Page:Alice Riggs Hunt - Facts About Communist Hungary (1919).djvu/31



"It is very difficult to believe that with these counter-challenges the embittered mass will behave pacifically. Besides, wherever the 'White Guards' put their feet, a terror never heard or dreamed of is beginning. They persecute and hang the communists, they even persecute the families of the communists. They begin it, and the proletarians answer. Men know no other way than to destroy each other when there is discord in their points of view. The task of women is to face fearlessly the situation and to try by education to reduce the resistance and collision to the smallest possible degree."

Yolan Fried, a young woman only twenty-seven years old, is at the head of the Child's Welfare Department of the Government's Social Welfare Department. Her duty is to look after and organize recreation, amusement, health, and home conditions of the children. She has been working for six weeks, and has already established! public baths in each district of Budapest where seventy thousand children take one compulsory bath each week. "At these baths they are thoroughly rubbed, examined by a physician, given a cold water massage and tea after the process is finished. Each public school has a certain day of the week for the bath in that district and every child, whether rich or poor, must take the bath," said Mrs. Fried "or else it would be exactly like the old system."

"The Commissariat also takes charge of the amusement of the children, and I am planning to have stories written, especially adapted for children from six to ten, ten to thirteen, and thirteen to nineteen years. Childrens' playthings will also be distributed so that each little girl owns at least one doll. I have changed the orphan asylums into houses for all kinds of children, so that the unfortunate orphans need not feel their isolation, and other children, not orphans, may mix with them.

"An integral part of my work is the establishment of an office for psychological investigation of each child, so that we can adapt children to the kind and amount of work for which they are fitted. I am also establishing a colony for children on Lake Balaton and have adapted many confiscated villas and