A survivor of the Warsaw ghetto and a resistance fighter who was involved in the Ghetto uprising, Mared Edelman, later noted that the complete segregation of the ghetto from the outside world had "a very definite purpose"; it was intended to foster a special way of thinking among the ghetto inhabitants so that the only thing they would be worried about was simply to remain alive. In such an environment many of the Jews themselves turned collaborators2 and informants in order to be able to survive or resorted to smuggling and black-marketing even if it was at the expense of their own people.

             Life in the Ghetto: The Germans divided the ghettos into three categories. According to the Polish historian, Kazimierz Osmecki, the wealthy Jewish families and the intelligentsia were housed in the "little ghetto." The area was very different from the rest of the ghetto and contained cafes, restaurants, and concert halls that were well supplied with food, drinks and foreign delicacies. The second part of the ghetto was its industrial center, where the Jewish workers and their families were housed and were utilized as cheap labor-running large-scale workshops. The workers were paid wages and received better food than the poor Jews. ("The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Poles" p.9) The worst part of the ghetto called "the big ghetto" was where the majority-the poor Jews lived. They lived a life of extreme poverty and misery and barely survival. Homeless adults and children with emaciated bodies and dressed in grimy, torn rags roaming aimlessly in the streets of Warsaw ghetto became a common sight. Beggars begged and died in front of shops displaying food smuggled in from the "Aryan" area for those few who had the money to buy it. Even such harrowing scenes of misery were exploited by the German propaganda machine as examples of "depravity" of the "sub-human" Jews by contrasting it to the extravagant life-style of the few who had benefited from smuggling.