The yellow stars which marked the Jews of France and Belgium have disappeared from the streets of Paris and Brussels, indicating the extent to which the Germans have purged those cities of Jews, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency was told today by a neutral traveller who was in the French and Belgian capitals recently.
The JTA informant said that it is almost impossible to ascertain the whereabouts of former Jewish acquaintances. Non-Jewish neighbors, when queried concerning the fate of Jews who had lived in the neighborhood, can only furnish the vaguest details as to their sudden disappearance, or, in some cases, gruesome stories of how the Jews were taken from their homes by the police in the middle of the night and never heard of again. Even the families of the arrested Jews never learn what has happened to them.
From conversations he had with anti-German Frenchmen and Belgians, the neutral traveller voiced the opinion that a defeat of the Germans will not, automatically, bring an end to anti-Semitism in western Europe. He said that some of the Nazi arguments concerning Jews have influenced the populations of the occupied countries, resulting in these people asserting, that while they were not opposed to native Jews, they would object to immigration of Jews from eastern Europe after the war.
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.
