Atlanta tri-weekly journal. [volume] (Atlanta, Ga.) 1920-19??, 1921-08-20

VIZ ASHINGTON, D. c., Aug. 15.-The
w postoffice department has been the
recipient of hundreds of letters
from postal employees in Austria and Hun
gary ever since the armistice signed,
and even before that, begging assistance
that they might not starve. Realizing the
futility of appealing to their own city or
national governments for assistance, these
people have turned in despair to others in
the same business, even though they had
been engaged on opposing sides in the
greatest clash of arms the world has ever
known.
One of these letters, addressed main
Post Officer written in laborious Eng
lish by an orphan girl employed in a
Hungarian postoffice, enclosed several
stamps Of her own country, and asked
the postmaster general to buy them and
send her the few dollars the stamps rep
resented. Another, addressed \ to the
principal of the Post and Telegraph Of
fice," at Washington, set forth first that
only want and despair" drove him to writ
ing the appeal for aid. This man said
he had been stationed at a point in what
is not Jugo-Slavia, and that the Serbs
exiled him. He secured position in the
small salary scarcely sufficied for medi-
cines for his aged and sick mother, this
man wrote:
elm my great need his letter said, IT
know of no other way out except Amer
ica.'
From German-Austria a letter came to
tie postmaster general which, after ex
tolling the 'dear fatherland' at some
length, said his government was not able
} help him or his wife and baby, there
fore he was turning to his colleagues in
the postal service of the United States.
''My wife and my child are ill., he said
"we have little and bad to eat, it is
wanting us on the clothings, foods, and on
the ready money to buy those things" At
the end of the letter this young man
asked that he might be recommended for
any kind of a job anywhere else, just so
there was food obtainable foe his ailing
baby and his wife.
Another cry of distress came to Wash
ington, addressed to the Union of Postal
Employees, from the widow of a former
Austrian postal employe. Exiled from
Marburg when it incorporated into the
new nation of Jugo-Slavia, this woman and
her three children fled to Graz, in Ger
man-Austria.
Beggars Among Beggars
with no pension, destitute of all means
having sold all my furniture and articles
of value to buy food, completely exhausted
by trouble, sorrow and want, l am plunged
into the deepest despair she wrote. "Al
pensioners get assistance, but we get moth
ing. We are beggarS among DeggarS.
Another appeal, from a man too proud
to ask for outright aims, came in letter
which got into the hands of the post
master general. This man, though for
twenty-five years employe in an iron
works, had been struggling all of his life
to get a start as musician. The letter
had an enclosure asking that it be for
warded to some orchestra in washington,
and asked for work in transcribing Aus
trian music The man said that in his
twenty-five years of work he had managed
to save up little money, but that the
whole little saving had been swept away
by the His children had been with
out proper clothing for months.
Necessity is already claiming my musical
Instruments his letter said, my sacred
possessions from which only the grave
should separate me, so l come as last
resort to strangers in a strange part of the
world. Here in this country people are
unable to help one another"
These are all fair samples of the begging
mail coming from the postal employees alone
of the late enemy territory. Another let
ter, this one from a postal emp1oye in
Vienna, gives figures which show with
what the poor people of the old empire S
capital have to contend. This man, mere
| ly clerk in the Vienna office, with a sick
mother and an aged father dependent upon
| his meager salary, said it was hardly pos