Moscow Jewish Conference Opens; Hears How Gestapo Depopulated Jewish Towns in USSR

The extent to which Gostapo executioners have depopulated huge sections of Russia which prior to the war had hundreds of thousands of Jewish inhabitants, was revealed here today by speakers addressing the third annual meeting of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which is being held simultaneously with a nationwide conference of representatives of the Jews of the U.S.S.R.

Among the Red Army officers participating in the conferences, which opened on Sunday, is Lieut.-Col. Rafael Milner, a be-medaled veteran of three years of war, who came here from the front in order to attend the meetings, Lieut.-Col. Milner disclosed that in all the villages recaptured by his regiment in White Russia, and later in the Dnieper region, the Russian troops did not encounter a single Jew, so thorough had been the German extermination of the Jewish population. “Nothing is left of the Jewish population, but the bodies we found in large mass graves everywhere,” the Red Army officer said. “The German cut-throats spared neither old people nor infants.”

Among the many accounts of Jewish heroism in the struggle against the German invaders released this week by the Anti-Fascist Committee in connection with its conference, is a story of a Jewish peasant family from the town of Larindorf, which, by itself, battled German occupation troops in the Crimea until it was able to amass sufficient arms to join with other small groups to formidable partisan detachment.

The family consists of Zorach Kon, the father, a veteran of World War I, his two sons and a daughter. The mother of the family and a relative have been killed in battles with the Nazis. A correspondent who recently spent some time with the Kon unit reports that old Zorach refuses to be evacuated to Russian-held territory for a rest, but is determined to remain behind the German lines in the Crimea so that he can be “among the first to return to Larindorf.”