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No Immediate Jewish Emigration Question After War, Polish Official Asserts

March 9, 1941
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A spokesman of the exiled Polish Government told a Jewish press conference today that the only immediate evacuation problem from post-war Poland would be of Germans, while the question of emigration of Jews would be “an internal Jewish problem.”

Prof. Olgiers Gorka, head of the Nationalities Department of the Polish Ministry of Information, stated: “In my view, the problem of evacuating will be not so much a Polish Jewish problem as, most of all, an internal Jewish problem. Evacuation is a question of eventual differences of opinion among Jews themselves, namely, by what roads and at what rate they will strive to create a national home. From the Polish viewpoint, the question seems to me to have lost much of its urgency for some time to come.

“The problem which will arise when Polish authority is restored will be a policy of restitution in integrum and evacuation of Germans, and not a problem of hustling evacuating Jews.”

Prof. Gorka denied that any member of the Government or any politically responsible person ever expressed in word or print anything of an anti-Semitic character or tone. He denounced the publishers of Jestem Poliakem, nationalist anti-Semitic paper, as “a little group of irresponsible adolescents who have revealed an extreme lack of national discipline.”

He added that Jewish rights were unequivocally guaranteed by the Polish constitution, which did not recognize any distinction between citizens for any reason.

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