MIGRATION OF DEATH
By GERALD GARDINER
In 0 talk casually of mass population-movements is easy ; to see
mass population-movements in operation (as I have done in the last seven months as an officer of the Friends' Ambulance Unit) is a different matter. The Polish expulsion of the German inhabi- tants of Poland began in June. In spite of an order, which was said to have been made at the end of July, to stop their coming into Berlin itself, they appeared to be still reaching the capital in August at the rate of 15,000 to 20,000 a day. The total involved has been variously estimated at between 1,500,00o and 8,000,000. It has recently been stated that the expulsion of a further 4,500,000 from Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia was to start at once.
I have seen some of these refugees coming through Berlin. In some cases their evacuation has been in some degree orderly and humane. In the majority of cases, however, they have been expelled from their homes at ten minutes' ot half an hour's notice with what food they had and could carry. On their way to the railhead, and throughout a journey to Berlin which takes from two to fourteen days, they must live on that food or on what they can find in a countryside already short of food ; a certain number are subject to looting and raping by Polish soldiers en route. These refugees are nearly all obviously poor people of the peasant type, and the large majority of them are old people and children. They crowd into trains for Berlin, partly because rail transport for Berlin is available, and partly because they hope to find there some organisation which will look after them. Some, either from starvation or infirmity of age (or youth), do not in fact survive the journey, and the removal of the dead in carts from the railway stations was a grim reminder of what I saw in early days in Belsen.
Berlin has the means neither to house nor to feed these people. They are only accepted in Berlin for twenty-four hours, after which they must leave. They receive accommodation in camps with wooden beds and few mattresses or even straw palliasses, and the available food-supply is not sufficient to provide them with more than two slices of dry bread and some potato soup. Their general condition is fairly illustrated by an account written by one of the members of our Berlin section at the time: "There was an old woman in tattered peasant dress with a red scarf on her head and pitifully worn boots on her feet. Her legs were swollen and she was quite exhausted. She had brought four grandchildren with her from East Prussia. Like her, they were all lying down during the day, too weak to move. The eldest child was suffering from an infection of the lungs ; the youngest, two years old, looked like a small baby, apart from the size of its head. Their mother had died on the road, their father was last heard of at Dunkirk. The old grandmother had come to Berlin because most people were going that way, but she had nowhere to go from there. Her family had always been peasants, and now they had lost their land. This complete absence of any future aim in life is often much worse for the refugee than his present privations. He carries on without hope. A young mother showed us her little girl aged five, and all the starvation pictures we have seen came to life. There were the spindly legs, the swollen abdomen and the drawn yellow face. She had had practically no food since the Russians reached Danzig four months ago. Her father was weg ; he might be alive, but, even if he were, how could they trace him?"
I have seen the conditions under which they leave Berlin, particularly from the Anhalter station in the American sector. Herded together in the open air without shelter, they await entry to the platforms for a period which sometimes" amounts to four or five days. No attempt is made to stop further looting of these unhappy people by Russian soldiers, and the crowd is so great that the American officer in charge himself told me that the bodies of those who die are sometimes not found in the crush for two or three days. Those who try to get on a train without taking their place in the queue (if queue such a conglomeration can be called) are, he told me, shot out of hand. From the reports of refugees who have gone west from Berlin and then returned,' there seems no reason to think that those who survive this ordeal and crowd into the cattle-trucks going west from Berlin fare any better at the towns on the extreme west of the Russian zone to which these trains go.
What is to be the fate of these hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of old peasants and young children expelled from their homes in the east and wandering round from place to place in the west of the Russian zone? Have they any real hope of surviving the winter, and, if not, what steps can be taken to prevent mass deaths on a scale compared with which those at Belsen may seem insignificant? The remedies seem obvious enough, namely, (I) to stop further expulsions, at least until the winter is over, and(z) to take a fair proportion of these refugees into the Western Allies' zones. The decision to give this large part of Germany to Poland was an Allied decision ; is it fair to the Russians to expect them to shoulder in their zone the burden of the whole of the consequent expulsions?
On the other hand, it may not unfairly be asked: "Can these other zones, and in particular the British zone, support any more?" Conditions in the bombed towns in the British zone, particularly in the Ruhr, are likely in any case to be bad enough. The German ration of rather less than half the British civilian ration is in some districts, as in Berlin, still a paper ration. The bread and potatoes may be obtainable, but not the full ration of fat and meat. In some Ruhr towns even the full potato ration is not obtainable. The fact that there is to be no German coal or coke ration this winter creates innumerable problems in these bombed areas. Many foods cannot be eaten unless they can be cooked. In one Ruhr town even the hospital can only serve cold meals, the wash-houses have had to be closed, and the little milk available cannot be pasteur:sed. Hospitals are in short supply for buildings, ambulances and drugs. With the existing overcrowding in cellars and air-raid shelters and a water supply which in some bombed towns is still piped along the streets in half-inch pipes which must freeze when winter comes, the possibility of epidemics is undeniable.
Nor are conditions made any easier by the division into zones. Gelsenkirchen, for example, may have wire and metal building accessories which it would like to exchange for dried milk, of which Munich is reported to have a surplus ; but Munich is in the American zone and the German authorities cannot, or do not know how to, effect the exchange. Existing conditions in the British zone, therefore, do not augur well for the winter which lies ahead. Never- theless, three factors have to be borne in mind. In the first place, the country districts, large parts of which have hardly been touched by the war, are in a very different position to the bombed towns. Secondly, removal of the outgoing Displaced Persons has freed a certain number of camps, and although some of the best of them have -since been taken over by British troops, some remain' available to. house refugees. In the third place, if experts
like Sir Arthur Salter are right, both the food and the transport are in existence to render the conditions remediable, if the Allies want to remedy them. If they are remedied there is little doubt that a substantial number of refugees could be both housed and fed in the British zone, particularly in the camps and country districts. But if any such step is to be taken, the decision must not only be taken now, but must be implemented forthwith. Any corps commander is naturally enough disinclined to add to the very real problems which already confront him in the housing and feed- ing this winter of persons already settled in the British zone, par- ticularly in the bombed towns and in the Ruhr. But conditions which are barely tolerable for old people and children in the summer and in a particularly mild autumn become intolerable in winter, and unless that decision is both made and implemented forthwith it will be too late.
Previous page
