SLAVES OF RUSSIA IN MILLIONS

Grey River Argus, 17 February 1949, Page 5

SLAVES OF RUSSIA IN MILLIONS

Revelations About Camps By American Federation of Labour

(Rec. 9.25). NEW YORK, Feb. 15. The Ariierican Federation of Labour to-day laid before the United Nations Economic and Social Council documentary evidence that millions of slave labourers are living under intolerable conditions in Russia.

Miss Tony Sender, the representative on the Council of the American Federation of Labour, submitted fifteen sworn statements, by persons who claimed to have been the victims of the Russian forced labour programme. She said that Russia had built Labour Camps throughout the Soviet Union, and that there were up to

one million political prisoners and other persons in some single camps. Miss Sender demanded impartial investigation of the slave labour in Russia.

DOCTOR’S SWORN STATEMENT There is a sworn statement by Doctor Julius Margolin, who is now in Israel, who said that he had been a slave labourer. He claimed that the conditions in these camps were worse than those in the camp at Dachau, the war-time Nazi horror camp. He said: “The conditions of life in the Soviet camps present an indescribable hell to the eyes of a European. The prisoners who knew the Polish prisons and the German Dachau remembered them in the Soviet camps as being a comparative paradise”.

Dr Margolin's statement said that the prisoners worked under armed guards. The sanctions for not fulfilling their work quotas were punitive hunger rations, and prison, and, for systematic refusal of appointed work, trials with the possibility of death sentences.

He said that the prisoners were dressed in stinking rags. They presented a pitiful sight. Their death rate was high. WOMAN'S TESTIMONY

Miss Sender also quoted testimony by Esther Witnowska, who .is now a nurse in New York. Miss Witnowska’s statement said that she was arrested in Brest.litovsk, in 1939, for not accepting Soviet citizenship. She was sent to work in copper mines in the Ural Mountains. She, and other women, worked underground, hauling ore in wheelbarrows. The full wheelbarrows were too heavy for the women, and, with her utmost effort, she was able to reach only forty per cent, of her assignment. Her only food was black bread and water. Often there was a shortage of bread, and the prisoners got, nothing at all. SOVIET REPLY M. Semyon TSarapkin, Soviet delegate on the Council, denied the charges. He accused the American Federation of Labour and the State Department of using Goebells propaganda technique in spreading what he termed “grotesque lies, filthy slander” about Russia. He said that the United States was trying to divert the attention of people from “slavery in the United States and in other capitalistic countries”. M. Tsarapkin said that workers in Russia were content in the knowledge that they were working for themselves, and not for “capitalistic exploiters”. He charged the American employers with using brutal methods against their workers. He also attacked the Taft-Hartley Labour Act, saying that it was an attempt to enslave unionists in America. SOVIET SPEAKER CITES U.S. JAILS Continuing, the Soviet delegate, M. Tsarapkin, said: “There are hundreds of thousands of cases of convict labour in the United States. The main difference between convict labour in the United States and other capitalistic countries and the convict labour of the Soviet Union is that in the Soviet Union convict labour is an educational measure, and not a punishment”. BRITISH COLONIES CITED

M. Tsarapkin quoted an 1.L.0. report. to show that some eighteen hundred natives in Kenya, and twentynine thousand natives in Tanaganyika were U.S.A, forced labourers.

SOVIET WILL NOT LET AMERICANS IN!

M. Tsarapkin added: “The United States has become an asylum for all deserters and criminals who, after committing crimes in the . Soviet Union, supply all kinds of lies and false testimony to the American Federation of Labour. All the dregs of society are being used politically by the United States against the Soviet Union. Obviously, what the United States wants is to allow American intelligence agents to study something about which they feel that they have not sufficient evidence. The Soviet Union is not Turkey, or Greece, or one of the Marshallised countries. It will not - allow any American gauleiters”. SLAVE CAMPS SPREADING WESTWARD Mr Christopher Mayhew, the British Under-Secretary of State, declared that the forced labour camps were spreading westwards, and were “following the Hammer and the Sickle’’. Mr Mayhew asked why these camps were being kept so secret if, as the Russians claimed, there were no mass forced labour camps, but merely a few corrective camps? He said: “This inhuman practice of forced labour is now spreading beyond the boundaries of the Soviet Union. We see the evil growing in Czechoslovakia, and in Bulgaria, and in the Soviet zone of Germany. We see, now, that forced labour is not an exclusively Russian phenomenon —it belongs to the practice of Communism in several countries”. SLAVE CAMPS IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA Mr Mayhew continued: “In Czechoslovakia there is no attempt being made to disguise the fact that the forced labour camps now exist there. I am not suggesting to the Council that this forced labour in Czechoslovakia has yet reached the full scale and the full horror of the forced labour in Soviet Russia; but the seed is there, and all experience suggests that the evil will grow. “In Bulgaria, I draw attention to the law there of November, 1945. establishing ‘Labour Education Communities’, and to the law of 1946, establishing 'ldlers’ Camps’. These idlers’ camps are a milder form of the concentration camp, and are involving six months' sentences of heavy manual labour. QUARTER MILLION IN EAST GERMAN CAMPS “In the Soviet zone of Germany, both the concentration camps and the Nazi techniciuc have been taken over, and have been improved on. Research which was undertaken a year ago indicated that the German con-

centration camp population was there denser than it was in Germany up to 1939. Therd" are, we have reason to heiieve, from two to three hundred thousand prisoners in six major and six or seven smallei’ camps”. Mr Mayhew added that M. Tsarapkin had failed to answer any of the specific charges against his country which, in itself, constituted an admission of guilt. The Council adjourned till to-mor-row.