Belgian Cardinal Appealed Against Expulsion of Polish Jews from Belgium

Cardinal van Roey, Primate of Belgium, intervened unsuccessfully with the Nazi authorities to forestall the recent deportation of Polish Jews from Antwerp to Poland, according to information reaching Belgian circles here today.

According to these sources, the German military authorities ordered all foreigners from other occupied territories–which in effect meant almost exclusively Polish Jews–to report within 24 hours at a small railway station on the outskirts of Antwerp, allowing them to take along only 25 kilograms of luggage and 100 marks per family.

The Jews were made to wait for hours in the cold and were then directed to a camp near Hasselt, formerly used for Belgian war prisoners, from where they were sent to Germany.

Meanwhile, deportation of Vienna Jews to the Lublin “reservation” in Poland is continuing, according to a Budapest dispatch to The Times.

The Jews are assembled in schools, sometimes 60 to a room, without beds or mattresses and with only one wash basin. They are under orders to be ready for departure at any time. A favorite trick of the Nazis is to destroy all the documents and identification papers of the evacuees.

An official “send-off” was given recently at Vienna East Station to a trainload of deportees. An S.S. (elite guard) official made a speech intended to impress foreigners watching the departure with the humaneness of the Nazis’ treatment of the evacuees, among whom food parcels were distributed. The official wished them good luck and emphasized that they were going of their “own free will” to be “pioneers in new homes.”

The Jews were accommodated in first- and second-class compartments, but at the next station they were transferred to cattle cars and the food parcels were taken away.