Evening star., 1943-03-03
Reporter Tells of Destruction
Of Khorkov by Fleeing Nozis
Roll Station and Steel Overposs Dynomited;
Apartments, Offices and Stores Put to Torch

! mann Goering's Luftwaffe had it's
Gay.
Twenty eight bombers rained down
high explosives in the heart of
kharkov on February IT, the day
after the Red Army recaptured it.
/ Atop the fire and shell damage is
an overlay of shattered glass,
cratered streets, Sickening rubble-
filled gaps where houses once stood
the blltz Hitler's civilizing mission
! has made so familiar to almost all
Of Europe
$4,000 Survive Ordeal.
| But kharkov's story is more, far
| more than that of broken buildings
Three hundred and fifty thousand
| people somehow survived this ordeal
venom as the homes in which they
lived or the factories where they
worked Stalingrad was Hitler's
| mightieSt effort to break the Red
Army. As all the world is more and
more beginning to appreciate, it
failed. Kharkov might properly be
called the Stalingrad of the Soviet
people.
Perhaps only in Poland have the
mad race doctrines of Hitler and
his party philosopher DR.. Alfred
Rosenberg, been so ruthlessly and
brazenly applied. There was food
for the Herrenvolk, occasionally a
little-about 300 grams of millet
bread daily, when available-for
those who collaborated and thereby
earned such other dubious privilege
as riding Jim Grow" streetcars.
For dependents of workers" there
was $50 grams of bread during only
a couple of months. For the rest
there was begging or some slight
traffic in the city's markets at fab
ulous prices-S1O pound for millet
bread. Homeless waits of and 6
frequently were found in the streets.
Men and women walked so miles or
more into the countryside trying to
exchange personal belongings for
food.
One man said he had been caught
by patrol in a village and his
precious food was taken away, after
which he was beaten and warned
not again to try to circumvent regu-
lationS.
A professor of chemistry at Khar-
kov University told us that he had
earned a scanty living making
matches in his home laboratory
until he learned that he had been
denounced and was forced to 60
underground His mother, at g..
was the family salesman and his
half-Jewish wife and daughter fed
for doubtful safety to the country
10000 Died of Hunger.
The Soviet authorities estimate
that 10000 persons died of starva-
ton.
In mid-December of 194l Khar-
kov's Jews were rounded up and
taken away. Inhabitants tell ghast-
ly stories of the mass execution of
$4,000 and in world where fact
is often more horrible than inven-
ton, these cannot be lightly dis
missed. There do not seem to be
any survivors of this mid winter
trek to the suburban factory bar
racks which subsequently were
burned. Our waitress in the veteri-
narians' staff quarters, where we
were taken. said she saved her A.
year-old halfJewish boy by forging
his birth certif1cation The child's
father was shot.
Health conditions must have been
Incredible. The water system was
smashed before the Red Army left
and the Germans never succeeded
in restoring it. The water came from
two wells of rivers and with a sign
of summer came typhoid. The dry
sewers ceased operation completely.
There occurred, what one doctor
c9 He'd "Snoct ocular cl,,v,ps ;r fbo