Polish Premier Wladislaw Sikorski and Foreign Minister August Zaleski will raise the questions of relief in Nazi-occupied Poland and persecution of Poles and Jews, among other issues, in conversations with Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles on Saturday, it was learned today.
The Polish statesmen will seek American intervention to break the deadlock which has prevented large-scale American relief from reaching the German-occupied area because the Nazis have refused to permit complete American supervision of its distribution.
They will also discuss with President Roosevelt’s envoy the question of Nazi terrorism in Poland, including mass executions of Poles and Jews and expulsions into central Poland and the Lublin Jewish “reservation.”
Questioned by this correspondent, Welles, who reached Paris yesterday morning, would say no more than that he was seeing the Polish leaders on Saturday. He also declined to reply to the question of whether he had discussed Polish relief with Chancellor Adolf Hitler or other Nazi leaders while in Berlin.
The exiled Polish Government at Angers is taking an increasingly serious view of the forced movements of populations in Nazi Poland, as indicated by a speech of Premier Sikorski to the provisional Polish Parliament Wednesday night. “The entire Jewish population–even the Jews residing in Germany, Austria and the Protectorate–may all be transported by the Nazis into Polish territory lying on the San or Bug rivers,” he said.
Today the Polish Government’s information service reported that the population of Warsaw was beginning to feel the effect of hunger and that “catastrophic famine” was spreading in the Warsaw district as the last food reserves were being exhausted. Jewish relief organizations received information that the number of Jews in Warsaw requiring feeding by the Jewish community and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee had risen to 150,000 from 50,000 a month ago.
Expulsion of Jews from Lodz is continuing, this information said, and two ghettos have been established by the Nazi authorities for non-Germans remaining in Lodz–the northern section for Jews and the southern quarter for Poles. The central area is reserve for Germans.
According to another report from Lodz, the road from that city to Warsaw is crowded with migrating Jewish families seeking to reach the former capital by foot and in horse-drawn wagons. The Lodz rabbinate has granted permission for the wanderers to travel on the Sabbath.
The Jews undergo a strict search by German soldiers on reaching the border between the area of Poland which has been incorporated in the Reich and the “Government-General,” which consists of the Warsaw district. They therefore arrive in Warsaw without money and clothing and add to the burden of the Warsaw Coordinated Jewish Relief Committee, which includes the Warsaw Jewish Community, the American J.D.C., the ORT and other Jewish relief groups.
The Lodz Jews are easily recognized when they arrive in Warsaw since they still wear the yellow badge ordered for Jews in Lodz, in contrast to the blue-white armlets with six-pointed stars which Jews in the Warsaw area must wear.
German newspapers reaching Paris express satisfaction with the speed of Jewish expulsion from Lodz. “The expulsion of Jews from Lodz is making good progress, and the expelled Jews are being replaced by Germans repatriated from the Baltic and Wolhynia areas,” states the Deutsche Bergwerks Zeitung, industrial organ of Field Marshal Hermann Goering.
Other Nazi newspapers also dwell on the expulsions, commenting on the city’s changed appearance and different composition of the population.
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