EXILE HORRORS

Stratford Evening Post, Issue 8, 1 August 1930, Page 5

EXILE HORRORS

TALES FROM RUSSIA. CHILDREN FROZEN. Harrowing letters from the Russian peasants exiled (presumably as Koulaks) by the Bolsheviks are circulated by the news agency of the German Democratic Party as coming from “an absolutely trustworthy source,” says the Berlin correspondent of the Daily Telegraph. For obvious reasons, the names of persons and places are suppressed, but apparently the writers are Russian subjects of German race. “In the confinement of our place of exile,” writes one pleasant, “there are altogether 2000 of us. The misery is indescribable —hunger, filth, lice, and disease and the daily death-roll Is sometimes twenty. The stench in the yard is terrible. There were 97 in our room. We have no windows here, and you can imagine what the air Is like. Hundreds run away and are arrested. Women and children are not allowed out, but sit in the darkness and beg for a morsel of bread.” Another letter, which is undated, says; “Where we now are there are only sky and forest. There are no villages and no water. We must melt snow in order to drink and to cook. For a week our men folk have been busy building us huts. When the snow melts there will be nothing but morass. It will then be impossible to get things either in or out, and we shall be buried alive.” Children’s Death-roll. On May 18 one of the correspondents wrote: “Children die daily of undernourishment, measles, and scarlet fever. When a child dies it is carted to the town without a coffin. As many as ten children were put into a single grave without the presence of their relatives, who wrote about it but were ignored.” Another letter mentions that on a journey of twenty days “into the unknown—the Far North,” in a temperature of 30 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, several children were frozen to death. “Railway transport passed us,” continued the writer, “the doors were closed, but lamentations and groans could be heard from the cars. Through\the opening in the roof a man’s wailing voice begged for water and for the removal of the dead. To this an official replied, with derision, that he might as well keep quiet, as they were all to perish in that way.” Even women with child were sent. Some of them brought children into the world enroute. The babies were taken away, and the mothers sent on. In despair the mothers have even thrown their infants into a house on passing, with the words: “You must perish in any case—this way or that does not matter.”