Religious Antagonism in Poland Has Disappeared, Says Survivor of Warsaw Ghetto

Religious antagonism in Poland has virtually disappeared, according to a Jewish lawyer who was able to flee to Sweden from the Warsaw ghetto through the efforts of friendly Poles.

In a lecture delivered here, he stated that common struggles and common sufferings have united the Poles and Jews, and cited how Poles smuggled food, clothing and underground papers into the Warsaw ghetto before it was destroyed. The Swedish press and public opinion have been greatly moved by his lecture and the Social Demokraten, a Swedish newspaper, writes that “his words speak for themselves, and need no comment. The destruction of the Jews in Poland is one of the darkest pages in history.”

The lawyer, whose name was not divulged, reported that before the outbreak of the Russian-German war, sixty percent of the original inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto had died from hunger, but the number of persons within the ghetto precincts increased daily as a result of the arrival of a constant stream of deportees. Thousands of Jews were driven outside the ghetto walls for forced labor every day, he said, but many of them never returned, having died from hunger and mistreatment. Beginning July, 1942, he declared, the Nazis began removing 6,000 Jews from the ghetto daily through executions and deportations, and this continued on a some-what smaller scale until the final liquidation of the ghetto last April. After the expulsion of the last Jews from Warsaw, the Nazis systematically razed the ghetto, setting fires that burned for two weeks, he revealed.