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Germans Build Huge Funeral Pyre to Incinerate Polish Jews, Underground Reports

December 12, 1943
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An indication of the scale on which the Nazi massacres of Jews are still being carried out in Poland is given in a report received from underground sources by Emanuel Szerer, a Jewish deputy in the Polish National Council.

When the incinerator at the Majdanek “death camp” broke down for several days, the report discloses, hundreds of bodies of executed Jews piled up in the fields adjoining the camp until it became necessary for sanitary reasons for the Germans to build a huge pyre on the spot where the bodies lay.

Information reaching Polish official circles today discloses that the Germans tell western European Jews who are being deported eastward that they are bound for “labor in the East.” A group of French Jews, passing through Warsaw, are reported to have asked persons at the station: “Where is the town of Treblinka, to which we are being sent for work?” It is only when they arrive at their destination that the deportees discover that Treblinka is an execution center rather than a labor camp.

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