Jews in the Polish city of Lodz feel like “aliens” and wish to emigrate to Israel and the United States, the New York Times reports today in a cable from Lodz, which had a population of about 300,000 Jews before the Nazi occupation. At present there are only 3,000 Jews in the city, the Times correspondent reports.
“You must realize that Jews are not well liked in Lodz,” a young man told the American correspondent. A Jewish woman told him: “The only good thing about this government is that if it were not around, our Polish neighbors would wipe the streets with us.” The woman lived through five Nazi concentration camps only to return to Lodz to feel herself unwanted in the city of her birth, the correspondent remarks.
“Lodz was not badly damaged during the war, but the former Jewish quarter no longer exists,” the correspondent reports. “The buildings were razed by the Nazis. The Jews were sent along with the rest of their 6,000,000 co-religionists to the flames of Auschwitz and other concentration camps. The few Jews who came back to Lodz do not relish the city. They speak hopefully of migrating to join relatives in Israel and the United States.”
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.
