PRISON CAMP NEAR PRAGUE

Press, Volume LXXXI, Issue 24570, 19 May 1945, Page 7

PRISON CAMP NEAR PRAGUE

BROADCAST APPEAL FOR HELP

LONDON, May 17. British and American prisoners of war are among the 30,000 inmates of a concentration camp near Prague, for whom an urgent appeal for help was to-day broadcast by the Prague radio. The broadcaster, giving his name as David Graham, said that he had seen British and American prisoners at the Therisienstadt camp, 40 miles north of Prague, who asked him to broadcast immediately to Britain and America appealing for food and medical supplies. “Five thousand men and women are seriously 111 at Therisienstadt. There are 700 cases of typhus and 3000 of dysentery. Between SO and 100 are dying daily,” he said. “This catastrophe has been going on for three weeks. “In past years in this camp the Jewish inhabitants were able to keep it free of lice and serious illness, although there was a severe food shortage. Three weeks ago the Germans brought in 12,000 men and women from other concentration camps which they were evacuating. These 12,000 were in the worst stages of malnutrition and disease. There were no facilities for delpusing them and there are still almost none. “The Inhabitants send this urgent appeal to the peoples of Britain and America and to the British and American military authorities to organise large-scale help, immediately. If this is not done Hitler’s policy of extermination of all the men, Women, and children in this camp will be successfully carried out in the presence of an Allied army in a liberated country. “The elected representatives of the inmates have asked me to emphasise particularly that the Therisienstadt problem must be solved here because the great majority of the inmates are too ill and too weak to be moved.’’ The Paris radio says that the French authorities are endeavouring to trace a train carrying 2400 civilians, including 240 wives and 80 children of French prisoners of war, which left the horror camp at Belsen for Therisienstadt. Nothing has since been heard of the train’or its occupants.