The history of ghettos is at the core of the ways the Holocaust and, more generally, the Second World War is studied and represented. Together with the history of camps, the history of ghettos constitutes historiographical and conceptual cornerstones of Holocaust history. The “Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945” lists over 40,000 sites of persecution, forced labor, imprisonment, and murder, and over 1150 ghettos in Nazi-occupied and Nazi-allied Europe and North Africa. The experiences of ghettos are crucial for understanding the experiences of the Holocaust on the ground. Exploring different trajectories of ghettos’ establishment, functioning and destruction “from below” allows for tracing diverse dynamics in Nazi anti-Jewish murderous policies, entangled relations with non-Jewish residents and neighbors, including the involvement of the latter in mass murder of Jews, as well as lasting legacies of the Holocaust on Jewish communities and individual lives as well as on the places of their life and killings. Most of what we know about ghettos during World War II, as well as how the public imagines them, comes from research and cultural portrayals of the larger ghettos. The archetypal image of the ghetto is shaped by Warsaw, the largest and most extensively documented ghetto. There is a long list of academic works, digital projects, and films, to name just major formats. Over the last two decades, we have gained a deeper understanding of ghettos in major cities of Central Europe, such as Budapest (Cole, 2003) and Theresienstadt (Hajkova, 2020). Smaller towns rarely get to be the focus of a scholarly monograph. Yet, this perspective is promising, and new publications start to appear, for example, about the ghetto in Zdolbuniv (Dolhanov, 2024). Some more are in the process of research and writing.
Overlooked: Revisiting the Histories of Ghettos in Occupied Territories of Contemporary Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Moldova
