SLAIN IN MASS

Evening Post, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 100, 30 April 1945, Page 3

SLAIN IN MASS

10,000 JEWS IN'ONE NIGHT

The retreating Germans - in Lithuania massacred 10,000 Jews in -a ghetto slaughter during one night and then burned the entire quarter before abandoning Kaunas, according *to Colonel Pouyade, commander of the French Normandie Air Squadron that has been fighting in Russia.

He stated in Cairo that he had been inclined" to. be scepticaL about some of the atrocity reports published in Russia until he had seen tlie results of the Kaunas crime. He said that his unit had entered Lithuania with the Red :ArmyT and fifteen days after the occupation of Kaunas he had had occa-sion-to visit the city ;

He described heaps of corpses of men, women, and children in the streets and in ruined cellars. Only one Kaunas Jew escaped,.,he said, by hiding in a secret cellar beneath the usual cellar, which he had fitted with, a camouflaged 'stone trap-door, i According to Colonel Pouyade, there had been 40,000 Jews in Kaunas. The Germans concentrated them in a ghetto and, during three years of occupation, slew 30,000. However, the Red Army's sudden advance forced the Germans • to retreat while 10,000 Jews still remained alive. •- ■-"■.".

During their last night ."in Kaunas, Colonel Pouyade said, the Germans massed the survivors in a ■one-square-kilometre section of ttfe ghetto and machine-gunned them en masse after having poured abandoned fuel supplies on their houses and set them ablaze. He said that absolutely nothing remained of the-ghetto area. \