Hundreds of Jews driven to insanity by Nazi brutality and persecution are being transported from all sections of Poland, Austria and Czechoslovakia and lodged in the Warsaw ghetto, it was learned here today by Polish Jewish circles.
The arrival this week of a group of 100 insane Jewish men and women from the town of Wadowice in Southern Poland has added another problem to the many facing the Warsaw kehilla, since it is almost impossible to find adequate lodgings for them within the crowded ghetto. Many of those brought here are violently insane and are dangerous unless confined in proper quarters.
Ordinary trucks are used to transport the insane persons from where they are incarcerated to Warsaw, the reports disclose. They are crowded together like cattle without any medical supervision. Violent cases are thrown in with non-violent patients. Frequently the ghetto authorities are not even given sufficient notice of the arrivals. In one instance reported here, a group of these trucks arrived in Warsaw in the middle of the night and the locked trucks were left in the streets by the Nazi authorities in charge, when accommodations for their insane passengers were not immediately forthcoming.
A rigid censorship has been clamped down not only on letters entering and leaving the ghetto but even on intra-ghetto mail, the Polish Jewish sources also learned today. Among the censors are a few Jews and some Yiddish-speaking Poles, but the regional chief of the censorship set up is a German. There are now about a dozen postal sorting offices within the ghetto confines, where letters are collected, sorted, censored and dispatched. About 600 Jews are employed as postmen, the reports state. As a result of this complicated censorship procedure, letters sent by one ghetto inhabitant to another frequently take two to three days, and sometimes longer, to arrive at their destination.
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.
