Warsaw was a beautiful town, but that was before the war. In September 1939, Nazi forces invaded Poland while attempting to fulfill Hitler's dream of acquiring a substantial German empire. More than 80 percent of the city was eventually destroyed during that vicious military encounter. By the end of the war, much of Warsaw's landscape was marred by burned-out residences and churches, smashed bridges, and overturned streetcars.

The unextinguished fires set by the Nazi's continued to burn through the ghetto, and within days, nearly every bunker in the central ghetto had been scorched. The effects were disastorous both for the thousands of concealed civilians in the district as well as for the many scattered ZOB fighting units that were not with Mordechai Anielewicz's group in the well-insulated smuggler's bunker.

 The war brought growth in both the number of camps and the number of prisoners. Within three years the number of prisoners quadrupled, from about 25,000 before the war to about 100,000 in March 1942. The camp population included prisoners from almost every European nation. Prisoners in all the concentration camps were literally worked to death.

The most efficient method to kill people was gassing them. Therefore, the SS used the hydro-cyanic acid compound "Cyclone B" which evaporated at body temperature in a hermetically sealed room and led to death from suffocation within a very short time.

Bergen-Belsen was a Nazi concentration camp in Lower Saxont, southwest of the town of Bergen. There were no gas chambers in Bergen-Belsen, since the mass executions took place in the camps further east. However, an estimated 50,000 Jews, Czechs, Poles, Christians, homosexuals, and gypsies died in the camp

In October 1939, the SS began to deport Jews living in Austria and Czechoslovakia to ghettos in Poland. Transported in locked passenger trains, large numbers died on the journey. Those that survived the journey were told by Adolf Eichmann, the head of the Gestapo's Department of Jewish Affairs: "There are no apartments and no houses - if you build your homes you will have a roof over your head."

The Warsaw Ghetto originally contained almost 450,000 people. By January of 1943,it was down to roughly 37,000 people. The rest had already been taken away to slave labor or death camps. Word got out that the Germans were going to finish off the ghetto, clean it out.

Children stare into the camera from the Jewish ghettos. The forced starvation and unsanitary living conditions in the ghetto would lead to two thousand deaths a month in the Warsaw ghetto and eight hundred a month in the Lodz ghetto.