papal policy inadvertently ended up improving some aspects of the Jewish experience relative to the medieval period. Jewish historian Robert Bonfil has argued that the formation of ghettos acted as a sort of middle ground between acceptance and expulsion by the Christian authorities. Following the formation of the ghetto system, there was a sharp decline in incidents such as pogroms, forced expulsion, and accusation of ritual murder that were common during the medieval period. World War II and the Holocaust During World War II, the new category of Nazi ghettos was formed by the Third Reich in order to confine Jews into tightly packed areas of the cities of Eastern and Central Europe. They served as staging points to begin dividing "able workers" from those who would later be deemed unworthy of life. In many cases, the Nazi-era ghettos did not correspond to historic Jewish quarters. For example, the Kraków Ghetto was formally established in the Podgórze district, not in the Jewish district of Kazimierz. As a result, the displaced ethnic Polish families were forced to take up residences outside. In 1942, the Nazis began Operation Reinhard, the systematic deportation to extermination camps during the Holocaust. The authorities deported Jews from everywhere in Europe to the ghettos of the East, or directly to the extermination camps designed and operated in Poland by Nazi Germans. There were no Polish guards at any of the camps, despite the sometimes used misnomer Polish death camps. By country Austria During World War II, an open type ghetto holding over 65,000 Jews was set up in the district of Leopoldstadt, Vienna. Most were deported to concentration camps and death factories, only 2,000 survived. Soviet Belarus Following the Nazi German Operation Barbarossa of 1941, the ghettos were set up first in the prewar Polish cities within the territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union during the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 (in accordance with Nazi-Soviet Pact). They included: Brześć Ghetto, occupied Poland, holding 18,000 Jews, modern Brest, Belarus Łachwa Ghetto, occupied Poland, holding 2,350 Jews, modern Lakhva, Belarus Pińsk Ghetto, occupied Poland, holding 26,000 Jews, modern Pinsk, Belarus Słonim Ghetto, occupied Poland, holding 22,000–25,000 Jews, modern Slonim, Belarus Zdzięcioł Ghetto, occupied Poland, holding over 4,500 Jews, the site of the Dzyatlava massacre, modern Dzyatlava, Belarus The Nazi ghettos set up in Soviet Belarus within the borders of the Soviet Union from before the Nazi-Soviet