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Hundreds of ghettos were created throughout eastern Europe by the Germans and their allies during World War II. Some were large - the one in Warsaw held almost half a million people in 1942 - others were very small. All had the purpose of holding Jews separate from the rest of the population, almost invariably in extraordinarily deprived, squalid and crowded conditions. They became antechambers to the death camps but that purpose was not clear to most of their inhabitants. These were cities within cities' merit consideration, then, not just as staging posts in the extermination of European Jewry but as communities in their own right, with their own dynamics, in which elements of traditional pre-war Jewish society continued to exist. There have been some studies of the largest ghettos - Warsaw and Lodz - and a few accounts of some of the smaller ones; but very little examination of the ghettos as a whole. This history draws heavily on the testimonies of those who suffered in them, making use of a wide range of diaries and memoirs (and exploring the problems inherint in such sources). Other documentary sources - particularly German - are also used, but the intention is to look at the ghettos "from below", focusing on behaviour, values, and suffering, as well as on the heroism and the passiveness of the Jewish communities.