40,000 Living in Goods Wagons:
"Left to Die"
The need of Hungary is as pressing to-day as that of any Central Eurogean country, but a quite disproportionate amount of relief work is being done, says a Daily News" correspondent.
Hungary has suffered from war, from peace, from Bela Kun, and from the Rumaman invasion, which Jast resulted not only in theft wholesale scale, but also the most senseless destruction. From all these causes the country is filled with refugees, and naturally children are the chief sufferers.
Over 40,000 people are living in freight cars in railroad yards in and around Budapest. They lack every means of sanitation; epidemics are continually springing up among them, and threaten to spread throughout the country. At the present moment measles and scarlet fever are there.
I visited the freight car dwellers recently and was notified of their presence by a small not unlike an open sewer. Men, women, and children lay dying in these boxes, while the living slept beside them. There was no attempt at decency.
The freight cars of Budapest are; not a series of i homes, but an itinerant jungle. When they become too obnoxious in one spot they are hauled to another. The fate of their occupants is nobody's business; they are left to die.
But these people form only a minute fraction of the sum total of misery. Queues form early in the morning, but at the end ofa lon day of waiting supplies are exhausted. One queue is waiting for fuel, another for milk, another for potatoes.
The people who compose them are half naked; their feet are unshed; the snow is melting; the women carry babies. Can you realize the tragedy at the end of the day, when these people return to their families empty-handed?
I went to a maternity hospital, where devoted Hungarian women are working without thought of reward to save the lives of the unborn. They have no bed linen, no medicine, few instruments.
The establishment could be ran at a cost of 200 dollars a month—~ Jess than the cost of a woman's dress on Fifth Avenue. That 200 dollars is not forthcoming. In the near future the wards will be closed. some persons who desire to see omitted facts which are already recorded and are, perhaps, something of a skeleton in the family cupboard. Here, again, 'Burke' 18 adamant, and will not consent to the elimination of anything which is known to be historically accurate, provided it has a bearing on the family records'?
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.