INCREDIBLE CRIMINAL TALK OF NEW WARS: MESSAGE TO CHILDREN

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 33, 31 March 1948, Page 3

INCREDIBLE CRIMINAL TALK OF NEW WARS: MESSAGE TO CHILDREN

The "Report to the Children" meeting, held at Lake Success on February 28 by the United Nations Appeal for Children, was well under way. Children of 26 countries, ranging in age from 10 to 18, had taken their places at the conference table and been welcomed by Sec-retary-General Trygve Lie. The conference was formally opened at 10.30 a.m. by Ambassador Santa Cruz Hernan of Chile, first VicePresident of the Economic and Social Council.

Messages were read to the young members of the meeting; messages of encouragement signed by men and women whose names have international significance; Jan Sibelius, Aldous Huxley, Gilbert Murray, Aurora Quezon, Dr. W. W. Yen and Herbert Evatt were some of them. The children at the conference table, and more than 400 children who jammed the audience, listened intently while Chester Bowles, Chairman of the International Advisory Committee for UNAC gave a report on the conditions of children the world over and the progress of the Appeal. They heard Mr Bowles condemn his own generation with words such as. "You didn't make the war. We made the war. Your fathers were taken from your homes. You didn't send them. We sent them."

The teen-age audience, which normally would have spent Saturday at a ball park or in a movie house, remained silent, their attention fixed on the angular, soft-spoken man who continued, "Now—incredibly, criminally—there is talk of new

wars! We grownups, we who are supposed to teach and guide, you young people, - are spending today on a few destroyers, more than it would cost to inoculate every infant in the world against tuberculosis. We have given years of our lives—and years of your young lives—to these pursuits. Now it is up to us to give one day for the children." When Mr Bowles had finished speaking he signalled to an engineer in a radio booth above the audience. In a moment the recorded voices of children filled the chamber. A nine-year-old boy from the Phillipines told of the war as he had known it. Although he was only three when the war began, he said he could remember that he was always hungry. He told his story with quiet dignity, then suddenly he sobbed, "I hate war."

"Where one child suffers, there is a duty to he done," said the recorded voice of a 15-year-old Belgian girl. From New Zealand, Canada, Urugary, from Turkey, Hungary, South Africa and Sweden, the children of the world spoke to the children assembled at Lake Success. A nine-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy spoke from Prague. In answer to a question of what they would do if children from other countries came to see them, they said they would share all they had with them, and would ask them not to believe any ill that was said about them by anybody else. They, for their part, would believe in the goodness of children from other countries, and would try never to accept any ill which was said about children of other nations. To the children at Lake Success, the children in Czechoslovakia said simply, "We shall never fight each other."