All night long every night, little groups of refugee Jews stream across the Polish border into the little frontier town of Nachod, in Czechoslovakia. Their feet are muddy; sometimes their clothes are wet up to the waist. Their eyes are red and bloated from the strain of trying to see through the darkness. Their backs are bent.
Once in a while, a very old couple comes in, the woman pulling and the man pushing a rundown cart filled with their badly battered “treasures.” Or, more often, there is a stumbling father or mother pushing a wobbly wheelbarrow on which little children are sleeping. And their stories of weeks and months of wandering through forests, through streams and through fields, of hungry days and cold nights, are testaments to the endurance of human beings. Some make their way over the frontier alone and unguided. Others pay exorbitant rates to professional border-runners.
Then there are the Zionist groups. Mostly young men and women, they cross the border via a carefully laid out route, with their own guides and under their own armed guards. Earnest, defiant, well-disciplined, the girls wearing boots and the young men, shorts, they carry an absolute minimum of personal belongings. And they are not tired, but restless.
Cognizant of the fact that very few, if any, of this mass of refugees intend to remain in their country, the Czechoslovak authorities have been kind, considerate and helpful.
The routes followed from Czechoslovakia vary. The Zionists know where they are heading and how they will get there. But most of the older people, weary, hungry, broken and nerve-racked, want to go some place where there is peace and quiet–to them this means the American zones in Austria and Germany. Even those of the unorganized older refugees who feel that ultimately they want to go to Palestine, now head for Germany and Austria because they want to spend the “interim period” away from the strife and worry, “in the hands of the Americans.”
All told, including the organized and unorganized, and even those with proper papers, between 700 and 800 Polish Jews leave Poland and cross over into Czechoslovakia every night.
The seventy or eighty thousand Jews who are in one stage or another of leaving Poland form a triangle running from Warsaw to Crakow, to Lodz. To the south and west of this triangle are those who are going to remain. For, in the face of the questionable future, there are some Jews who want to remain in Poland. How many there are, no one knows.
(This is the second of a series of reports by a special JTA correspondent sent to Poland to survey the current situation of the Jews there.)
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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.
