Page:The Czechoslovak Review, vol3, 1919.djvu/155



People in America cannot possibly grasp in their imagination the awful depths of misery and destitution prevailing in the entire war area of Europe. A great deal has been told about conditions in Belgium, much also about the devastated regions of Poland and Serbia. And Armenia is in a class of its own. But there are other large sections of Europe of which no mention is ever seen in the American press, where famine stalks by day and night and old people and children are dying of exhaustion and hunger typhoid by the thousands. Only a few days ago official reports were received in this country of the activities of a Czechoslovak organization known as the “Czech Heart”, and these reports present a vivid picture of human misery and human charity in a country which has not so far made an appeal for help to America.

Czechoslovak lands are fertile and well cultivated and under normal conditions they produce more food stuffs than are needed for their dense population. But during the war the Austrian government requisitioned most of the crops for the use of the army and for feeding the barren lands of German Austria and the great capital city of Vienna. Czech cities, and especially Prague, were starved by the central authorities, because the Czechs were considered rebels and traitors to the emperor. Only the farmers managed to get enough to eat, for they early learned the trick of hiding some of the grain, butter and eggs raised by them.

During the fourth year of the war living conditions in Prague and many smaller industrial cities became truly terrible. Most of the men, fathers of families, had been dragged away as unwilling conscripts for the Austrian army ; tens of thousands were dead by this time and other tens of thousands were fighting in the recently created Czechoslovak armies in Russia, France and Italy. Their wives and children spent their days and sometimes their nights in trying to get enough food to keep body and soul together. Stores selling food were closed and padlocked, for they had nothing to sell; the death rate doubled and tripled, and grave diggers had to hire assistants. People were wearing out the last of the clothes which they possessed at the beginning of the war. Women stood in line all night long in the severest freezing weather in the hope that they would be in time to get something for their money and bread tickets, when stores opened in the morning. They shivered in their light, torn clothing, and little babies froze on their backs as they stood waiting all night. And if they were lucky enough, they got half of a small loaf of bread made of some sticky material looking and tasting like clay. There has been practically no milk in Prague since 1915. Imagine the fate of babies born during the war; their mortality has been terribly high and those that live are really slowing dying. Of course mothers protected their children as well as they could and gave them food which they drew for themselves. But under such circumstances they could not nurse their babies and there was no milk to be bought or other substitute to be given to the wailing little ones. Nor did drug stores have drugs for the sick and the few inadequate hospitals were always crowded. There are today hundreds of thousands of children in the Czechoslovak Republic who have not worn any shirt for several years. Their little bodies are wound in dirty rags and during the winter, as well as in summer, they walk barefooted. There is no underwear, there is no bed linen, neither in homes nor in hospitals and charitable institutions.

To cope with all this misery seemed a hopeless task. But the attempt was made. An organization that sprang out of charitable hearts, and called itself the “Czech Heart” proved that even in a general condition of hunger and privation self-sacrificing charity could do a great deal to alleviate human misery. On November 17, 1917, the organization of this society was undertaken mainly for the purpose of even ing up the varied levels of privation on which the different classes of the nation stood. The main task was to obtain some food from the country for the poor of Prague and other cities by an appeal both to human sympathy and to Czech patriotism. In a short while there were twenty-eight branches in Prague distributing food stuffs to the most needy and there were over one hundred district organizations in the country which were sending a little of the small stock of eatables saved from the Austrian requisitioning officers. Thus