Jewish Workers Arrested in Lodz for Striking Against Insufficient Bread Rations

Sixty-five Jewish weavers were arrested by the Nazi administration in Lodz and sent to a concentration camp as punishment for their participation in a strike against insufficient bread rations, Polish Government circles reported here today.

Reports reaching the Polish Government here from occupied Poland state that there are now 150,000 Jews crowded into the Lodz ghetto. “The Jewish ghetto in Lodz, in addition to being the largest in the world, next to the ghetto in Warsaw, is also the worst as far as the food situation is concerned,” one report informs. Another report says that while the death rate among Jews in the Lodz ghetto shows the same increase as in other ghettos in Poland, the birth rate there is the lowest in the country. In the course of three months there were only eight children born in the Lodz ghetto, the report reveals.

JEWS FORBIDDEN TO WEAR SIDECURLS; 102,000 JEWS IN WARSAW AT FORCED LABOR

In the Cracow district, according to one report, an order was issued by the Nazis forbidding Jews to wear sidecurls. Jews violating this order are to be punished by heavy fines and imprisonment. The Jewish Community of Bochnia, near Cracow, was compelled by the local Nazi authorities to publish this order at its own expense.

There were 102,000 Jews working at forced labor in Warsaw at the end of 1941, the information from occupied Poland reveals. They included Jewish men and women aged from 16 to 60. In addition some 15,000 Jewish boys under sixteen years of age were employed at forced labor in Warsaw. There are about 1,800 non-Jewish residents in the Warsaw ghetto including 1,540 Catholics. For the latter there is one Catholic church which the Nazis allow to be opened on Sundays for one hour only.

The lack of medical supplies in the Jewish ghettos in Poland is causing a sharp increase in deaths which could under normal circumstances be prevented, one of the reports received here emphasizes. The report informs that during the last three months of 1941 about 450 patients died in the Jewish hospital in Warsaw chiefly because of lack of medicines. The same hospital housed 2,757 Jewish patients at the end of 1941. The mortality was even greater in the children’s hospital where of the 741 patients confined during the last quarter of 1941 about 24 percent are reported to have died.