December 18, 1919 Post-WW1 Holocaust Precursor: "'Terrible news is reaching us from Poland,' the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann wrote to a friend on 29 November 1918.
December 18, 1919 Post-WW1 Holocaust Precursor: "'Terrible news is reaching us from Poland,' the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann wrote to a friend on 29 November 1918. 'The newly liberated Poles there are trying to get rid of the Jews by the old and familiar method which they learnt from the Russians. Heart-rending cries are reaching us. We are doing all we can, but we are so weak!' On 18 December 1919 a British diplomat wrote an account of one such episode, during which Poles had killed a number of Jews suspected of Communist sympathies, and arrested many others. The Jewish women who had been arrested, but who had been exempted from execution, he noted, 'were kept in prison without trial and enquiry. They were stripped naked and flogged. After the flogging they were made to pass naked down a passage full of Polish soldiers. Then, on the following day, they were led to the cemetery where those executed were buried, and made to dig their own graves, then, at t...