Kiwa Zyto
August 1942, Kielce, Poland
Ten-year-old Kiwa stands in a queue in the Kielce ghetto, watching as children, sick and elderly people are rounded up for transport. No one knows where they are being sent. Kiwa keeps sneaking his way further back in the queue. When no one is looking, he escapes into a nearby abandoned building and hides in the attic.
KIWA ZYTO grew up in a Jewish family in Kielce, Poland, with his parents and three older brothers. When Poland was invaded, the Nazis immediately began persecuting Kielce’s Jewish population. Kiwa’s family fled to the forest and hid. Then the family was forced to split up, and Kiwa and his mother Zelda ended up in the Kielce ghetto.
In August 1942, the Nazis began emptying the ghetto of children, the sick, and the elderly. But no one discovered Kiwa in his attic hiding place. He managed to sneak into the area where the Nazis had herded the Jews destined for forced labour. Among them was Kiwa’s mother, Zelda, who managed to conceal her son.
One day in 1944, Kiwa and Zelda were taken to the Kielce train station together with the other Jewish prisoners. Guards forced them into railroad cars. Zelda was sobbing, and Kiwa tried to comfort his mother. He was too numb to cry. After only a few hours, the train ground to a halt. They had reached their final destination – the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.
Ghettos
After the occupation of Poland, the Nazis began to create so-called ghettos in the Polish cities. They forced Jews to live in small, limited parts of the cities. Over time, most of these ghettos were fenced off and enclosed. In some of the ghettos, the Warsaw Ghetto for example, there were also groups of Roma.
The inhabitants were forced to work in the ghetto factories, both for private companies and for the German war industry. Overcrowding, disease and starvation were part of everyday life in the ghetto and the number of deaths was extremely high.
From the spring of 1942, many ghettos also served as assembly points when the Nazis deported Jews and Roma to extermination camps.