As a result of mounting restrictions, all a Jew can do in Germany “is to sit in his room and hope and wait for death,” declared Richard O. Boyer, a correspondent of the newspaper PM who recently returned from a visit to Germany, in an article to appear tomorrow.
“Regulations directed against the 187,000 Jews still in Germany–there were never more than 500,000–have made it literally true that all a Jew in Germany may do is stay in his room and slowly starve or become ill from insufficient food or heat,” the writer asserts. “About 25,000 Jews are still in Nazi concentration camps and their treatment can be imagined.”
Thousands of Germans feel ashamed of Nazi treatment of the Jews and “try to sneak kindnesses to this tragic race,” says Boyer, “but these people are as much prisoners of the Nazis as are the Jews themselves, although their fate is not so hard.”
Under present restrictions, Jews are forbidden to buy clothes of any kind; receive reduced food rations, with no milk; are forbidden all coal, cannot engage in business, cannot walk certain streets at any hour and must be off all streets by 9 p.m.; cannot have telephones or radios, cannot go to movies, restaurants, shows or operas; cannot enter most stores before noon and can enter food stores only between 4 and 5 p.m.; can do only menial work and are forbidden refuge in bomb shelters in many places.
“I wish you could have seen these Jews,” the article declares. “I wish you could have seen their dignity and bearing there in their denuded rooms, in their ragged clothes. There were writers, there were lawyers, professors and doctors whom I saw on these visits. They told me of relatives who had killed themselves, of other relatives murdered, of scores of friends in concentration camps, and always they listened to hear if someone was coming…
“But saddest of all were those who had worked for years to get into the U.S.A., who finally had every red tape requirement fulfilled, only to find that entry was barred to them because of the recent fear of Fifth Columnists. Fifth Columnists! The offense of the Jews in Germany was not that they were Communists–or does someone think they were Nazis? It was that they were successful. Almost all of that small population were of the bourgeoisie and their horror of Communism equals that of any American.”
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.
