Slaves

The platform of the railroad station of Lublin, in German Poland, teemed. On it stood a forlorn, broken spirited crowd who moved only when shoved. The people were utterly destitute. All they had for baggage was here a knapsack, there a handbag, sometimes just a cloth bundle. A few carried scraps of food for which they had no stomach. The most any had in cash was 300 marks ($120). Train after train pulled in, and passengers poured out like ashes from dump-trucks. The heavy crowd became unmanageable. Finally the stationmaster blustered out, ordered that not one more passenger should alight. More trains came in. He ordered them not to stop, to clear out. "But where to, with this cargo?" asked the engineers.

Lublin, Poland, the city which once complained because the Tsars changed a nobleman's castle into a prison, was recently chosen by Adolf Hitler as the site of his long-planned Jew-sump. By next April 1, according to a German government decree, 150,000 Jews must be evacuated to Lublin or other "reservations" like it from Bohemia, 65,000 from Vienna, 30,000 from Posen and the onetime Polish Corridor, 175,000 from the Lodz district, 240,000 from Germany proper.

The lot of the first arrivals was last week reported by the Berlin correspondent of the Copenhagen Politiken. The unhappy Jews were virtual slaves. The area around the city was entirely hedged in by barbed wire and bayonets. Gradually the Jews were herded from the station, given quarters of sorts, put immediately to work (twelve hours a day) on roads, fields, bogs, buildings.

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