Dr. Joseph J. Schwartz, Vice-chairman of the European Council of the Joint Distribution Committee, returned to New York yesterday aboard the Yankee Clipper from Lisbon. Dr. Schwartz, who had been in Europe for a year, came home to report to the JDC and discuss with community leaders the problems of expanding American aid to sufferers overseas. He appealed for redoubled support of the J.D.C.
The food situation, he said in an interview, is worst in Poland and Spain, where people are actually starving. In France and other countries, he added, while there is no such general starvation as in Poland, there are severe shortages and the situation is growing worse.
The Vichy Government, he said, is doing all it can to alleviate conditions in the refugee internment camps, but they remain very bad. Some internees have been released recently but many thousands remain in confinement. The majority of the inmates are Jews, he pointed out. “Despite all the French Government can do,” Dr. Schwartz said, “these is a vast need which only private relief organizations and particularly American organizations such as the JDC can attempt to meet.”
Dr. Schwartz arrived in Italy on the day the Blitzkrieg in France began. He was in Paris until just before the occupation of the French capital and helped evacuate the JDC office to other French cities, and finally to Lisbon.
“I have been in the camps at Argelles and Gurs,” Dr. Schwartz related. “It is exceedingly depressing to see thousands of innocent men, women and children shut up in gloomy, wooden barracks with insufficient food, amid unsanitary conditions. All credit is due to the French Government, which under great handicaps is doing what it can for these people, but their plight is still heart-rending and calls for every possible relief effort on the part of Americans.
“The French internees, and for that matter all the war sufferers in Europe, turn to America as their chief source of hope. This is particularly true of the Jews, who must bear not only the misery which the war has brought to all alike, but the added afflictions of discriminatory laws and of anti-Semitic persecution. What the JDC has been able to do with limited funds available at its disposal has been of immense value, not only for the physical survival, but for the morale of the Jewish populations. But we have been barely able to begin to meet the ever-growing need and that is why European Jewry prays for a more successful United Jewish Appeal campaign this year than ever before, because on the success of the UJA depends the ability of the JDC to continue its vitally necessary work.
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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.
