The First German Jews Arrive in the Ghetto
Jews deported from Prague, Czechoslovakia, move their belongings through the streets. Lodz ghetto, Poland, 20 November 1941.
The ever tightening persecution of Jews in the west and in 'Greater Germany' reached a new stage when they began to be forcibly deported to established ghettos in Poland. The fiction that they were merely being 're-settled' in the East was maintained to ensure their compliance – and to reduce the objections of the local German population watching the departures. They were allowed to leave with personal luggage, although all their other possessions were confiscated by the German Reich as soon as they left.
This was not a 'new life in the east', it was effectively a death sentence, given the levels of starvation and deprivation that the Germans enforced in the ghettos.