On September 1, 1939, the German invasion of Poland began a ruthless process that over the next six years brought about half of all of the world's Jews, then about seventeen million, under harsh and murderous rule. By the end of 1942 Nazi occupation troops ruled all of Eastern Europe, and Polish Jews were joined in anguish and pain by millions of coreligionists. Two months after the 1939 invasion and occupation of Poland, the Nazis forced Polish Jews into ghettos, the first ever imposed in Eastern Europe. In the Warsaw Ghetto which had about 450,000 people at its peak, a Judenrat Food Committee developed community soup kitchens. Between the war's start in 1939 and the transport in 1942 of ghetto Jews to the camps, European Jewry experienced unprecedented Horror Story excesses, and yet also Help Story stealth altruism.