Jews in France are continuing to make desperate efforts to escape.
Some of the wealthier refugees exhaust all their funds in trying to reach Casablanca, French Morocco, in smugglers’ boats. One such vessel, Greek-owned but flying the Panama flag, reached Lisbon yesterday from France carrying 60 Belgian Jewish refugees, who could not proceed further because they lacked the funds to pay the additional $500 daily demanded by the ship’s captain to take them to Casablanca.
Although refugees no longer reach Portugal en masse, another 700 Jews from France entered Portugal on Wednesday and were ordered to Figueira da Foz, where the Jewish community is caring for them.
It was reported today that more than 100 Austrian and German refugees in the French camp at Lisieux have fallen into the Germans’ hands, while another 50 succeeded in escaping to unoccupied France. The fate of the former is not known.
Urgent appeals for relief continue to reach the Joint Distribution Committee and HIAS-ICA Emigration Association in Lisbon by letter and telegram from Bordeaux and Toulouse, emphasizing growing starvation.
The American Consulate here opened a special visa office to deal with the flood of refugee applicants and to examine the possibility of transferring quota visas from American consulates at Paris, the Netherlands and Belgium to those who had applied for visas there prior to the German occupation, including refugees from the Reich coming under the German quota.
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