Jewish Labor Leader, Returning from Warsaw, Says a Jewish Community Will Remain in Poland

An eye-witness report on the Jewish situation in Poland was given at a press conference here today by Charles S. Zimmerman, vice-chairman of the Jewish Labor Committee, who last week returned from Warsaw.

“Excesses against Jews in Poland are taking place,” he said. “They are due to virulent anti-Semitism, to underground political activity against the present regime end to just plain banditry. The Polish Government is definitely opposed to these anti-Jewish atrocities and is doing whatever it can to curb them. But, of course, the possibilities of government action are limited.

“I had an opportunity to see and talk with numbers of Polish Jews in the German displaced persons camps, recently arrived from Poland. I must say that it seems to me deplorable indeed that tens of thousands of Jews who have suffered the full fury of Nazi savagery during the war should now be driven to trudging the roads or to confinement in camps.

“However that may be and whatever the miseries which the Polish Jews are yet doomed to undergo, one thing seems certain in my opinion: there will remain a Jewish community in Poland. To the 80,000 or so Jews there not, there will soon be added about 150,000 more repatriated from Soviet Russia. Many of them – committees and groups of individuals particularly under the leadership of the Central Committee of Polish Jews – are already hard at work rebuilding their economic and cultural institutions, I visited many newly established schools, children’s homes and cooperative workshops and I was much impressed with what I saw. It will be a great responsibility for us in this country to help this pitiful remnant to rebuild their lives, to reconstruct a normal productive existence.”