Grodno Ghetto

The Grodno Ghetto
Jews flooding the gates of Ghetto One during relocation action, November 1941 Grodno Grodno location in the Holocaust in Poland
Location	Grodno, German-occupied Poland
Persecution	Imprisonment, forced labor, starvation, transit to extermination camps
Organizations	Schutzstaffel (SS)
Death camp	Treblinka, Auschwitz
Victims	25,000 Polish Jews

The Grodno Ghetto (Polish: getto w Grodnie, Hebrew: עברית‎‎) was a World War II ghetto established in November 1941 by Nazi Germany in the city of Grodno for the purpose of persecution and exploitation of Polish Jews in German-occupied eastern Poland. Until the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 Grodno (now, Belarus) was part of the Białystok Voivodeship of the Second Polish Republic. Following the secret pact signed with Germany, the Soviets annexed the region temporarily in 1939 to the Belarusian SSR in the atmosphere of terror. Grodno was annexed by the Nazis in 1941 to the Bezirk Bialystok district of East Prussia in the course of the German attack on the Soviet positions in eastern Poland codenamed Operation Barbarossa.

The Ghetto, run by Nazi German Schutzstaffel (SS), consisted of two interconnected units about 2 km apart. The Ghetto One was established in the Old Town district, around the synagogue (Shulhoif), with some 15,000 Jews crammed into an area less than half a square kilometer. The Ghetto Two was created in the Słobódka suburb, with around 10,000 Jews incarcerated in it. Ghetto Two was larger than the main ghetto but far more ruined. The reason for the split was determined by the concentration of Jews within the city and less need to transfer them from place to place. Their situation however, had considerably worsened with the ghettos' locations highly inadequate in terms of sanitation, water and electricity.