The army of Jewish fighters who battled the Nazis from the ghettos and concentration camps of Europe want to go home, and home to them is Palestine, said Dr. Zalman Grinberg, president of the Council of Liberated Jews in Germany, at a meeting in Manhattan Center tonight. The meeting was sponsored by the American Jewish Conference, at whose request; Dr. Grinberg was flown to the United States from Munich.
“During the war, which for us has not yet ceased, the Jewish people throughout the world fought on four major fronts,” Dr. Grinberg told an audience which jammed the large meeting hall. “They fought as partisans, in the European underground armies. They fought in the Jewish Brigade from Palestine. They fought under the flag of all of the United Nations. And they fought on a too little recognized front–the front of the ghettos and concentration camps.
“In factories, in construction camps, on road-building projects, Jewish slave laborers sabotaged, slowed-down, and passively resisted the execution of Wehrmacht plans. Work on the airdrome at Kaunas, Lithuania, for instance, was so successfully sabotaged that Webrmacht troops could not use the flying field until the Russian armies were almost upon them,” he declared.
Dr. Grinberg said he spoke not only for the Jewish survivors, but for those who died, and left a holy testament which was “inscribed on our souls by chattering machine guns, absorbed into our skulls through the fumes of gas chambers, burned into our hearts by the pitiless fire of crematoria.” He appealed to American Jewry to help the displaced Jews achieve their goal–to leave Germany and go to Palestine.
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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.
