HORRORS OF RUSSIA.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LIX, Issue 18174, 21 August 1922, Page 5

HORRORS OF RUSSIA.

CANNIBALISM FREQUENT. Mme. Elsie Dalo-RatchkofF, formerly Miss Elsie Conneeley, and an old Sydney High School girl, now associated with the American Food Administration in Samara, in the Volga district of Russia, telle a pSignant story of Russia as she sees it to-day, in an appeal to the girls of her old school. " Daily," ehe writes, " there come to my door pitiful wrecks of humanity—once fine, hard-working peasants, now hardly able to crawl along; women with skeletons of babies in their arms; old grandmothers, tottering and falling; tender women and women who relate how they have left only one hope of life, the food relief. "Here tho inhabitants (hot Bolsheviks) are only too glad to eat dogs, cats, vermin of any kind, leather, skin coats, leaves and grasis. lam sure you girls from the country can realise it a little. You havo seen the starving stock in drought-time. Just imagine they are human beings, and you get some little idea of the sufferers here. Bandits roam the countryside, killing and eating all human beings ttooy can find. Children's flesh ia preferred. Deing bO tender. " This is not what I have read, but what I see going on around me. I navo come up from Moscow to work hew till the end. Fancy mothers eagerly watching for their children to die in order to get to work instantly to devour their bodies. These wero loving,' tender mothers last summer, but the long, cruelly cojd winter has unbalanced their brains. Mme. Dale-Rattfhkoff, in a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald states that children's flesh may be seen on tho market. ,