LIFE OF HORROR

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25660, 7 October 1944, Page 8

LIFE OF HORROR

PEOPLE IN THE BALKANS SHOCKING PRIVATIONS (Rec. 11.30 p.m.) LONDON, Oct. 6. " The people in the southern Balkans lead a life of horror,” says the Daily Herald correspondent, who' has just returned from a visit to the southern Balkans. “I could have wept when I saw little boys and girls emaciated, filthy, and lousy. An old partisan farmer told me that every other child had tuberculosis or was suspected of having it. The children have no chests, and their arms and legs are like pipestems, with ugly, malformed elbows, wrists, and knees. Many are blotched with sores. They have no shoes and their feet are terrible ■to see. They are dressed in a few patched-up fags, their eyes are big and bewildered, their hair is long and matted, and their faces hard, old, and thin. • “All the men who could get away, from the cities are partisans. They are fairly well armed with weapons stolen from the Germans, but they are the most ragged army the world has ever known. Nights are cold, but ragged trousers and Joseph’s coats of threadbare patches are all they wear. They eat grapes and roots sandwiched between green, leaves. They are unshaven and/filthy, but their eyes are burning with the fire of a man who fights to kill. ■ “ The real unsung heroes are the women, who live with the partisans and share their dangers and sorrows. They - don’t look much like women. They are thin and have no figures. They are dirty and dressed like Cinderellas. I have heard endless stories of villages being burned _ and the inhabitants massacred —stories of . torture I would not care to write. Many of the children are dying and many will die in the years after the war “ The next generation is doomed,, but the country itself will never die with women like that. Now they are looking forward with pathetic eagerness to the day when liberation will come from across the sea.” /