In accordance with German instructions, each ghetto was administered by a Jewish Council (Judenrat). The Judenrat was responsible for health, food distribution, employment and public order within the ghetto. It was also responsible for implementing German orders including, eventually, the registration, assembly and deportation of Jews to the extermination camps. The Judenrat involuntarily became a cog in the process of the destruction of its own people and itself.

Conditions inside the ghettos were harsh. Ghetto inhabitants were crowded into a small area and food and medicines were in short supply. "We manage to get only one kilogram of bread every three days," wrote 14-year-old ghetto inhabitant Charlotte Veresova. "They bring it in old hearses pulled by people. Actually, that is the only transportation here. They also carry corpses in them. Sometimes we get mouldy bread and that's bad. We cut off the mouldy part and then we must slice the rest in very thin slices to make it stretch, and it doesn't matter at all that we have to eat dry bread. If only we get enough."

The Nazis followed the principle of continually reducing the area of a ghetto and packing it with ever-increasing numbers of deportees from other towns and from abroad. By the middle of 1941, over 13 000 people in Warsaw and 5 000 in Lodz had starved to death. Many more were undernourished or malnourished, easy prey to tuberculosis (T.B.), and typhoid, as well as many diseases which had ready cures on the other side of the ghetto walls.

Children starving to death in the Warsaw ghetto

Despite the high death rates and the apparent hopelessness of their situation, the inhabitants of the ghettos sought to create as normal a life for themselves as possible. An intense intellectual life was maintained: schools were set up and musical and cultural groups of all kinds flourished. Through religious observance, political debate, education, theatre and music, the Jews in the ghettos maintained a commitment to civilisation in the midst of barbarism.