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Uruguayan Consul in Yugoslavia Reports Guerrillas Aiding Jews to Escape Nazis

April 24, 1942
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The first eye-witness account of how Serbian guerrilla fighters are trying to aid the Nazi-persecuted Jewish population in occupied Yugoslavia was given today by Emilio Ferreti, Uruguayan Consul in Split, Yugoslavia who reached here on a Spanish steamer.

“Although large numbers of Serbian peasants have been executed, resistance to the occupational forces continues,” the diplomat stated. “The Serbs display contempt for the anti-Jewish propaganda which the Germans try to feed them. They miss no opportunity to display compassion with the suffering Jews and to give them whatever aid possible. One of the principle aims of the patriotic guerrilla fighters is to attack the special concentration camps in which Jews are being held, in order to liberate the prisoners, and take them to comparative safety in the mountain regions.”

Mr. Ferreti said that he himself had witnessed mass-killings by German and Italian soldiers of Serbs and Jews in Yugoslavia. “I am convinced that the heroic Serbian nation will eventually succeed in driving the enemy from its country,” he declared.

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