Post War‐Jewry

Extract

One thing is certain: the total population of the Jewish people has been considerably reduced. For the last twenty years it has been customary to reckon this roughly at sixteen millions, now the two or three millions ruthlessly and wantonly done to death by demoniacs, will have to be subtracted. This ghastly process cannot be regarded as a winnowing; as the avowed intention has not been to eliminate undesirable elements, but to exterminate all who could, in the widest stretch of the term, be designated Jews. Non licet esse vos has been the guiding principle. The arch-fiends who adopted this worse than barbaric policy have not been able to carry out their fell design to the full; but their failure is not due to any lack of malice: they have made a desperate attempt and seem to have been backed by diabolic assistance. The account of a Rabbi-survivor—one of a tiny remnant—rescued from the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp, published in The Times, of June 21st, 1945, is a lurid, but exact summary, of the nightmare horrors perpetrated there until the Nazis were forced to relinquish their grip on Bavaria. In this Ghetto, as he styles it—compared with which the worst mediaeval ghetto was an earthly paradise—it was normal that there should be at least a hundred burials, or burnings, a day, most of these the result of what was morally murder. During his three years as an inmate of this inferno, ‘ he estimates that fifty-five thousand perished. Such a violation of the primary instincts of human decency has already suffered a nemesis which, though severe, is mild compared with the crimes that provoked it. But the mills of God have only commenced their work of retribution.