Shortly after the victorious Germans took possession of the defeated Polish capital in September, 1939, the Nazi conquerors initiated the process of concentrating the Jewish inhabitants of Warsaw, together with those Jews resettled there from points elsewhere in the occupied land, into a small area with fixed boundaries. Thus was created the ‘Warsaw Ghetto’, which suffered untold agonies until its final destruction in the aftermath of the desperately heroic, but ultimately futile, uprising in April-May, 1943. Indeed, the demolition of the main Warsaw synagogue on May 16, 1943 marked the effective end of Europe's largest and most vibrant Jewish community, as well as the beginning of the final chapter in the unprecedented evil known generally as the Holocaust.

Yisrael Gutman, Professor of Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Director of the Yad Vashem Research Center, has undertaken the challenging task of describing the major trends and developments that occurred in the Warsaw Ghetto during its unhappy existence. Himself a former resident of the Ghetto and participant in the Uprising, the author sets three major objectives for his work: to consider the ‘character and conduct’ of the Warsaw Jews under increasingly stressful conditions; to discuss the intellectual and psychological methods used to deal with the many pressures of daily living; and, finally, to analyse the evolution of the militant Jewish resistance movement that culminated in the Uprising. In pursuing his goals, Gutman focuses on the three main collective actors in this complex story - the Germans and their collaborators, their Jewish victims, and the Poles, both those in Warsaw and in the London-based exile government. After opening with a brief introductory history of the Warsaw Jewish community, he launches his main narrative, whose fifteen chapters are divided into three parts. The first, composed of three chapters, describes the initial months of Nazi rule, the nature of Jewish institutions and their reaction to the crisis, and the triangular relationship among Jews, Germans, and Poles. It contains a detailed account of the establishment of the Ghetto, the organization and functioning of its several institutions (including the Jewish Council - Judenrat - and the police force), and the continual strugglefor mere survial that faced its unfortunate residents.