Thousands of Jews and many Germans are reported today to have been killed in street battles in the Polish cities of Lodz and Bialystok, where the German authorities last week began “liquidating” nearly half a million ghetto residents, consisting mostly of Jews deported from Western Europe and Nazi-occupied Soviet territory.
At Lodz, the report said, there were approximately 300,000 Jews deported from Germany and Western-European countries, while in Bialystok there were more than 100,000 Jews from Byelorussia and other parts of occupied Russia.
Ghetto residents obtained machine-guns and used them against the Nazi Elits Guard militia and Gestapo detachments when these arrived to carry out another of the massacres which have become a regular practice of the German occupational authorities in Poland. Non-Jewish residents of the cities joined the Jews in battling the Germans, the report declared. The ghettos were destroyed completely, but fighting continues elsewhere in the cities.
In the Lublin district, thousands of young Jews in labor camps set the buildings afire and fled to the forests to join Polish guerrillas. Thirty thousand Jews are reported to be prisoners in the concentration camp at Oswiecim.
German newspapers reaching here today from Poland indicate that the Lodz ghetto had become a “center of attraction” for German visitors from the Reich. Cab drivers in the city induced visitors to drive to the ghetto, telling them that “no place in Lodz is as interesting as the ghetto,” the papers report.
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.
