The Seattle star. [volume] (Seattle, Wash.) 1899-1947, 1920-02-05
FOOD? IS
FAINT CRY FROM
Gates OF Death
4
Only Immediate Food Can Prevent
Virtual Extinction of Child-Life
in Central European Cities

bI HANK I d. E1OINl
WASHINGTON, Feb. 5.-Five million chill
dren under Is years of age are face to face
with starvation in Central Europe. Three
millions of these are not merely within the
starvation line but are right down at the gates
of death
Only food, food Immediately, can prevent
virtually the total extinction of child-life in
the larger cities of the hunger swept districts
This is the startling situation presented in
cabled reports received here by the Red Gross
and the American Relief administration from
their representatives abroad.
Conditions which have been terrible thruout the
whole of the past year, and which grew rapidly worse
with the coming of winter, have reached climax in
horror and suffering wholly beyond the power of de-
horror and suffering wholly beyond the power of de-
lScrlptOn.
90 PER CENT OF CHILDREN OF VIENNA
DEPENDENT UPON CHARITY
In Vienna, which today shelters probably more
concentrated misery than seen before in any
one city, 80 per cent of the $4,000 children under
Ia years of age are virtually without food except
such inadequate ratons can be supplied thru OPP
Grating charities, according to Albert Halstead Of
the American mission.
In Budapest, cablegram from the Hungarian
Red Cross states underfed mothers and children are
dying by the thousands. In one month the death
rate at the states babies dspensary, which has
capacity of $4,000 babies, WAS 966 PER 1000!
numbered in thousands but hundreds of thousands.
Estimates made by Captain c. T. Ekelund of st.
Paul, Minn., Red Cross representative in Poland,
and Palmer Fuller of the American Relief admins
tration, agree that not less than 100000 Polish
children will die during the next three months unless
they are kept alive by food from outside sources
In Poland hunger not confined principally to the cities
the in Austria and Hungary but extends into the
towns and villages and the country districts where the
ebb and flow of war prevented all production for the
past five years. Thousands of children trying to exist
mad Of
on grass soup and on wild roots and weed seed
CHILDREN OF POLAND
"PALLID OF FACE AND LISTLESS"
These children says Ekelund in dispatch to the Red
Cross pad of face and stess Many of them have the
false pasy pmpness of famine edema others the wrinled
old faces and bowed legs of nanton and ricketts, With
many of them physiology has been tampered with for
long that it is impossible to reesabish normal food bal
and they die in spite of all efforts to Them
Under-nourished, hungry children in Czecho-Sovakia
approach in numbers those of Poland Estimates by officials
mediate need of relief place the figure 100000 This is
about 40 per cent of the child population.
Two out of three babies born in Czecho-ovaka
months have died the direct result of UNDER
feeding. Milk cannot be obtained anywhere Men and
women alike barely existed on starvation diet Few
their babies and in hundreds and hundreds
the babies die in their mothers arms
On the basis of food taken by Red Cross work.
in JugoSlavia the seriously underfed children that
new nation number about quarter of million In the
schools Saraevo it established that children
to school without breakfast whatever that
than onethrd 36 per cent to be exact had only small
quantity of Bread that 80 per cent had bread and black
imitation coffee 36 cent had bread and coffee with milk
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