Photograph by Stanley Washburn 

 POLISH JEWS LOOKING EOR A NEW HOME 



These wanderers in a wilderness of woe, like their forebears in Palestine, have a pillar 

 of fire to guide them by night; but it is to guide them away from their homes, kindled by the 

 torch of war, instead of a flame to pilot them to a Land of Promise. 



We began to investigate the conditions 

 of those who were still alive, those refu- 

 gees who were homeless. We saw no 

 buildings in that whole 230 miles. Every- 

 thing had been destroyed ; nothing but the 

 bare chimney, black and charred, was 

 standing ; no live stock, no farm imple- 

 ments, in all that vast area. 



I saw with my own eyes between fifty 

 and sixty thousand of the six or seven 

 hundred thousand of those refugees who 

 had been gathered together, about a 

 thousand to a building, in rude, hardly 

 weather-proof barracks hurriedly put up 

 by the Germans. 



A STATE OE INDESCRIBABLE WOE 



There they were, lying on the ground 

 in broken families, getting one starvation 

 ration a day, dying of disease and hunger 

 and exposure. The buttons from their 

 clothing were gone ; their clothes had to 

 be sewed on. 



When I saw them they had not had 

 their clothes off for weeks. There were 

 no conveniences of life. They were in a 

 state of bodily filth that is indescribable. 



Going back to the cities, where the de- 

 struction was not so awful, we saw little 

 people and, grown people, mothers and 

 children, sitting on the sidewalk, leaning 

 against a building, sometimes covered 

 with snow or rain-soaked, too weak to 

 lift their hands to take the money or 

 bread that we might offer them. 



All the wealthy people of Poland were 

 giving everything they owned to save 

 their nation. 



One day one of the Poles, the head of 

 the great Central Relief Committee of 

 Poland, a wonderful man, wealthy before 

 the war, but who has given everything he 

 possessed to save his people, showed me 

 a proclamation and translated it for me. 

 It was written in Polish and I could not 

 read it. It was signed by the German 

 Governor-General, and the significance of 

 it was this : It was made a misdemeanor 

 for any Pole having food to give it to 

 any other able-bodied Pole who would 

 refuse to go into Germany to work. 



That meant that this "system" had put 

 it up to the head of any of the various 

 families to go into voluntary slavery in 



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