Polish conscripts in the Nazi army who voluntarily surrendered to the Russian forces told today how prominent rabbis and leading Jewish figures in many Polish towns were brutally massacred by the Nazi troops.
In Kozheniz, the Poles relate, the German soldiers, enraged because the famous aged Chassidic “wonder-rabbi” of the town refused to remove his hat before the Nazis, pulled him from a throng of Jews they were crowding into a ghetto and dragged him by his beard to a public square. There they disrobed the rabbi and instructed him to sing. When he refused to do so, they tied him to the rear of an automobile and dragged him through the streets of the city behind the speeding vehicle.
In Zhelechov, according to these same Polish prisoners, the Gestapo shot the grandson of the famous rabbi “Chofez Chaim,” also a prominent Jewish leader, Chaim Meir and his brother-in-law, Berl Landau, who was an official of the Agudas Israel, and Moshe Kaliner, a famous local philanthropist from Garvolin. The Jews were first taken to work on fortifications at the front where they “were shot while trying to escape.”
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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.
