VICKI BAUM

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXIII, 11 May 1939, Page 10

VICKI BAUM

WORK FOR LEPERS LIVED IN COLONY I b.v Air Mail—tiuecial Correepc udeutl LONDON, Ist April. In London this week, Vicki Baum, the Austrian-born author who wrote "Grand Hotel,” was persuaded to talk of her experiences at a leper colony in the South Sea island of Bali.

“Everyone warned me against going to the leper colony, but 1 simply had to obey my instincts and go,” she said, ‘and though I mixed with these lepers day in and day out J remained immune. The only thing I caught was malaria.”

Vicki Baum went to the island to get local colour for her novel. This is her usual custom, for before she wrote "Grand Hotel” she lived and worked as a chambermaid in an hotel.

“Like everyone else 1 had always thought of Bali as the most beautiful place on earth, but when I got there I was horrified to find, among all the beauty, this terrible blot —this community of men and women and children, cut off from all contact with the outside world.

“How could I, an outcast myself from my native Vienna, a woman whose friends are in concentration camps, who are living in exile abroad, or who have been driven to suicide, fail to be moved by the plight of these leper outcasts? “And so I went every day to the colony of lepers. It was pitiful to see them, pitiful to see their gratitude for medical help, pitiful to see the way they revered a white woman who would risk working among them.”