Palatka daily news. [volume] (Palatka, Fla.) 1919-1994, 1919-11-08
AMERICANS HELP
HUNGRY AND ILL
Unbelievable Conditions Found
in Territory East of
River Bug.
DISEASE AND HUNGER STAY
Red Cross and Jewish Relief Commit
tee Working Hand in Hand to
Help Sufferers-Fresh Cloth
ina Dire Need.

New York.-The River Bug, which
served until recently as boundary of
the bolshevik fighting, is today a
boundary of another kind.
Its eastern shore bounds on one side
the hungriest and most diseased and
the most stricken territory in the world
today. Five million people are at the
point of starvation east of the River
Bug, according to figures given out by
the American Jewish Relief commit
tee and compiled by the American Red
Cross and American Jewish Relief
agents. A great number of them are
Jews. The war has left 100000 des-
titute and stricken Jews in Eastern
Europe utterly helpless, in many cases
i'll. in every case hungry and de-
pendent
East of the River Bug these people
are living in devastated houses, in
stalls of old stables, on roOfless plat
forms built for refugee families, one
family to a platform, in old freight
cars in holes in the ground or under
the open sky. They are weak from
many months Of semi-starvation, for
they have gone for five years without
one square meal. They are still ter
ror-stricken from the war. Their num-
Der is being reduced every day by a
series of the most terrible epidemics
that ever swept any section of the
world.
Typhus, Cholera and Smallpox.
Typhus, cholera and smallpox are all
raging in the territory east of the
River Bug. The first and most gen.
eral of these epidenfics is carried sim
ply by body lice. At least one men,
Der out Of every fifth or sixth family
Is stricken with some form Of it, as Is
Inevitable among a people clad In five
year-old rags, people who have not had
a bath with soap or change of cloth
ing since the beginning of the war. No
estimate Of the actual number of those
smitten with typhus in Poland has yet
been compiled, but 1t probably is great
er than in Siberia, where the American
Red Cross found 100000 cases.
Dirt and maInutrftion are the two
great causes of the epidemic of dis
ease. All through Poland may be
found children eight or ten years old
no larger than youngsters half their
age ordinarily are. Two out of three
infants do not survive their first year
of life. The average child in the ter
ritory east of the Bug river has never
tasted milk, even mothers milk. Amer
lean Red Cross investigators say that
an abnormal number of children are
born blind because of the malnutrition
of their mothers. American Jewish
Relief investigators discovered new
eye disease that had attacked thou
sands of children, beginning with con-
slant blinking and ending in total
blindness, resulting when long con
tinued starvation had affected the
muscles of the eye.
So the great eXpanse of 1.-THE de-
partment of the East" which sounds
like any other part of the map to the
people of the United States, is will
derness of horror and desolatiOn to the
American workers in Poland who are
familiar with the unbelievable suffer
ing there. In the battle against dis
ease and starvation which is going on
In the territory east of the Bug river,
the American Red Cross is fighting
the former, with medicines and physh
clans and nurses, and attempts toward
cleanliness, while the American jew
ish relief workers have entered the
lists against hunger with soup kitchens
and milk stations, and Ohildren's Re
lief bureaus, established here and
there, all through the vast stretch of
territory
Fresh Clothing the Dire Need.
If all the people in the territory east
of the Bug river could be fed properly
at once, disease would soon disappear
physicians in the afflicted region say.
If they could replace the rags which
they have worn sincE the beginning of
the war with fresh clothing the cpl
denies would cease to spread. If their
living places could be made habitable
and clean, it would no longer be as III
lis today the most desolate expanse of
land in the world. 1t is toward this
end that the two great organizations,
one of Gentiles and the other of Jews,
are working hand in hand, difference
of creed forgotten, in the great practi-
cal need that they face.
The Red Cross personnel has been
trebled in the last few weeks in this
district. American Jewish Relief
agencies are feeding hundreds of chill