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Polish Jews in Russia Enlist in Polish Army There; Nazis Kill 4,000 Foreign Jews

May 10, 1944
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British correspondents in Russia who are now visiting polish military units in Western Ukraine today reported that Jews constitute six percent of the Polish Army which is fighting against the Germans on the Russian front.

The Jews in the Polish fighting forces in Russia are all volunteers, the correspondents disclose. The Jewish refugees were exempted from the general mobilization which Gen. Sigmund Berling, commander of the Polish Army in Russia, proclaimed, once those born on Polish soil now claimed as part of the U.S.S.R. are considered Soviet citizens. Nevertheless, many of them enlisted voluntarily to fight for the liberation of Poland and to avenge the blood of the hundreds of thousands of Polish was killed by the Germans.

An underground report from occupied Poland reaching here today states that about 4,000 foreign Jews who were living in Poland before the war and were later interned by the Nazis in a camp near Hanover, have recently been executed, The report. received by Emanuel Szerer, Jewish Socialist member of the Polish National Council, also discloses that all “Jewish concentration camps” in the Lublin area have been liquidated. Some 2,000 “privileged Jews” who were confined in a camp reserved for writers, leaders of the Jewish communities and other intellectuals, were among those executed.

There are now a number of Jews working in the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto, the report says. They have been hired out to a German salvage firm which is clearing up the ghetto debris in order to obtain scrap metal for German war industries. In Vilna, it reveals, there are only about 200 Jews. These are skilled workers employed by the Germans. Twenty of them were recently shot when a tunnel leading from the ghetto was discovered. Of the 6,000 Jews in Nowogrodek, only 200 remain.

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