FILTH, HORROR, HUNGER.

Waikato Times, Volume 108, Issue 18140, 3 October 1930, Page 5

FILTH, HORROR, HUNGER.

THE TRUTH ABOUT RUSSIA. WHAT TWO GERMAN REDS SAW. , , BERLIN, August 17. Two German coal-miners, Herron Bruno V/robel and Gustav Rokitter, who accepted a Bolshevik agent’s offer of work in a mine at. Rutshenkpvo, in the Donetz district, have left the Soviet paradise in double quick time. They entered Russia on July 21, and were back in Germany again on August 17. “And thankful I am,” says Frau Rokitter, who accompanied her husband. Both men are earnest members of the German Communist Party, and unemployed. They were induced to go to Russia by the promise of what appeared to them enormous wages—l6o roubles o manth, which, on paper but not in purchasing power, is £16 —nice houses, and everything absurdly cheap. Herr Rokitter said to-day:— “They told us that a good dinner would cost ninepence, meat fourpence a pound, and butter ls.7d a pound. "When we got to our destination we were lodged in rooms full of vermin and swarming with flies. There was no place to wash and the water was undrinkable and the food uneatable. The rations were lib. of bread each for mvself and wife. Besides this we only got cucumbers, tomatoes, cabbages, herrings, onions, and sun-flower-seed oil. Hundreds of Beggars. “The wages were from £6 to £8 a month, with £lO for a member of the Communist Party, and £3 for a woman working In the mines.” “We were not going to put up with that.” said Herr Wrobei, “so we went to Kharkoff and got tickets from the German Consul to travel home to Germany.” The forlorn little party had to wait eight days at Kharkoff. Herr Rokitter continued: — The town is dirty. Orphan children dressed in nothing but bathingdrawers begged for bread in the streets and women in tattered clothes, without shoes, stockings or underlinen, wandered about. Hundreds of disabled men beg in the streets. There are food-cards, but one can hardly get food for them. People wait all night outside the .stores to get food. A pound of sugar per head is given monthly, together with a tiny packet of tea, and a quarter-litre of sunflower-seed oil. In the market, without food-cards, meat costs 9s a pound; bacon, which smells so bad that nobody in Germany would touch it, 10s to 12s, and butter, 14s to 16s. A salt herring costs Is 7d, and an egg, 6d. Mass Burials.

Frau Rokitter was taken ill and had to go to a hospital. She gives a nauseating account of it:— The doctor who treated me for five days had dirty clothes on and had to borrow a pencil and paper from me to write the prescription. !My husband had to procure a bottle to contain the medicine.. But the medicine was not to be had so, like most of the other patients, I had to be content with the prescription. She states that people with infectious diseases were in the same wards with expectant mothers. Patients who died were put, five together, in a chest from which, she was told, they were tumbled into a common grave. The chest was then brought back to the hospital to be used for other corpses. The two miners now say that they will have nothing more to do with the Communist Party.