WHAT IT IS LIKE TO STARVE: APPALLING STATE OF AUSTRIA

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 48, 21 May 1948, Page 7

WHAT IT IS LIKE TO STARVE: APPALLING STATE OF AUSTRIA

Hunger is numbing. Worse than a cold, says a UNAC bulletin dealing with Austria. You can do something about cold. You can find something else to put over the shoulders or wrap around the feet. Or, you can go to bed and stay there. You can wait the cold out, for there is a beginning and an end to cold. But there is no end to hunger.

Being hungry you do things you thought you would never do. You send your children out to trade on the black market. It would go hard on you if you yourself got caught, but with the children, if they get “Picked up” the authorities will be more lenient. You learn, too, not to ask your children too many questions, when they bring food home. You eat it, and while you are doing so you hope no one will come in with whom it ought to be shared. You have not enough for your own. Adversity does not bring out the best in people, not when it is a question of who shall live and who shall starve. It is each for himself and his own.

You see the children grow, thinner, day by day. With the babies it is all right as long as they are nursing. They grow fat, as babies should, but their mothers become like wraiths. And—the baby lives and the mother may die. Of course, places are set up where nursing mothers can get supplementary feedings, but they hate the way it is done. The, rule is that they must eat the food at the centre. Otherwise they would, of course, take the food home for the children.

Those who can go to school have it a little better than their younger brothers and sisters, for there is a school feeding programme of sorts. But the children cannot always go to school. They must take turns wearing the shoes or the overcoat. They get sick and there is nothing to be done about it. The authorities in Vienna know as much as people anywhere in the world about how tuberculosis should be dealt with, but they do nothing because they are. helpless. In all Austria there are' only 1,600 beds for tubercular patients. So those who have tuberculosis live as the others do. The sick and the well live and sleep together and the well, of course, get sick. Many die. Starvation goes by still other names than tuberculosis. Sometimes on the death certificate it is listed as typhoid fever, or it is called diarrhea, or any of the diseases that come from an impure food. Death takes whole families —sometimes there is no one left to notify. Death also leaves many orphans. The younger ones are cared for in institutions. The older' ones look after themselves, and “juvenile delinquency,” in their case,- is a way of saying boys and girls are hungry. They take as they can; they oppose with violence the peasant or anyone else who tries to stop them. The girls have their own ways of getting along. Young as they are they come to terms early, as hungry people everywhere - come to terms. Even their own mothers must sometimes come to terms. Who is to say who is a good mother and who is not, in times like these?