Scores of Jews are freezing to death every day in the Jewish ghettos of Warsaw and Lodz as a result of insufficient fuel to meet the extreme cold wave now sweeping Poland, coupled with the ever-present food shortage, according to reports reaching official Polish circles here today.
Undernourishment among Jews in the two Lodz ghettos has reached a point where the Nazi authorities could not find sufficiently strong young Jews fit to serve in the special ghetto police force. Jews from other areas of occupied Poland had to be brought to Lodz to take up police duties in the ghetto, the reports inform.
(Reliable information published in today’s New York Times confirms recent JTA reports that Nazi authorities in occupied Poland ordered the killing of civilians with typhus where it would be difficult to isolate them for proper medical attention. Isolation for medical treatment is impossible because there are no medical supplies or soap in Nazi-held Poland.)
The Breslauer Neueste Nachrichter, a leading Nazi newspaper in Germany, in an article on the Jewish ghettos of Wartheland, which includes the city of Lodz, reports that 173,000 Jews are now segregated in ghettos in this district. The Jews in the Wartheland section are classified as “foreigners,” the paper writes.
JEWS IN WARSAW GHETTO OBSERVE “PALESTINE DAY;” THREE GHETTOS IN OUTWOCK
A “Palestine Day” was observed by the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto on the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, it was learned here today. Though not permitted by the Nazis to emigrate from Poland, the Jewish population in the ghettos prayed for the time when the world will be open to them and when they will be able to resume their Zionist activities freely.
In Otwock, a former health resort near Warsaw, the Nazi local administration has split the Jewish ghetto into three sections, each separated from the others. Jews of one section are not permitted to communicate with the ghettos in the other sections of the city except by telephone. In case of urgent need a messenger may be sent from one section of the ghetto to the other after securing special permission from the Gestapo. The splitting of the ghetto was necessitated by the fact that some villas belonging to non-Jews were situated within the ghetto area, the Nazis explain. The villas are now being used as hospitals for wounded German soldiers arriving from the Russian front.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.
