A Race With Winter

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 318, 27 July 1945, Page 5

A Race With Winter

F men never bit dogs it would be a hard world for journalists. And if conquerors did nothing but conquer it would be a horrible business writing history. But men at intervals do behave in such an extraordinary way that their aberrations make news, and that is why UNRRA is news. UNRRA is the human race behaving as it has never behaved before. Nations have often enough blotted one another out. They have occasionally ‘pitied their victims, and very occasionally forgiven them. But UNRRA is a rescue race on a world scale. Although Germany is at present outside its operations, a no-man’s-land charitably as well as’ politically, 44 nations are rushing to the relief of the rest of Europe with much of the speed and urgency and _fore-planned thoroughness of a military assault. It is an altogether unprecedented situation in world affairs; not merely novel but sensational; and it will be months yet before we see clearly what is happening. But in four months, or five in the most favoured countries, the European winter will have arrived, and the immediate anxiety of UNRRA is to get enough serviceable clothing into Europe to give its millions of "statistically naked" people a chance to survive the cold. That is why UNRRA appeals are going so continuously over the air. That is why CORSO, its New Zealand auxiliary, is asking and going on asking from people who have already given generously. It is why all the military and political friction stories still filling space in the newspapers are of no significance at all in the presence of this grim shadow of hunger and cold. And it is why everybody, no matter how bare he may think his wardrobe already is, should look at it again next week to see whether there is not something else to which some unfortunate man, woman or child somewhere has not a better claim. It has never been more true that giving promptly is giving twice.