Entire families of Burgenland Jews are being thrown into jail, it was learned today, apparently for no other reason than that they have been unable to comply with orders to leave German territory.
It is estimated here that since the Burgenland crusade began, nearly 3,000 Jews, many of whose families had been settled in the eastern Austrian province for ten to twenty generations, have been uprooted and suddenly ordered to leave the Reich within periods ranging from three days to three weeks.
Some of the exiles have been smuggled across the borders and are living illegally or with temporary permits in adjacent Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia. Others are confined in barracks opposite Bratislava, Czechoslovakia.
The greatest number, estimated at 1,700, are refugees in Vienna. Their presence here is no secret to the police, most of them being officially registered, there is no way of telling how many have been arrested.
In some streets in Vienna Jewish quarters there is hardly a home that is not harboring one or more Burgenland refugees. In some instances, families of five are living in a single room.
Jewish leaders attempting to work out an emigration plan for Austrian Jewry are forced to consider the Burgenland exiles as merely part of the general picture. Although they constitute under ten percent of the entire problem, the remaining 90 percent may legally remain in Austria, subject to the vicissitudes of Jewish life under present conditions, until they find a way out. The Burgenland refugees, however, are veritable outcast men and women without a country.
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.
