Prewar Warsaw, the capital of Poland, numbered among its residents some 380,000 people who counted as Jews under the Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws, and who, from the moment the Germans occupied Poland, faced first discrimination and then later physical extermination. Consequently almost one in three of the inhabitants of Warsaw was effectively sentenced' to death. Only a small minority of Warsaw Jews made their escape in the course of the military campaign in Poland of September 1939. Some fled to the east (to the territory occupied by the USSR on 17 September 1939) or else to the south (Romania, Hungary) to countries which were neutral or allies of Poland, although even there, not all of the refugees survived the experience. Meanwhile, during 1940-41, the Nazi authorities systematically drove tens of thousands of Jews from outlying small towns into the capital and settled them forcibly in the Warsaw ghetto.

The first ghetto in central Poland was created by the Germans in Piotrków as early as October 1939. The first of the really large ghettoes was created in Łódź (a city which before the war had contained the second largest concentration of Jews in Poland) in February 1940, when over 160,000 people were forced into an area measuring some four square kilometres. The Lódź ghetto was in time to achieve international notoriety, when 20,000 Jews were forcibly re-settled there in the autumn of 1941 - Jews who had previously been transported from Vienna, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Cologne, Emden and from Luxembourg and Prague. The Warsaw ghetto, bounded by high walls, was sealed off in November 1940. The number of its involuntary inhabitants grew rapidly (as a result of the forced population movements mentioned above) to almost half a million. But even before the Germans had begun to implement their decision of 20 January 1942 to carry out ‘the final solution of the Jewish question’, death by ‘natural’ causes - in reality brought about by poverty, hunger and epidemics - had wiped out around 100,000 inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto in the period between autumn 1940 and the summer of 1942.