The Ghettos of Lodz & Gaza

I am reading a most disturbing book "The World of My Past" by Abraham H Biderman.  It is the stroy of how he survived the Jewish Ghetto of Lodz in Poland and ultimately Auschwitz while his whole family perished of starvation in Lodz or in the gas chambers.  It is a very disturbing account of the horrors committed against a dehumanized population.

Most of the book is set in Lodz and details how the 100k+ Jews of Lodz were hurded into the Lodz Ghetto, sealed off from the rest of the world, given little food and medicine and basically worked and staved to death.   And now I open the news tonight to see this:

Gaza shut to fuel and journalists

No fuel (paid for by foreign donors) has been allowed into Gaza for its power station, no food has been allowed in for the United Nations' aid distribution centres on which most Gazans rely.

No journalists are being allowed into Gaza to cover the story."This is brutal, deliberate collective punishment," she told us on a mobile phone from southern Gaza.

"It is in breach of Geneva Conventions, and the United Kingdom and European Union are colluding in it with their silence. Israel is trying to batter and beat a whole people just to crush Hamas."

"Gaza's a prison," said Baroness Jenny Tonge, who had also arrived on the boat from Cyprus.

"We've seen shortages of absolutely everything. The schools don't have paper, the hospitals don't have medicines. We've just been shown some of the tunnels to Egypt which have had to be dug to get badly needed supplies," she added.