About 3,000 Jews are among the 30,000 surviving men and women of Warsaw, the correspondent of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency established today upon his arrival in this battered city.
The plight of these Jews baffles description, and their number is increasing as Jewish survivors arrive from neighboring townships. A local Jewish committee is functioning, and is doing its best to provide food for the needy Jews from the 124 soup kitchens which have been established to feed the hungry population. Most of these kitchens are located in the praga section of Warsaw.
Escorted by Colonel A. Finkelstein of the Polish Army on a tour through the debris of Warsaw, the JTA correspondent found all houses in the ghetto leveled to the ground. Not a single synagogue remains in the city which had dozens before the outbreak of the war. No trace is left of any of the streets which were thickly populated with Jews in pre-war times and which the Germans made into a ghetto soon after the occupation of the city.
While all buildings in the ghetto are a mass of ruins, the brick wall of the ghetto-ten feet high and surmounted by barbed wire-strangely enough remained intact. The surviving Jews live in basements beneath the ruins, as does the non-Jewish population. They do not even have candles for light. The food which they get from the free kitchens is only black bread and a plate of soup. No sugar or milk is available in Warsaw.
Despite their dire need and incredible hardships. all the surviving Jews are happy at the fact that they again are free people. Some of them told the correspondent of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that funds sent by Jewish organizations from the United States and England to the Jewish underground reached here and proved invaluable not only in the work of securing food for starving Jews, but also in purchasing false identity documents from corrupt German officials.
The Warsaw Jewish Committee, formed immediately after the liberation of the city by the Russian Army, is now headed by Dr. M. Beck, Poland’s leading gynecologist who lived secretly in Warsaw all during the German occupation.
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.
