The desperate plight of some 11,000 Jewish refugees in the Wilno district was described here today by A.M. Kaizer, general secretary of the Anglo-Jewish Polish Refugee Fund, who has just returned from a stay of several weeks in Lithuania.
In an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Kaizer said that the refugees were undergoing especially severe suffering during the current cold spell, which they were weathering with insufficient clothing and bedding.
Kaizer said that the Refugee Relief Committee organized by the Wilno Jewish Community was maintaining 50 feeding stations. The committee’s financial requirements were being met largely by Jewish relief organizations, he said. Another 3,000 refugees in the Kaunas district were being maintained by a Kaunas committee which was raising 80 per cent of its funds locally.
Kaizer reported that the Anglo-Jewish group had allocated L12,000 for relief of the refugees and some 30,000 Jewish war sufferers in the Wilno area. Foreign relief organizations, he said, were obliged to operate through the Lithuanian Red Cross. The Government contributes the equivalent of 50 per cent of funds brought into the country by the foreign relief agencies.
Kaizer reported that refugees were still trying to escape from Nazi-occupied Poland despite the great dangers involved. The refugees, to reach the Lithuanian frontier, have to pass German and Russian frontier guards. They are often savagely handled by the Germans, Kaizer said. Many who succeed in reaching Lithuania bear wounds inflicted by the Nazis and are stripped of all valuables they may have possessed. Despite the danger, too, numerous refugees in Lithuania are smuggling themselves back into the German areas in desperate attempts to rescue relatives or friends left behind.
Kaizer said that hundreds of Jews from the Suwalki district of Poland, from which they had been expelled by the Nazis, perished in the swamps along the Lithuanian frontier. Citing the brutal methods employed by the Nazis in ousting the Suwalki Jews, Kaizer related the following incident as told to him by eyewitnesses:
A large party of Jews had been rounded up and forced to march to the frontier. One old Jew, unable to maintain the pace, lagged behind. A Nazi guard leaped at him, asking why he did not keep peace. The Jew pointed towards his grandchild, whom he was carrying in his arms, saying that a man as old as he was could not walk with such a burden and keep up with the others. The guard thereupon seized the child from his grandfather, dashed him upon the ground and shot him dead before the aged man’s eyes.
“Now,” the guard shouted as he pushed the Jew roughly forward, “now you can keep step with them.”
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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.
