It Might Have Happened to You: A Contemporary Portrait of Central and Eastern EuropeDawson, Coningsby
History
It Might Have Happened to You: A Contemporary Portrait of Central and Eastern Europe
Dawson, Coningsby
Children -- Europe; Europe -- Description and travel
All the American and British relief work done in Germany is being concentrated on the youth. For the American Relief the Society of Friends are the dispensers. The work starts constructively with the unborn. Feeding stations have been established at which under-nourished expectant mothers attend daily. The main reasons for their undernourishment are the scarcity of work and, before that, the blockade. One of them told me that her husband had had nothing to do for six months. How did they live? On their unemployment pay. But hadn't her husband been in the war and didn't he receive a pension? Yes. He had been in the war for four years. But he received no pension, for, alas, he had not been badly wounded.
At the present moment 600,000 children are being fed at American Relief Stations, which the Friends are operating; but there are at least 400,000 more who ought to be included. Whether they are included depends on what funds are forthcoming within the next few months.
The schemes for saving the youth of Germany are exceedingly thorough. Starting with the unborn child, they finish with the student at the University. By far the larger part of the funds for the student feeding are contributed by Great Britain. They are administered by a personnel made up of the British and American Society of Friends.
The thirst for learning since the close of the war has become abnormal. Students attending the universities are one-third in excess of the capacity. They are young men and women drawn from every class and welded together by an almost painful enthusiasm for democracy. The sacrifices which they make to gain an education sometimes reach the point of martyrdom. One girl, who is by no means exceptional, attends her lectures by day and scrubs floors as a charwoman by night. If it were not for the one substantial meal in the twenty-four hours which the Friends provide, she would collapse. It is to such people that the American and British Friends are ministering. They realise that, if there is ever to be peace between the sons and daughters of the nations who fought, the peace must commence in the heart.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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