LIVING IN TERRIBLE CONDITIONS

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 100, 22 January 1935, Page 9

LIVING IN TERRIBLE CONDITIONS

Manchukuo White Russians DAME RACHEL CROWDY’S ACCOUNT By Telegraph.—Press Assn.—Copyright. London, January 19. “The condition of 30,000 White Russians in Manchukuo is worse than anything I could have imagined. Twothirds are living on the verge of starvation,” so Dame Rachel Crowdy, who has returned from a two months’ tour, told the "News-Chronicle.” “Most of tlie officials and business men have sent away their wives after tlie murder of Mrs. Woodruff, and consequently the girls are unable to find, domestic positions. The younger ones, aged 11 and 12, haunt low dance halls; the elder ones become mistresses of Chinese farmers. Hundreds of Russians, many of noble birth, are living in huts and dug-outs built of mud and petrol tins. Some have been 16 or 17 years in such quarters.. People are committing suicide, and owing to their helplessness seven or eight are frozen to death nightly in the streets of Harbin. There are drug shops everywhere. Mobs of lads beg money to spend on dope. There is a, notorious shelter called the Small Boys’ Corner, where scores, doped with heroin in cigarettes, faces like death’s heads, lean against the wall in 50 to 60 degrees of frost.” Dame Crowdy is making an effort to raise funds,in America and elsewhere to succour sufferers. She says that the Japanese are tackling the problem, but outside help is essential.