("Warsaw"; Bell, pp. 167-168) .

             The Ghetto is Formed: On October 16, 1940, the German governor general, Hans Frank announced the establishment of the Warsaw ghetto, a segregated area for Jews in the city. A Jewish Council for Warsaw named Judenrat was formed under the auspices of the Germans to "govern" the ghetto and a Jewish police force raised for maintaining order. All Jews in the city, one-third of its population, were ordered to be crammed into an area which was just one-twentieth of the city's size (just one square mile). .

             Within one month all non-Jews were shifted out of the ghetto and ten-foot high walls were built around it to seal the Jews off from the outside world. During the next year and a half, Jews from smaller cities and villages in the country were brought into the ghetto swelling its population to 400,000. Each room in the overcrowded ghetto held an average of twelve occupants. The Germans systematically closed-off labor opportunities for the Jews, so that 60 % of them were unemployed. Official rations for Jews were severely limited to starvation levels and most of the ghetto inhabitants survived on a diet of watery soup served in public kitchens. (Bell, 167) .

             Survival Becomes the Priority: In order to keep the Jews in line, the Germans resorted to terror tactics and applied the principle of "collective punishment" if any Jew dared to disobey the rules. For example, as early as November 1939, even before the official proclamation of the ghetto, 53 Jews in an apartment building were summarily shot for the beating of a Polish policeman by one of the tenants. (Edelman, para 5) When a radio transmitting station of the Polish Underground was found by the Germans in January 1940, the Germans arrested and executed over 300 Jewish social leaders, intelligentsia and professionals in a single night. (Ibid, para 9) Apart from the physical travails of the ghetto inhabitants, the Germans also subjected the Jews to psychological torture in order to break their spirit of resistance.