The New York Post, in a cable from its Vienna correspondent, reports today that the “sober and considered judgement” of Western observers who are analyzing the effects of the recent Prague purge trial is that “what the Nazis started in Eastern Europe — mass annihilation of the Jews — the Communists are completing.”
“The Russians, the observers are reported to say, “won’t resort to gas chambers nor mass executions, except where political figures are concerned,” the correspondent states. “They have instead inaugurated a program of cutting the Jewish population off from gainful employment, from local community and cultural lite which Jews, like other minorities, possess in Western nations and are ostensibly determined to keep them stagnant and preoccupied with the problem of staying alive.
“A premonition of their fate has led Jews in large numbers to commit suicide, not only in Czechoslovakia, but elsewhere in the satellite lands,” the correspondent reports. “This last act of desperation, observers pointed out, also occurred in Germany and Austria when the Nazis established their control.”
The correspondent quotes a Western diplomat whose views, he says, bear considerable weight in formulating his government’s decisions, as stating: “The Jews of Eastern Europe feel that they are sitting on a rumbling volcano. They have become identified with a system — Zionism — which the Soviet Union considers dangerous to the consolidation of its control in the satellite areas.”
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.
