A wall-enclosed ghetto is envisaged for Warsaw’s Jews by the Nazi authorities in the former Polish capital, it was revealed today with receipt of the full text of an edict just issued by the new Warsaw District Chief, Herr Leist. If the edict is executed, Warsaw’s ghetto would become the first of the wall-enclosed type since the Middle Ages.
Not all of Warsaw’s Jews, however, will be compelled immediately to live in the ghetto, as was at first thought from a Krakauer Zeitung report of the edict.
In addition to those Jews already living in the sectors set aside for the ghetto, only Jewish newcomers to Warsaw and those changing their residences in other sections of the city will be obliged to move to the wall-enclosed area.
Non-Jews living in the ghetto are not compelled to leave it, but if they move at all they must move out of the sector rather than to another portion of it.
The Leist decree marks the second attempt of the Nazi authorities to set up a ghetto. The first, made shortly after the occupation, had to be abandoned because of a typhus epidemic in the city. At that time the Jewish quarters were separated from the rest of the city by barbed-wire barricades, ostensibly to prevent spread of disease.
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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.
