se decrees affected her life and changed it right away. She says, "...Every day they came out with different laws and orders, we had a curfew, we could only be seen between 9:00 and 5:00 in the afternoon.... We had to wear a yellow star on the chest and my back...they took away all our lawyers, our writers, our teachers, our clergy, and I could not go to school anymore...they took away our rabbis, and we couldn't go to synagogues anymore." Her experiences reflect the systematic succession of steps towards social and economic isolation. This procedure was repeated almost identically in every city that fell under the Nazi control.
             Supporting the idea of a rational and systematic process, Dawidowicz holds that the next cycle of anti-Jewish legislation came in 1938 and was synchronized with Hitler's plans for war (A Holocaust Reader, p. 37). After the annexation of Austria, Jewish children were banned from school, Jewish families were ordered to assess and report their domestic and foreign property. This is the first law (Decree Regarding the Reporting of Jewish Property of 1938) in a law set that is part of the second phase of this destruction process: expropriation. These facts show how in consecutive steps, the Jewish community was separated politically, socially, and legally from the Germans while at the same time they were crowded into ghettos. This is the process that Hilberg calls ghettoization.
             The "ghettoization" is also part of the third phase of the destruction process: concentration. Hilberg points out that the ghettoization of the Jewish community (i.e., the isolation from the surrounding German population) was directed, systematically, by the bureaucracy. He identifies five steps by means of which the ghettos were taking shape. These steps were: (1) the severance of social contacts between Jews and Germans, (2) housing restriction, (3) movement regulations, (4) identification measures, and (5) the institution of Jewish ...