THE LATEST ANTI-JEWISH HORROR
By OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD
[Mr. Villard, who has just returned from a tour in Germany, was editor and proprietor of the New York NATION from 1918 to 5932, and is one of the best-known editorial writers in the United States] WHAT may prove to be the final act of the incredibly brutal and cruel tragedy which Adolf Hitler has inflicted on the Jews in his power is now going on, and without receiving the attention of the world as it should because of the pressure of war news. With practically no publication of the plan in the German newspapers, Adolf Hitler is going ahead with the creation of a so-called Jewish State, located in Poland, near Nisko, on the San, south-west of Lublin. A stretch of land, about 5o by 6o miles in area, has been set aside. It is enclosed by a barbed-wire fence, and only Jews will be allowed to live therein. Into this small territory are to be crammed no fewer than 1,945,000 Jews. What is to become of the Poles who have inhabited this region is not stated, but it is said in various quarters that the land is excep- tionally poor. Whether it is poor or rich, this mass-migra- tion by force has been begun now, in the dead of winter, and in a manner that cannot be interpreted as anything else than a determination to create, not a Jewish State, but a most horrible concentration camp, which can certainly become nothing else than a habitation of death.
For these unfortunate people are forbidden to leave with more than 300 marks. They are permitted to take with them only such hand-bags as they can carry. All the rest of their belongings, the furniture in their apartments, the rest of their means, their jewels—everything is stolen from them in the usual custom of the men who declare that they belong to the purest and noblest strain of humanity the world has yet seen. No preparations are made for their reception ; they are simply to be dumped in and left to shift for them- selves. If they cannot find shelter in the deserted homes of the evacuated Polish peasantry, why, they can freeze to death, or build new homes, without means, without materials, with- out tools, without anything. How they are to subsist when they get there no one knows. How those who survive until the spring will obtain seeds and farming tools and cattle and horses no one can imagine. It is impossible to conceive of any more barbarous cruelty—and it is deliberately calculated. Behind the barbed-wire fence the Jews are to live or die in circumstances which would not be permitted in any civilised country if the victims were dogs or cattle.
Not only are 1,500,000 Polish Jews to be confined there, but to them are to be added 150,000 from the Czech Pro- tectorate, 65,000 Viennese, 30,000 from Posen and West Prussia, and 200,000 from the rest of the Reich. This means that every remaining Jew in Berlin and elsewhere will be forcibly interned. People of the greatest refine- ment and culture are to meet the same fate as the Polish Jewish peasants. Perhaps these figures for the Reich are a little too high, for according to the latest report of the Reich Association of German Jews, as published in the Rotierdamsche Courant, the number of Jews in Germany has fallen from 500,000 in 1933 to 185,000 on October 1st, 1939. Of these, some 77,000 are men, and 108,octo women, of whom no fewer than 95,00o reside in Berlin. A majority of the whole number is totally without means, and subsists on the capital remaining to those who were well-to-do or wealthy. No one is allowed to work except some able-bodied men who have gone to labour on farms ; they report, by the way, that they are kindly received and humanely treated by the farmers. Otherwise not a penny of earned income comes to these people. There they sit, forbidden to be in the streets after eight o'clock at night under penalty of arrest, without anything to do, with only two repaired synagogues available in Berlin for religious services, and with practically no places of entertainment open to them. Day after day they sit at home, and every time the door- bell rings expect that the order has come to prepare for immediate departure for Poland, and what they consider certain death.
The forced migrations began on October 17th. The first to go were those from the Protectorate, the second from Austria, the third group from Posen and West Prussia, and the last from the Reich, the movement being in charge of the Gestapo. There are being taken out of Vienna every week some two thousand men, women and children, but at the end of October one such transport comprised only four- teen hundred persons, according to information given to the Allgemeen Handelsblad of The Hague, because so many had sought to escape this fate through suicide or flight. " In the last fourteen days," its Berlin correspondent re- ported on November loth, " in Vienna alone 82 Jews have committed suicide, of whom 36 were women." Nowhere were the deportations pushed more vigorously than in Moravian Ostrava, where already many Jewish-owned houses are standing empty. What this actual evacuation means in terms of human suffering I learned from a letter sent to an American official by an Aryan German residing in a certain town. Writing to this official, this German asked whether the United States could not be induced to protest against the horrible cruelty of this transportation. He stated that a trainload of cattle-trucks containing these unfortunates had stood for twelve hours in the station of the town in which he resided, that they were without food or conveniences of any kind, and had no heat. He declared that the moans and groans of these desperately wretched sufferers could be heard a long distance from the station. He declared that he was a loyal German, but that he could not keep silence in the face of such horrible wickedness. Not one word of this, of course, can appear in a German newspaper. The public is, therefore, utterly unaware of what is being done, and individuals will not believe the truth when it is told to them.
What adds to the general confusion of these strange migrations is that Russia and Germany have just signed an agreement for the repatriation of German citizens in Soviet- occupied Poland and Soviet citizens in the German-occupied section, and that at least 5oop0o Jewish refugees, of whom 350,00o have received Soviet citizenship, are now reported to be in Lemberg, the chief town of the Soviet-occupied Polish Ukraine. Hitler is currently reported to be migration- mad ; ever since he hit upon the idea last winter of moving the Germans out of the Italian Tyrol his mind has occupied itself with the shifting of minorities out of the regions in which they are to be found, and reuniting them with people of their own race. But with the Jews the motive is to get rid of them without loss of time, and, as has been mid, with- out the slightest regard for what may become of them after they have reached their destination. It goes without saying that Hider would not thus treat cattle on the railroads, for such cruelty to them is forbidden by strict laws.
I suspect that there is an ulterior motive behind all this. It is altogether probable that one reason why these poor people are stripped of almost everything before being thrust into this charnel-house is that Hitler may point to them when they die off of hunger and cold and say: " See, I told you these were a parasite people who could only live by battening on Gentiles. I gave them territory on which to build their own State, and see how utterly they have failed." I did not dare, for their sake, to call on more than a very few Jews while I was in Germany, lest I injure them. But I found that they were entirely aware of what transfer to this " State " meant. Their one request of me was that I make known to the English and American Jewry just what this proposal signifies, and beg them not to be misled. They pointed out that even if this " State " were adequately pre- pared for the migration, it still could have no economic future, since it will be surrounded on all sides by hostile com- munities, who will doubtless not be permitted to do business with those surviving unfortunates within the barbed-wire. I have no hesitation in saying to German friends that if the Hitler Government were in every other respect a model one, I should still consider it utterly damnable because of what it has done to Jews who felt the power of this despot.
Previous page
