Stalins "gömda judar" från den påhittade tyska "förintelsen"?

The Soviet embassy in Washington is denying reports disseminated by the Palestinian press, according to which the Russian authorities have transferred part of the population of liberated Bessarabia, Bukovina and the eastern parts of Poland to Siberia and already brought hundreds of Jews from Czernowitz to the Ural region. According to the statement of denial ‘these claims are completely unfounded and have nothing to do with reality.’ This reply was directed at the Federation of Bessarabian Societies of America, which had contacted the embassy in order to verify the reports which had reached them by cable from Jerusalem.

[...] reports about the mass deportation of Jews from the Western border region of the Soviet Union, especially from White Russia, the Ukraine, Eastern Galicia, Bukovina, and Bessarabia. According to one report, the deportation affected mainly the Jewish citizens who had relatives in America or Western Europe; other sources maintain that the whole Jewish population of some territories was deported.

The American Jewish League against Communism sent a protest to the Secretary General of the U.N. in which it estimated the number of Jews affected by the deportations as 400,000.

The reports of deportations of Jews from some border territories of the Soviet Union were repeated during 1949-50. There was a report that the entire Jewish population of Lwow in Western Ukraine (formerly Eastern Poland) where 30,000 Soviet Jews had settled after World War II, had been completely evacuated. Similar reports came from Bessarabia and North Bukovina; in this case, they were denied and labelled as ‘fantastic’ by the Soviet Embassy in Washington on August 18, 1949. According to these accounts, the Soviet authorities in Kishinev and Czernowitz had announced on July 1, 1949, that Jews wishing to emigrate to Israel should register with the local authorities; the majority of the local Jewish population registered and was sent to concentration camps near Murmansk. According to another report all Jews with relatives in the United States or England had been deported. It remained impossible to confirm these accounts. The United States State Department received reports confirming simultaneous mass deportations of Greeks from the Black Sea area; but as to Ukrainian Jews, it could only say that reports of their deportation had reached the American Embassy in Moscow, but could not be verified, due to travel restrictions imposed on the Embassy personnel.

Reports that Jews in Bessarabia and Soviet Bukovina were deported on masse to Siberia last month after they registered for emigration to Israel were made known today on the basis of private letters reaching here. According to the letters, Soviet authorities in Kishinev and Czernowitz announced on July 1 that Jews wishing to emigrate to Israel could register with the local authorities. The majority of the Jewish population of the two cities, as well as Jews in all towns of Bessarabia and Soviet Bukovina, immediately registered for migration to the Jewish state. The letters report that between July 10-20, all Jews who had registered their desire to proceed to Israel were packed in specially-prepared railway coaches and dispatched to the Murmansk area, in the Arctic, which allegedly had been earmarked as a new concentration area for all Jews ejected from towns located on the Russian-Rumanian border. The letters add that panic is spreading in Bessarabia and in the Rumanian part of Bukovina among Jews who had been preparing to emigrate to Israel and who remained ‘paralyzed’ following the prohibition on emigration. Many months have elapsed since relatives in Israel of Jews in Bessarabia and Bukovina have received any mail from those areas, it was noted here.

Reports of deportations of Jews from Soviet border territories [...] were confirmed by new information printed in the Christian Science Monitor in March 1952. According to this and other reports, the transports of deportees from the Ukraine and White Russia were continuing, and all Jews had reportedly been removed from some districts, such as Rovno and Zdolbunov. At the beginning of the deportation, the Jews were assured by the police that this was not a penal action and that they were being removed ‘for their own security’ because the German occupation had left dangerous seeds of anti-Semitism; the deportees were given twenty-four to forty-eight hours’ notice of the transports. Later the tactics were changed, and the victims were rounded up in surprise midnight raids and removed at once. According to the Israelitisches Wochenblatt of Zurich, July 31-August 8, 1952, a similar evacuation was carried out in Kharkov, where 4,000 Jews were removed from the city [...].

Some of the deportees may have been sent to Birobidjan, where several districts were put under the administration of the secret police and transformed into slave labor regions. Some persons who passed through Birobidjan during and after World War II recalled having seen forced labor trains arriving there as early as 1944. The existence of such camps would explain the complete silence about Birobidjan for the past several years, and the complete severance of any contacts between its inhabitants and the other Jews in the Soviet Union.

In 1945, the three women were sent by the Soviets to a labor camp in Siberia; they were considered suspect because of their religion and their German provenance.

‘We couldn’t speak one word of Russian,’ Ruth Usherenko recalled. ‘They didn’t feed us. When people died, they didn’t bury them – they put them in the forest and the wolves were eating them.’

So complete was their isolation that they did not know when the war ended. ‘Stalin passed away in 1953, and they released us in 1955,’ Ruth Usherenko recalled. ‘A woman came to us and said, ‘The war is over.’

The three women settled in the Ukrainian town of Dnepropetrovsk, where they worked as milliners. The sisters married – Ruth to a shoemaker and Toni to an aviation engineer – and in 1981, after years of trying to leave the Soviet Union, the families were able to emigrate to Brooklyn.

The Russian newspapers have sharply denied the statements seen in Western press about a deportation of Jews from Ukraine to Siberia. What underlies these rumors, they say, is the fact that during the war a Jewish mass escape took place away from the Nazi armies. This mass escape led to 250,000 Jews ending up in Siberia. There they founded 57 collective farms.

Rumours grew that measures were being prepared to deport all Soviet Jews to the Jewish Autonomous Region set up in Birobidzhan in eastern Siberia in 1928 (when Stalin and the Politburo had at last come to the conclusion that those Jews of the USSR who wished to retain their ancestral culture should have a territory of their own).

Whether Stalin really intended the universal deportation of Jews in the early 1950's remains unknown, though this is widely treated as a fact; and no conclusive proof has come to light.

There were widespread rumors of possible pogroms and the internal resettlement of Soviet Jews.

Vid antikominternkonferensen nyligen i Berlin berördes självklart också politiken mot judarna. De 13 stater, som voro representerade på konferensen, skulle efter det tyska propagandaministeriets direktiv öka angreppen mot judarna. Pester Lloyd meddelar, att en europeisk konferens under Alfred Rosenbergs ledning längre fram kommer att sammankallas för att närmare behandla denna fråga. Närmast skulle områden i Galizien reserveras för judarna från Tjeckoslovakien, Ungern, Rumänien
och Jugoslavien, men efter krigets slut skulle de skickas till Madagaskar.

Judisk kolonisation i Sibirien

De ryska tidningarna har med skärpa dementerat de i västlig press synliga uppgifterna om deportation av judar från Ukraina till Sibirien. Vad som ligger under dessa rykten är, säger man, det faktum, att under kriget en judisk massflykt ägde rum undan nazistarméerna. Denna massflykt ledde till att 250.000 judar hamnade i Sibirien. De har där grundat 57 kollektivkolonier.

Hundreds of thousands of Jews concentrated in Eastern Galicia, between the cities of Rawa-Russka and Przemysl, are now being organized by the Nazis into groups which are to be deported to unknown destinations, it was reliably reported here today in a message from the underground movement in Poland.

I should say that our stay at the punishment camp, Rawa-Ruska, involved one thing more awful than anything else we prisoners saw ,and suffered. We were horrified by what we knew was taking place all about us. The Germans had transformed the area of Lvov-Rawa-Ruska into a kind of immense ghetto. Into that area, where the Jews were already quite numerous, had been brought the Jews from all the countries of Europe. Every day for 5 months, except for an interruption of about six weeks in August and September 1942, we saw passing about 150 meters from our camp, one, two, and sometimes three convoys, made up of freight cars in which there were crowded men, women and children. One day a voice coming from one of these cars shouted: "I am from Paris. We are on our way to the slaughter." Quite frequently, comrades who went outside the camp to go to work found corpses along the railway track. We knew in a vague sort of way at that time that these trains stopped at Belcec [sic!], which was located about 17 kilometers from our camp; and at that point they executed these wretched people, by what means I do not know.

Perdue aux fins fonds de la Galicie, aux limites de l’Ukraine, la province avait été transformée en un immense ghetto où confluaient les Juifs emportés de toute l’Europe occupée, gardés par des policiers ukrainiens brutaux, à la solde de l’Allemagne.

Försvunnen i Galiciens djup, vid Ukrainas gränser, hade provinsen förvandlats till ett enormt getto där judar samlades från hela det ockuperade Europa, bevakade av brutala ukrainska poliser, i Tysklands lön [automatisk översättning med Google Translate].

The Athens News Agency, quoting reports from 17,000 Greeks who had returned from the Caucasus, said that Jews in an unnamed large Ukrainian town who had relatives in Britain and United States had been deported to Siberia. It added that there had been recent large-scale deportations to Siberia of Armenians from the Ukraine.

Reports of deportations of Jews from border territories [...] were confirmed by new information printed in the Christian Science Monitor in March 1952. According to this and other reports, the transports of deportees from the Ukraine and White Russia were continuing, and all Jews had reportedly been removed from some districts, such as Rovno and Zdolbunov. At the beginning of the deportation, the Jews were assured by the police that this was not a penal action and that they were being removed ‘for their own security’ because the German occupation had left dangerous seeds of anti-Semitism; the deportees were given twenty-four to forty-eight hours’ notice of the transports. Later the tactics were changed, and the victims were rounded up in surprise midnight raids and removed at once. According to the Israelitisches Wochenblatt of Zurich, July 31-August 8, 1952, a similar evacuation was carried out in Kharkov, where 4,000 Jews were removed from the city. [...] Some of the deportees may have been sent to Birobidjan, where several districts were put under the administration of the secret police and transformed into slave labor regions. Some persons who passed through Birobidjan during and after World War II recalled having seen forced labor trains arriving there as early as 1944. The existence of such camps would explain the complete silence about Birobidjan for the past several years, and the complete severance of any contacts between its inhabitants and the other Jews in the Soviet Union.