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Nazis Drive Jews and Poles Hundreds of Miles on Foot to Devastated Russian Areas

September 25, 1942
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Jews and Poles who are now being sent by the Nazis from unoccupied Poland to the devastated sections of occupied Russia for slave labor are no longer transported in trains but must make the several-hundred-mile journey on foot under the supervision of Nazi guards, it was revealed in a report reaching here today from Cracow.

Railroad facilities being overburdened, the Nazi authorities in Poland have instituted a system whereby the Jewish and Polish deportees must cover at least forty miles a day on foot. Underfed and exhausted, hundreds of them are unable to stand the strain and collapse on the roads. They are left there by the German guards as “human junk.” Polish peasants from the neighboring villages do their best to provide them with food and sheler.

The Nazi paper, Krakauer Zeitung, reaching here today, boasts that the ousting of Jewish artisans from the economic life of Nazi-held Poland has made “considerable progress” this year. Of the thousands of Jewish-owned handicraft? shops that existed in Warsaw before the German occupation, only 1,959 are still functioning in the ghetto, while outside the ghetto there are now 6,674 “Aryan” artisan enterprises, the paper states. In the rural districts of Warsaw only 68 Jewish shops remain of the 445 that were operating before the war. The same proportion exists in other sections of Poland where Jews are still permitted to reside.

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