GREEKS PERISHING

Wairarapa Times-Age, 16 March 1942, Page 4

GREEKS PERISHING

HORRORS OF THE AXIS OCCUPATION MURDER AND STARVATION. HALF OF POPULATIQN LIKELY TO DIE. (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) (Received This Day, 11.25 a.m.) LONDON, March 15. Between 150,000 and 200,000 Greeks have perished as a result of the Axis occupation of Greece —massacred, executed or died ot starvation and disease due to malnutrition. An Associated Press of Great Britain Cairo correspondent says this figure was given him by loca! Greek officials on the basis of accounts by escapees. The officials fear that unless some effective way is found to get more adequate relief to Greece, half the population of seven million may be dead before the war has ended. The peak figure of deaths from starvation and malnutrition in Athens was reached in February, when an intense cold wave augmented suffering from lack of food and fuel. Fifteen hundred persons died daily in the Athens-Piraeus area. Many people stand in line all day to get a ration of four ounces ’of hard, black bread, in which maize, rice and chestnut flour are mixed. An escapee said that infant mortality in Athens was appalling. A park in the centre of the city had been converted into a cemetery because so many people die in the centre of the city and there is no transport to take them to suburban cemeteries.