Jewish Representatives Visit Transnistria; Find Deportees Starving, Ill

Representatives of the government-controlled Jewish Central Office in Bucharest were permitted last April to visit the devastated towns in Transnistria, the Rumanian-administered part of Axis-occupied Ukraine, to where tens of thousands of Jews have been deported from Bessarabia, Bukovina and other parts of Rumania, according to a report issued in Bucharest.

The report states that disease and starvation is taking a heavy toll of the deported Jews. More than 200 Jews were found to be suffering from paralysis while 401 showed symptoms of the initial phases of the disease.

The delegation emphasized that starvation among the deportees is so acute that they eat poisonous seeds. “Many of them have been fed on those seeds exclusively for a long time,” the report pointed out, declaring that one of the effects of this “food” is that the people who eat it contract lathyrism, paralysis of the lower limbs, which is now wide spread among the Jewish deportees.

Another report from Rumania states that conditions under which the Jewish deportees in the Tulchin district of Transnistria live are so bad that the Rumanian authorities there were compelled to appeal to the central authorities in Bucharest for food in order to enable the Jews to perform the forced labor to which they are assigned.

Of 2,000 Jews who were sent from Tulchin to do forced labor in the city of Gaissin, on the left bank of the river Bug, only 400 are reported to remain alive. Conditions are even worse in other labor camps in the Tulchin district, especially in Warniarka, Paciore and Kapustiana. A contingent of 150 Jews was sent from the camp in Kapustiana to “somewhere east of the Bug River” but nothing is known of their fate, the report says.