Soon after the Nazis invaded Poland in September 1939, they began to establish ghettos: areas of towns and cities for exclusively Jewish residence. Ghettos took many forms, but they all functioned to restrict Jewish movement and physically separate Jews from the rest of the population. Ghettos were usually constructed in a disadvantaged area, marked by crowding, poverty, and poor sanitation. A Jewish Council (or Judenrat) was often appointed in ghettos, a set of community leaders subject directly to the Nazi administration. By 1942, many ghettos served as a tool in implementing the Nazis’ Final Solution (extermination of the Jews). They weakened Jews physically—through starvation and illness—spiritually, and mentally.

One of the first ghettos to be established in Poland was the Lodz ghetto, in February 1940.

The Jews of Lodz (about 200,000 persons) packed up their belongings on their backs or by wagon and crowded into the slums in the northern part of the city, often 7 people or more to a small room. The crowding worsened in late 1941 and 1942, when the Nazis deported tens of thousands of Jews from Central Europe to Lodz.

The Lodz ghetto was the longest-lasting ghetto in Poland. Lodz was an industrial city, and the Nazis needed the textiles (fabrics) that it produced. Yet Lodz Jews received rations that could not possibly sustain them. Coal and other sources of heat were scarce in the winter. 20% of ghetto inhabitants died of illness or starvation.

One of the inhabitants of the Lodz ghetto was a young woman named Rywka Lipszyc. Born in Lodz in 1929, Rywka had moved to the ghetto in 1940 together with her parents and her three younger siblings. Her father soon died of a beating at the hands of the Germans; her mother, like many other ghetto inhabitants, succumbed to illness and starvation in 1942. Two of Rywka’s younger siblings were deported from the ghetto to a death camp in September 1942. Rywka and her remaining sister, Cipka, were sent to live with three older cousins, all girls. Rywka was 14 years old. During the day, she worked in a small sewing factory. When she had a spare minute, she wrote in her diary.

Rywka was not unusual in writing a diary: Jewish young men and women across Europe chronicled the experience of being targeted solely because they belonged to the Jewish “race.” As the Nazis purposefully sought to destroy communal and family structures, both young men and women were forced to adopt new roles and faced challenging living environments. They both struggled with the universal questions of adolescence: who am I, and where do I fit in? Yet in ghettos specifically, men often fell prey first to starvation; they were more often the targets of Nazi violence and more often subjected to hard labor. In their absence, women assumed additional economic and, in certain cases, religious roles.

Before the war, religious families such as Rywka’s were just beginning to consider expanded roles for women. Rywka attended a Beys Yakov school, which encouraged women to engage in religious study—a subject previously limited only to boys. In the ghetto, Rywka continued to attend her religious study circles. Yet at home, she struggled with her new roles and with the disintegration of her family. The novelist and critic Virginia Woolf, who famously advocated that women have “a room of their own,” had not yet been translated in Poland. But in Rywka’s traumatic circumstances, she too, like her British counterpart, yearned for her own “shelter to call home.”