Hungarian Jews faced with deportation and death despite intervention in their behalf by religious and political leaders of the United and neutral nations are frantically attempting to flee the country, it is indicated by reports reaching here today from various sources.
Hungarian newspapers disclose that the police in the town of Szeged have discovered a large organization which was smuggling Jews into Rumania. The group was headed by a prominent non-Jewish citizen of Szeged and had the cooperation of the chief of the Alien Control office in the city. Many members of the organization have been sent to concentration camps.
The Nazi Transkentinent Press reports that the head of a large textile firm has been arrested, together with fourteen of his employees, for providing Jews who fled from the labor service or concentration camps with forged identification documents. Rumanian newspapers received here state that several Hungarian Jews have been sentenced to five years in prison for crossing into Rumania illegally.
The Slovakian press, which has kept silent up until now concerning the deportations of Jews from Hungary, today admits that transports of Jews bound for Poland have been passing through Slovakia. They reveal that deportees who succeed in escaping from the trains are being sheltered by Slovakian Jews. They accuse a baptized Jewish land owner named Hertz and his manager named Friedman of operating an “under ground railroad” which has succeeded in getting many Hungarian Jews to safety.
POLICE INTENSIFY HUNT FOR FUGITIVE JEWS
The Hungarian police are taking drastic measures to curb the flight of the fugitive Jews. A wide-spread dragnet has been thrown around Budapest and all borders aimed at rounding up every Jew not residing in ghettos. In the capital this week police shot and killed David Popovics, who had escaped from a ghetto in one of the provincial cities.
The Hungarian civil authorities, meanwhile, are continuing to introduce further anti-Jewish measures. The National Commissioner of Public Health decreed that all equipment in the offices of Jewish doctors, or in medical supply firms owned by Jews, belongs to the state. He announced, at the same time, that only 19 of the estimated 4,500 Jewish physicians in the country have received permits allowing them to travel out of the cities in which they are confined in order to treat patients. Several hundred Jewish medical aid societies and Jewish-supported hospitals were closed down this week.
In Budapest the authorities are being swamped with applications for the tens of thousands of apartments from which Jews have been ousted. Revealing that 100,000 such applications have already been filed, the housing department announced that no apartments will be allotted as yet, and warned that persons who have taken over Jewish Homes are living there illegally.
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.
