New Pogroms on Jews Throughout Poland; Nazis “liquidate” Ghettos in Many Cities

Practically all the remaining Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Poland are now being “liquidated,” following the procedure used in Warsaw, and tens of thousands of Jews are being mercilessly slaughtered while others are attempting to flee into the neighboring woods in the hope of escaping extermination.

Information reaching the Polish Government here today from the underground movement in Poland reveals that massacres of Jews are now being carried out in every city, town and village on an unprecedented scale. In some places the Jews, having nothing to lose, are putting up heroic resistance killing Germans with whatever arms they can manage to secure. More than 20,000 Jews are estimated to be wandering about in the forests along the Bug River in an effort to save them selves from annihilation.

There is hardly a Jew left in the Lublin district, except for a few hundred skilled Jewish workers whom the Nazis have confined in a concentration camp near Lublin, where they are used in war industries, the report said, adding that even the number of Jews in this camp is dwindling.

Not a single Jew remains in the townships of Lukov, Miedzyrzecz, Parczewa, Wlodawa, Piaskow -Lubelski, Konska-Wola, Izbica and Zaklikow, where Jews were hitherto permitted to live in special quarters. In the city of Czenstochowa, several thousand Jews were executed and more than 35,000 deported “to unknown destinations.” The 5,000 Jews who still remain in the ghetto there are in despair, expecting to be killed or deported any day.

JEWISH WAR PRISONERS EXECUTED; JEWISH MINERS SLAUGHTERED

The ghettos in the cities of Bialystock, Grodno, Brest-Litowsk, Hrubieshov,Grajew and Zambrowa have all been “liquidated” by the local Nazi authorities. Several hundred Jewish war prisoners, former soldiers in the Polish Army, have been executed in a camp in Kruszyna. More than 150 Jewish mine workers who, as a result of mistreatment, were no longer fit for work were killed in the camp where they were confined near the Izabelina peat bogs.

The ghettos in the cities of Chelm and Rawa-Russka have also been “liquidated.” About 12,000 Jews who lived in the Rawa-Russka ghetto have “disappeared.” Not a single Jew has been left in Chmielnik, Bodzentyn and Suchedniow, All Jews have been deported from Staszow. Massacres of Jews have also taken place in the cities of Siedlice and Kaluszyn. In Krynki, near Bialystock, Jews defended themselves, and after killing about twenty Germans, succeeded in escaping into the neighboring woods. In Minsk-Mazowecki the Nazis drove 320 Jews into a local school and set fire to the building. The Jews battled the German guards, and about thirty of them succeeded in jumping through the windows of the burning building and fled to the woods. The others were burned alive.

Dziennik Polski, official organ of the Polish Government-in-Exile, today reports that Bishop Brizgis of Lithuania has excommunicated all Lithuanians participating in or assisting Nazis in the persecution of Jews and Poles, The paper says that the Gestapo recently massacred 6,000 Jews in the Vilna district while Nazi photographers filmed the mass-execution.