The selling of bread to Jews in Nazi-held Poland has been discontinued since July and Jews in the Warsaw ghetto are warned that until the middle of the winter they will have to subsist on small quantities of potatoes only, according to reliable first-hand information reaching the Jewish Telegraphic Agency offices here from Warsaw.
The information from Warsaw, coming through a neutral country, says that food in the Warsaw ghetto is so scarce that death from starvation is a daily occurrence. Typhus epidemics are much more serious than it is realized outside of the ghetto. One can see Jews actually falling dead in the street as a result of hunger and disease.
The situation in the Warsaw ghetto is typical of the Jewish situation in the whole of Nazi-held Poland, the information discloses. Mere bread has become a luxury to Jews who cannot obtain even the meager portion of three ounces a day alloted to them nominally on their bread cards. The entire harvest from the Polish fields is sent to Germany, with the Nazi authorities caring very little about what will happen to the starving population in the occupied territory.
In addition to actual hunger, the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto live in fear of possible excesses as a result of the intensified anti-Jewish propaganda now conducted in the Nazi press, directed especially against the Jews of Poland. This propaganda which received a new impetus soon after the Russo-German war started, is growing daily. Old anti-Jewish atrocity photos are being dug up and published in the Nazi newspapers with the idea of impressing Germans with the fact that Jews in Poland are killing Nazi soldiers. An example of this suddenly renewed anti-Jewish atrocity campaign is a series of pictures of Polish Jews published in the Berliner Illustrate Zeitung describing the Jews as “murderers of Bromberg” and threatening revenge for the death of 120 Germans who were allegedly killed in Bromberg back in September 1939 when the Nazis started the war against Poland.
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.