More Ghettos

From Yahoo:
"Excruciating details emerge on Jewish ghettos"

Even after decades of in-depth Holocaust research, excruciating details are only now emerging about more than 1,100 German-run ghettos in Eastern Europe where the Nazis murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews. And there were about 200 more ghettos than previously believed, said Martin Dean, editor of the recently published "Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, Volume II." It's part of a long-term effort to document every site of organized Nazi persecution, beyond the well-known Warsaw ghetto and extermination camps like Auschwitz. It "gives us information about ghettos that would slip into historical oblivion and be forgotten forever if we didn't have this volume," Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer said. "Who knew there were more than 1,000 ghettos?" More Jews died during World War II in Poland and the western Soviet Union — today's Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania — than the estimated 1 million gassed in Auschwitz, Langer said.

"The people are dead, but at least we have the memory of the place where they lived and some knowledge of who killed them," said Langer, an 83-year-old professor of English emeritus at Boston's Simmons College. The museum fields inquiries daily about survivors' families using the new information — some of it from non-Jews divulging locations of unmarked mass graves. Researchers at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington painstakingly collected details for the encyclopedia's more than 2,000 pages from the communities where Germans herded Jews and killed them if they tried to escape. Researchers and writers scoured the world to find new witnesses, study archives opened after the fall of communism and survivors' texts and testimonies in many languages. For town after town, village after village, and even just spots in the countryside, Dean and his team assembled pieces of a grisly puzzle, which he said "shows that the Nazis made a concerted effort to find every last Jew in every last place" and eliminate each one. Another encyclopedia on World War II ghettos was published in 2009 by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Israel's official memorial to Holocaust victims. The "Encyclopedia of the Ghettos" sums up the story of each ghetto for either lay readers or researchers. The two-part tome compiled by the U.S. Holocaust museum and published in early May by Indiana University Press includes more listings, with extensive scholarly footnotes and bibliographies. The new volume covers ghettos from Moscow to today's German border, and St. Petersburg to Yalta, in Ukraine. The next volume will cover camps and ghettos run by states aligned with Nazi Germany like Vichy France, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, Italy and Croatia.

^ It's always important to document each and every site where something horrible happened (whether it's from the Holocaust or a battle.) In this case, most of the information was keep secret by the Communist governments behind the Iron Curtain and it was only in the past 20 years that the files were opened and everyday people decided they could finally talk about what they saw and did without fear. ^

http://news.yahoo.com/excruciating-details-emerge-jewish-ghettos-000356301.html