Here, LIFE.com presents a series of photos from Warsaw and from the town of Kutno, 75 miles west of the Polish capital, in 1939 and 1940. Adding perspective to the images is an essay (below ...

The Warsaw Ghetto uprising would later inspire more acts of resistance in World War II. Jewish resistance often took the form of aid and rescue. Established in 1940, Warsaw held about 400,000 Jews ...

Alex Hershaft remembers the special comb. He and his family were living in the Warsaw ghetto. It was 1940. He was a little boy, about 6 years old. A disease known as epidemic typhus was spreading ...

Established by the Germans in October 1940, the Warsaw Ghetto was the largest Jewish ghetto in German-occupied Europe. About 400,000 Jews were sealed off from the rest of the Polish capital behind ...

Between 1940 and 1943, over 90,000 Jews died in the Warsaw Ghetto of starvation and disease. But that number could have been much higher if not for the efforts of doctors and ghetto officials who ...

Under the German occupation, "ninety-eight percent of the Jewish population of Warsaw"—480,000 Jews—perished in WWII. But while the conditions of the infamous Warsaw Ghetto and its ...

In this 1940s photo, the ruins of Marszalkowska street, leading into Savior Square are shown after World War II in Warsaw, Poland. The ruins of the Church of the Holiest Savior in Warsaw were ...

The wall was built in 1940, when the Nazi Germans closed the area of Warsaw they called the “Jewish district.” (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski) Local residents have two weeks to appeal the ...

Nazi Germany created the Warsaw ghetto -- the biggest of its kind in World War II -- in 1940 to hold almost half a million Jews during its occupation of Poland. Residents were crammed into a small ...