Warsaw J.D.C. Asks $500,000 Monthly to Aid Jews in Nazi Poland

The Warsaw office of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee has forwarded to the organization’s European headquarters in Paris a budget asking 3,000,000 zlotys monthly–nominally about $500,000–to provide bare necessities for the starving Jewish population in German-occupied Poland.

Two thirds of the funds are needed, according to the budget, for feeding adults and children, the balance being required for medical and sanitary assistance which the Nazis refuse to Jews and for maintenance of Sheltering homes for refugees from devastated towns and hostels for children who have lost their parents during the occupation.

The figures give a graphic picture of the starvation prevailing among the Jews in Poland. In Warsaw alone 75,000 meals daily must be issued from J.D.C.-supported soup kitchens. Jewish children in Warsaw who must be fed number more than 23,000. In the provinces of Nazi-occupied Poland at least 300,000 Jews require free meals.

In addition to issuing food, the J.D.C. must provide shelter for thousands of Jews, since, according to verified figures, about 40 per cent of the houses in Warsaw’s Jewish quarter have been destroyed and no less than 50,000 Jews are victims of fires in their homes. Many have been given shelter by relatives and friends, but a large number are homeless and penniless and are accommodated in collective lodgings.

It is believed that thousands of Jews in Poland could obtain assistance from relatives abroad were it not that the Nazis are keeping the occupied territory isolated from the rest of the world, apparently because contact with persons abroad would reveal the enormous number of Jewish casualties in the occupation and the subsequent anti-Semitic persecution.