Black Market -- Labor and Food in the Ghettos -- Deportations and the End of the Ghettos

This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Learn more at the TOME website, available at www.openmonographs.org.

This work can be downloaded for non-commercial purposes: Acts of Care is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.