The German authorities in Warsaw have taken over the city’s only Jewish hospital and expelled the Jewish patients, including 1,400 typhus cases, it was reliably reported today.
Despite the coldest weather of the year, the patients were taken from their beds and ejected from the building. The Jewish community organization installed them temporarily in Jewish schools, lacking medical supplies and equipment, which the authorities would not release from the hospital.
The presence of 1,400 typhus cases, comparing with a figure of 250 mentioned in a report a fortnight ago, indicated the spread of the disease in the Jewish section of Warsaw. The patients were maintained by the Jewish community with funds raised by a 1,000-zloty tax on every family wishing to bury its dead in the better section of the Jewish cemetery.
A report reaching here from Cracow told of executions of Jews, rape of Jewish girls and expropriation of Jewish property.
“Very often Jews are murdered and robbed in their homes during the night and rich Jews disappear,” the report said. “The Jewish community of Cracow has been obliged to deliver 200 Jewish women for labor, but suddenly an order was given that these 200 must be all girls of the Hebrew High School. What the Nazi soldiers are doing with these girls in their quarters forms a hair-raising account. They are being raped, and even worse than that. In addition, the Nazis are seizing Jews and Jewesses on the street for forced labor, releasing them only in the evening.”
The Cracow report added that anti-Jewish measures were even more severe in the provinces. In Wieliczka, near Cracow, 34 Jews were executed on a charge that arms were found concealed in the local synagogue, it was said.
Reliable information from Nazi-occupied Upper Silesia and Teschen said the expulsion of Jews from that area had been virtually completed. No Jew was permitted to take more than 30 kilograms of luggage when expelled. They were driven to the Soviet border and ordered to cross into Russian territory within five hours on pain of being machine-gunned.
Forty kilometers from the frontier the Jews were taken off trucks and ordered to leave their luggage behind, it was said. At the last German posts many of them were even stripped of their clothing, and some had to cross the border in their underwear. One of these Jews, Gustav Karter, owner of a textile factory and of the Bielitz Company, was said to have lost his mind.
A Jewish officer of the Polish Army who was interned in a camp for Polish war prisoners in Galicia, but who succeeded in escaping and arrived in Paris today to join the Polish Legion, gave this correspondent the following account of events in the camp:
“We were 1,200 Polish and six Jewish army officers held in the camp as war prisoners. The commandant of the camp as an Austrian. He received instructions to separate the Jewish officers from the Polish, but the Polish officers objected and threatened passive resistance if these instructions were carried out. They said:
“The Jews had fought with us at the front, and we insisted that they remain with us in the camp.’ After that the Jewish officers were given equal treatment in the camp. Within a few weeks, however, the Polish officers were released and permitted to return to their homes in Poland; however, not the Jewish officers.
“As the commandant was Austrian, he tacitly indicated that any of us who would refrain from answering the question of whether he was Jewish would also be released, which was what happened. The Austrian officer quietly informed me that within two days our camp would be transferred to the interior of the Reich. He thereupon helped me to escape by bringing me to the exit from the camp, and even supplying me with cigarettes.
“Different, however, was the case of Jewish privates in Nazi camps. They were herded into a separate camp in Galicia and when I was brought there to act as translator from Polish to German I witnessed how they were brutally beaten by the Nazi soldiers and how they were prevented by terrorism from approaching the gates, where food was delivered by relatives and friends.
“The hunger prevailing in the camp for Jewish war prisoners can hardly be described, and their situation is much worse than that of the Polish war prisoners, although the latter are also terribly maltreated. The majority of Jewish war prisoners are being shipped from the camps in Galicia into the interior of the Reich.”
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.
