PLANNED EXODUS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26043, 5 January 1946, Page 5

PLANNED EXODUS

JEWS FROM EUROPE GENERAL’S ALLEGATION AN INQUIRY ORDERED LONDON, Jan. 3. The British Foreign Office has decided to investigate Lieutenant-general Sir Frederick Morgan’s allegation of a planned Jewish exodus from Europe, says the Evening News. The request for an inquiry into the accuracy or otherwise of the allegation was made by U.N.R.R.A. The Foreign Office is expected to inquire through Britain’s diplomatic representatives in Poland and other Eastern European countries, find the matter may eventually come before the Anglo-American committee studying Jewish questions in relation to Poland. The Board of Deputies of the British Jews issued a statement declaring that it was astonished that General Morgan should be so ill-informed, in spite of repeated official Polish and Czech statements admitting anti-Semi-tic attacks. “ The few surviving Polish Jews are understandably fleeing from places of horror in the hope of starting afresh in the Jewish national home. Lieutenant-general Morgan’s reference to atJewish plot is not only grotesque, but highly uncharitable and unworthy, when it comes from the head of an organisation whose purpose is to bring comfort to the suffering victims of Nazi barbarity.” Intense Hostility in Poland

The suggestion that a world-wide Jewish conspiratorial organisation was arranging for the infiltration of Polish Jews into the American zone was described by Judge Rifkind as . “ just so much poppycock.” Judge Rifkind is the adviser on Jewish affairs to Lieutenant-general McNarney. Giving his personal views on General Morgan’s belief that the flow of Polish Jews to the west was part of a wellorganised positive plan, Judge Rifkind said that 95 per cent of those he interviewed were leaving Poland under a sense of compulsion, either genuine or imagined. The predominant factor in their flight was fear. Those who returned to their homes in Poland found an attitude of intense hostility on the part of the native population. He had seen notices posted on Jewish doors ordering the occupants to leave Poland on pain of death. There was no evidence that there had been pogroms in the sense of mass Slaughter, but the receipt of notices to leave, punctuated by the death of some individual Jew, was sufficient to bring home the point. Polish Government Powerless The Polish Government was opposed to the persecution, said Judge Rifkind, and was attempting to eliminate it, but thus far it was powerless in the face of the anti-Semitism of the population. Migrants, from Poland were guided and assisted, not by a secret organisation, but by the remnants of the old Jewish organisation which had existed in Poland for many years. x They were assisted by volunteers to whom the rescue of the few remaining Jews in Europe had become the only passion making life worth living. Only 75,000 of the 3,500,000 Jews in Poland before the war were surviving it. Among these a skeleton service for the guidance of migrants had arisen. This guidance consisted mainly of rudimentary road instructions. The migrants undoubtedly hoped eventually to reach Palestine.