The chapter explores deportations into the ghetto from surrounding towns and western Europe. It examines the food security issues for the newly arrived, particularly as they were displaced from the places of origin and social networks. This chapter also discusses the deportations out of the ghettos and the end of the ghettos. It examines how hunger drove some onto deportation trains, how deportations impacted food prices on the black market, and the cancelation of ration cards to force those directed for deportation onto trains. It also discusses how food resources were needed to avoid deportation, particularly if one wanted to go into hiding in the ghetto. This chapter also explores food and the Warsaw ghetto uprising.

Chapter 4, “The Warsaw Ghetto: A People Set Apart,” considers how Polish elites grappled with Jewish victimhood in their midst and differentiates between Nazi targeting of Polish elites and the better known targeting and murder of Polish Jews. It traces initial Nazi persecution of Warsaw’s Jewish community, ghettoization in 1940, persecution within the ghetto, and its liquidation to the death camp at Treblinka in 1942, and the outbreak of violent resistance in 1943. This is contextualized against Polish antisemitism before and during the war and particular Polish elite reactions to the developing Holocaust. A handful of intelligentsia figures who reacted strongly to antisemitic persecution in various ways demonstrate the complexity of Polish response to the Nazi Holocaust and how prewar and wartime antisemitism widened gulfs between ethnic Poles and the Polish-Jewish community. It argues that, because of a combination of targeted Nazi violence and native antisemitism, Polish elite response to Jewish persecution arose very late, typically only in 1943 with the outbreak of the ghetto uprisings, which captured the attention of resistance-minded Poles.