An eye-witness report of the miserable conditions under which more than 400,000 Jews live in the ghetto of Warsaw was released here today by the Polish Labor Group which is sponsored by the American Friends of Polish Democracy and the International Coordination Council. The report was written by a person who was able to make several extensive visits to the Warsaw ghetto during the past winter and who is now in a neutral country.
“The streets of the Ghetto,” the report says, “are indescribably crowded and noisy. There is not enough room for all the people who want to be out in the streets. The area of the Ghetto is extremely small, and the authorities of occupation are constantly reducing it further. Only recently three large streets (the Sienna, Sosnowa, and Sliska Streets) were carved out of the Ghetto; the Jews who lived there were ordered to move deeper into the Ghetto.
DRINKING WATER SOLD BY THE GLASS, FOOD PARCELS SAVE LIVES
Trade is conducted on the street corners. Vegetables, scrap-iron, books, Jewish armbands showing a blue Star of David are bought and sold. There is a great trade in drinking water one glass of fresh water costs 18 groshy. The water is sold by water-carriers who walk along the streets with buckets of fresh water. When a military car passes, all in the crowd silently remove their hats.
The prevailing elements in Ghetto life are misery, and hunger. Every parcel arriving from abroad saves people from actual starvation. The Jewish physicians, who were compelled to move into the Ghetto, are overwhelmed with work. Hundreds of people die daily from exposure and hunger. Even the sacredness of death is lost in the Ghetto. A funeral must be paid for, and few families possess the means. Misery overcomes piety, and the dead are simply put out into the streets at night. Later Jewish police carry away the corpses to be buried free of cost by the Jewish community.
The report concludes with this picture of the ghetto after curfew “the street are silent. Only the graveyards are growing. The numberless, nameless dead receive burial. Life in the Ghetto is a veritable hell on earth.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
