The Waterbury Democrat., 1943-01-19
ONE OF vILEsT CHAPTERS IN NAZI HISTORY

ONE OF vILEsT CHAPTERS
 IN NAZI HISTORY
 The Nazis thus opened enc of the vilest little chapters in the Nazi decades record of unblemished vile- ness. Their case was so utterly transparent and guileless, that 1t stank even in the dulled nostrils of their own people. They bounced upon a handful of enervated, help less human beings and assigned them to death by slavery, while their press screamed that these hopeless wretches were involved in @ plot to destroy Germany, the most powerful military nation in history. These were old people. They were not 8 vigorous opposition; their fcndes; hope was to die quietly and from natural causes; not torture. To have executed them would have been almost humanitarian, too much so for Nazi taste.
 In the dead of night, when. the old people had either gone to bed or were undressing, the Gestapo fell upon them. Generally, there was no warning; just Q sudden pounding on the door. They were given from a quarter of an hour to an hour to pack, to settle the af- fairs of lifetime and leave homes they had lived in since childhood. The time was sufficient, though, for they could take only what they could pack and carry with then-a bag of shabby clothing. What they could not carry with them in their own hands and on their racks, que tomatically became the possession of the German state: their furni- ture, worn bits of linen, heirlooms, meager possessions, but all they had in the world. The 1941 haul was not very good; not nearly as good as in 1888, for Goering had left them little of any value.
 They were then led to depots by the Gestapo, places where they were sorted out and given tags on which they could read, for the first time, their various fates which town in Poland or Russia they were being transported to.
 MARCHED TO SUBURBS
 FOR THE EXODUS
 Then they were marched in the darkness to suburban railway sta- tions, for the exodus. Morning after morning at half-a-doZen sta- tions, long trains of dilapidated un- heated coaches waited for them. The Jews were packed inside to more than double the normal ca- pacity of a railway coach, and most of them had to stand in cramped corridors without sleep and without food for the long exodus to the East.
 Some were lucky, and were stuffed, after a trip of two days, in disease-ridden ghettos of Eastern Poland. Starvation was almost cer- tain for the weakest of them, but they had a fighting chance. The others were shipped into Russia to work themselves to death, more quickly and more painfully. They were settled in towns wrecked by war, where there was no plumbing, no heating, and houses were Skele- tons of wood left precariously standing by Blitzkrieg. Together with Soviet civilians they worked on roads twelve, fourteen, fifteen hours day. Their weak, thinning bodies were nourished on thin wa tery gruel, with no bread or any, thing solid, thrice a day. Many of them died soon; many more must have died in the bitter eastern win- ter that followed, which they suf- fered in their slkimpy clothing, made for the western cities they had lived in all their lives. If any old fool dreamed of escape, well. the yellow star was over his heart and easy to spot for a gunner. But es. cape was purpoEeless, anyhow, fol the land was bare of food. Many did try t., escape. just to invite merciful bullet. Others committed suicide on the way. The greates number of suicides, however, oc' cured among Jews still in BerliI when the transportation first began
 Copyright, 1S42, by Howard K.
 Smith. Distributed by United
 Feature Syndicate, Incl
 TOMORROW. Dr. GOebbels
 kills himself also; so Germany
 said when his anti-Semitic cam.
 paign flOpped.
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