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Spectators Turn Swimming Meet in France into Pro-jewish Demonstration

April 14, 1944
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Spectators turned a swimming meet at Toulouse into a demonstration against Nazi racial laws in France, a new French underground newspaper, Fraternity, discloses.

Crowds in the stands demonstrated when it was learned that Alfred Nakache, French 100 and 200-meter free-style swimming champion, had been excluded from the meet by Vichy because he was a Jews. The demonstration was so insistent that the event was cancelled.

Fraternite confirms reports of thousands of arrests of Jews in Paris, Nimes Avignon, Montauban and Clermont-Ferrand, and headlines “deportations of French Jews to death and torture camps.” A letter smuggled out of a concentration camp at Koziel. Upper Silesia, reports that 68 of a group of deportees died while being transported in cattle trucks. At a nearby camp at Oschewits, according to the letter, 12 to 18 prisoners died daily, the inmates were those from Koziel who were either too young or too old to do manual labor.

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