![]() The starvation made fighting any disease that did emerge near impossible, and louse vectors spread easily due to a lack of adequate sanitation and an abundance of hosts. Additional food supplies were blocked until May 1941, at which point rations provided by authorities amounted to no more than 200 calories per day, per person. German officials knew enough about the spread of typhus to know that by overcrowding, starving and depriving the Jewish residents of basic necessities, the ghetto would become a breeding ground for infection. “It's eye-opening to realize how the question of epidemics informed various decisions, including the German decision to create ghettos, and paved the way to genocide,” says Holocaust historian Tomasz Frydel, who was not involved with the study. ![]() (For comparison, the population density of New York City is about 27,000 people per square mile.) The Germans excused and codified the containment under the guise of isolating disease-carrying individuals Polish Jews were depicted in Nazi propaganda posters as lice, or typhus vectors. In the fall of 1940, the occupying Germany army blockaded the Polish city of Warsaw, sealing the city’s more than 400,000 Jews into a 1.3 square mile area. While historians have long understood this to be the case, a new mathematical modeling study, published last week in Science Advances, brings together information from across a spectrum of sources including daily journals, government rationing records, reported case numbers and biostatics, and posits that a vibrant public health campaign was at the root of the efforts to curb the spread. The historical record shows that an epidemic of typhus, a deadly but preventable bacterial disease, ravaged the imprisoned population, but then, somehow, cases dropped dramatically. To combat the spread of illness, a new study suggests, Jews within the Ghetto may have had success in using community containment efforts not unlike the social distancing efforts recommended today in the struggle against COVID-19. As millions were killed by the SS in death camps like Auschwitz, the Jews in Poland’s capital city were held captive by the German army and subjected to starvation, forced labor and disease. The Warsaw Ghetto was a horrific part of the Nazi Germany campaign to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe.
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