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Warsaw Ghetto Fighters Warned Western European Jews to Flee Deportation Trains
(Times of Israel) The Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto broadcast a warning in 1943 urging Jews in Western Europe to flee Nazi trains taking them to death camps, the Ghetto Fighters' Museum revealed on Thursday. Adolf Avraham Berman, who headed Zegota, the Polish underground movement which worked to save Jews from the Holocaust, wrote, "The extermination sites in Treblinka, Auschwitz, Belzec and Sobibor have recently received, constantly, deportations of Jews from Western Europe, especially from France, the Netherlands and Belgium. Within 24 hours of arrival, they are destroyed in the steam and gas chambers." "The populations of...all the countries of Western Europe must be called upon to...warn the Jews living there about the danger of death that threatens them - so that they hide before traveling east, flee en masse from the trains, save themselves from certain destruction." Berman smuggled the letter out of the ghetto to the Polish resistance, which brought it to London where it was broadcast on April 16, 1943, three days before the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Berman survived the war and became a member of the Polish parliament. In 1950, he immigrated to Israel and was elected to the Knesset in 1951.