Between the Lines

Hundreds injured. Dozens of houses attacked. Stores demolished. Windows smashed. Population in panic.

This sounds like a war bulletin. Actually, it is a report about a wave of Jewish pogroms in Poland.

While Poland is still mourning the death of Marshal Pilsudski, pogroms are already reported from numerous Polish towns. In Grodno alone there are 300 Jewish victims. In Suvalk, more than twenty Jews have been injured and many Jewish houses and stores demolished. In Raciondcz, near Warsaw, Jews were attacked, and their stores pillaged.

JEWS IN PANIC

The entire Jewish population in Poland is now in a state of panic because of this wave of anti-Jewish terror which seems to have been instigated by organized forces. The local police seems always to appear too late on the scene of the riots.

In Grodno Jews locked themselves up in their homes for three days, fearing to appear on the streets. Jewish mothers were afraid to send their children to school. The same is reported from Nowodwor, a township near Grodno, where one Jew was killed and many injured during anti-Jewish riots last Friday.

REPORTS CENSORED

It is clear that the accounts received by cable about the anti-Jewish riots in the different Polish cities do not give a complete picture of what has occurred. Whether because of censorship or for some other reasons, these reports tend to minimize the bloody events. One can realize, however, what has taken place when the situation has reached a point where the Jews have been compelled to organize themselves into self-defense units.

Serious days are now ahead for Polish Jewry. The bloody events in Grodno and in the other cities seem only the beginning of a plan mapped out by the Naras and the anti-Semitic youth of the National Democratic Party, to terrorize the Jews of Poland in the same brutal manner as in Czarist Russia. It now remains to be seen what the new Polish government will do to check this plan.

WAITING FOR GOVERNMENT ACTION

No matter what grievances the Jews of Poland had towards the Pilsudski regime—and God knows they had many!—they refrained from coming out openly with these grievances because they appreciated Pilsudski’s effort to suppress any physical terror against the Jewish population. Will Pilsudski’s successors share the sentiments of their late leader? Will they use their full power and all the means at their disposal to stop the anti-Jewish wave of terror at its very beginning?

The new Polish government, which consists of men who are anxious to follow in the tradition of Pilsudski, will now be closely watched by world Jewry. Depending upon the measures the government takes against those who organized the riots, the Jews of the world will know what to think of the present Polish regime and how to act towards it.