An eye-witness account of the terror and starvation that is decimating the Jewish population of Poland, as related by a Jewish woman who succeeded in escaping, by a devious route, from Poland to Palestine, appears in a dispatch from Jerusalem in today’s News Chronicle, one of London’s largest newspapers.
The Jewish refugee woman, who formerly resided in the town of Kaluszyn in central Poland, reports that immediately after the Germans entered the city all of its 2,000 Jewish inhabitants were driven out. That same night the women and children were allowed to return but the men remained under German guards on the outskirts of the town. The next morning the roads surrounding Kaluszyn were littered with the bodies of the men and youths who had been murdered by the Nazis during the night.
Together with her four-year-old daughter, the Jewish woman managed to flee the city and finally reached Warsaw where she secured employment in one of the ghetto soup kitchens. But in spite of what the Jewish relief groups are able to do to alleviate the suffering. 10,000 Jews die monthly in the ghetto, she estimates, She saw undertaker vans scour the city all day long collecting emaciated bodies from which all clothing had been stripped and transporting them to cemeteries where they were buried three deep in mass graves.
Orphaned children with spindly legs and famine-swollen bodies roam the ghetto streets begging food, but nobody has much to give them. It has become almost commonplace to see children and adults fall dead in the streets from starvation. Scores of people commit suicide every day. There are very few means of earning a livelihood, although several thousand workers are employed by the German military authorities as tailors and shoemakers for the Nazi army.
The News Chronicle, in an editorial comment on the story, states: “Although’ means of sending food to the ghetto are difficult, there is one way in which everyone can answer this cry for help – redoubling efforts to speed the day of victory. Only then will the grim walls of the ghetto enclosing the worst hell on earth be razed.”
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.
