The newspaper Le Matin reported today that 900 Jews from the Koenigsberg district of Germany who were expelled to Poland were later found frozen to death en route to the Lublin Jewish “reservation.”
In a dispatch from the Swiss-German frontier, the newspaper said that the Jews, including women and children, were ordered to leave their homes without advance notice and without being permitted to take any of their belongings.
The deportees were crowded into a cattle train and shipped to Lublin, the dispatch said. On the way, however, they were transferred from the train to unheat barns for the night, despite the bitterly cold weather. Next morning, all 900 were found frozen to death, according to the report.
Other reports told of expulsion of Jews from towns in Nazi-occupied Poland. In most cases the expelled are no longer transported in cattle trains but are force to walk dozens of miles, accompanied by Nazi guards.
Five thousand Jews were expelled in this way from the town of Alexander near Lodz. Led by the famous “Alexander rebbe,” they were forced to walk in the direction of Warsaw. Three thousand were expelled on foot from Konstantin.
The entire Jewish population of Tushin near Lodz were forced to walk 40 kilometers, driven by German soldiers, and then were told they could proceed “wherever your feet will carry you.” None was permitted to take any of his belongings with him or to stop on the road to rest. Many fell sick on the way, some of them dying.
In Lodz, where expulsions were said to be continuing, the Gestapo was report to have begun a practice of taking the wealthier Jews to the “Gestapo home” and subjecting them to long and rigorous examination on charges of possessing undeclared foreign currency. Among those so treated were Wolf Pakula, former millionaire industrialist, and Wladyslaw Baumgarten, a banker, who committed suicide by taking poison after being forced, among other things, to eat excrement from a Gestapo lavatory.
At the same time, German soldiers in Lodz continued to seize Jewish girls and carry them away to military brothels. None of the girls who disappeared from the streets ever returned home and their families found it impossible to locate them.
In Warsaw, the jails were reported to be crowded with 8,000 Jews and 4,000 Poles, many of them rabbis and priests, arrested by the Gestapo after the assassination of a Pole who had acted as a Gestapo informer. The Pole was reported to have been killed by a Jew named Andrei Kot for advising the Gestapo of the location of a secret Polish radio station.
The station was discovered by the Gestapo in a ruined building on Zlota Street and six persons found there were executed. Kot disappeared after the assassination of the informer, whereupon Engineer Cherniakoff, head of the Warsaw Jewish Community, was summoned to Gestapo headquarters, held for eight hours and threatened with serious reprisals against the Jewish population unless Kot was delivered to the authorities.
Cherniakoff was released after proving that Kot, although the son of a prominent Warsaw Jewish merchant, was himself not Jewish and was not listed in the registe of the Jewish community, having become converted to Catholicism two years ago.
In Mlava near Warsaw it was reported that the Nazis had issued an order compelling Jews to wear numbers like those of prisoners. The Jewish population there was subjected to a special registration during which each person was given a numeral.
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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.
