TERRIBLE FAMINE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 23 October 1942, Page 4

TERRIBLE FAMINE

IN PROSPECT IN FRANCE COUNTRY STRIPPED BARE BY NAZIS. ONLY FEW TRAITORS WISHING FOR GERMAN VICTORY. “I am certain that no one in France —apart from a few sold to the enemy — believes in or wishes for a German victory.” —Such is the opinion of a Czech just out of France, where he had lived in important towns and been among the country people in both occupied and unoccupied zones. He met “all sorts of people, students, workers, office employees, lawyers, doctors, officers and soldiers.” Opinion, he told a reporter of “France” (the French daily published in London) was divided as to the manner in which Allied victory will come and when it will come, and as to the situation France will be called upon to occupy after victory. But on one point all the French were in agreement, lie said: the. present situation, in both occupied and unoccupied zones, is growing more and more intolerable, not only because of political repression, but because of the material situation of the lower classes. It does not suffice in this connection, he continued, to speak of restrictions, privations, hunger; it must' be said quite frankly that France is the country which, after Greece, has been the most completely devastated and the most pillaged by the Germans, much more even than Poland or Yugoslavia, and emptied in such a manner of its resources that one must be prepared to witness in France, within a few months, a famine as disastrous as that in Greece.

People with money, he reported, have up to the present been able to pull through. But how the worker and the small employee have succeeded in keeping alive I do not pretend to be able to explain.

This Czech observer enumerated the high cost of living, the extreme poverty, the long waits before food shops —“I have seen two old ladies wait six hours in a queue”—the increased mortality among old people and children through lack of nourishment, and the absolute lack of any real government, and in general painted a picture of the most complete disaster that can befall a nation.