Details of a Nazi-inspired pogrom that started on Easter Sunday and raged for five full days in the Jewish quarters of Warsaw were received here today.
The excesses, in which Polish Nationalist youths were the assailants, were carried on in full view of the Nazi-controlled police. They ended only when Jewish truckmen and porters organized a defense against the attacks. However, the Jews who had shown resistance were arrested.
The youthful Poles, reportedly members of the anti-Semitic National Radical party, shouted “Heil Hitler!” as they stoned Jewish shops, invaded and looted stores and attacked Jewish passersby with knives and iron bars.
“Hitler’s invaders treat the Jewish masses as powerless slaves. Unequalled barbarism and lawlessness are the only ‘law’ which is applied to Polish Jewry. Deprived of all possibilities for work, the Jewish population is delivered by the Nazi occupation to starvation, poverty and destruction. Thrown to the mercy of the brown beasts, they are at all times, even in their own homes, humiliated, violated and tortured with long-forgotten barbaric and medieval methods which the Nazis dragged out of the garbage cans of history.”
Advising the Jews against despair and emigration, the statement says that the Jewish masses in Poland, under the Bund’s leadership, will know how to defend themselves against domestic anti-Semites and against foreign anti-Semitic invaders.
“Poland is our country,” it says. “To Poland our strength belongs. In Poland we expect our rights as citizens, and herein is our future.” It condemns the Lublin Jewish “reservation” as “the lowest form of brown banditry” and concludes with an expression of belief that Poland will regain its full freedom.
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.
