Details of a purge of Jews which is now being conducted in Poland by a special department of the secret police were reported today from Stockholm by Reuter’s leading British news agency.
The report says that direct information from Warsaw gives the official title of the new anti-Jewish department as: “Special Bureau for Registering the Polish Population of Jewish Origin.” It already is busily at work listing the names, addresses, occupation, and personal history of all the Jews in the country. All those with western connections are to be interned in special labor camps now being built in the Bialystok district. In charge of the department and its camps is a Russian secret police officer, Colonel Morozov, who has a number of other Russian officers as assistants.
Acting on orders from Moscow, Colonel Morozov is making his purge slowly. Already, he has transferred a number of Jewish Polish Army officers from the coastal and western frontier districts to Bialystok and billeted them in one of the labor camps. They were not allowed to take their families with them and are living in semi-captivity. Officially, they are entrusted with superintending the building of other labor camps, although they have not been told that the internees earmarked for these camps are Jews.
Internees will first be “transferred” to the Bialystok “ghettos” and assigned to some fictitious job there before being fully interned in the labor camps, the report states. Isolated Bialystok, the report explains, has been chosen as the center for the “ghettos” because it is on the eastern side of Poland, and any Jews escaping would have to cross the whole of Poland to reach the West.
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