The article concerns the conditions of life in the Jewish district and the ghetto closed since January 1942: food, forced labor, overpopulation, the religious, family and social life (for example there used to be a primary school there). It also refers to the help rendered to Jews by Poles, and generally the Polish-Jewish relations in that small town in the center of Poland inhabited by ca. ten thousand people, located in the District of Radom of the former GG. Jews constituted a half of the entire community of Kozienice, many of them were Hassids. It used to be one of the important Hassidic centers on the Polish soil, established in the 18th Century by tzadik Israel ben Sabatai known as the Magid of Kozienice. In the article, also the action of liquidation of the ghetto in September 1942 is mentioned and the sale of the Jewish property taken from the people sent to Treblinka. The text is based on the archival documents (the files of Judenrat from Kozienice), the press (Gazeta Zydowska /The Jewish daily) and memoirs and testimonies as well as direct interviews.
The author discusses three issues: ghetto formation, Jewish workers and the living conditions, mainly based on examples from small ghettoes. From the very beginning, ghettoisation involved loss of property, privacy and autonomy. The author's analysis of the organisation of Jewish forced labour reveals a significant stratification among Jewish forced labourers. The economic aspects of the relations between the Jews and the local non-Jewish population was often omitted by Holocaust researchers, who focused primarily on the formation of German policy and its destructive consequences.
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