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FRIDAY, DECEMBER 10, 1943 THE NEWBERRY SUN “MAKE IT DO” SAYS BRITISH BLOCK FOOD TO STARVING Washing-ton, Nov. 11—Charging that the British Government blocked shipment of food to starving Euro pean children, although American of ficials and public opinion were n fav or of resoung the Nazi victims, Dr. Howard E. Kershner told a Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee that the policy might leave only Germany healthy enough to reconstruct the continent in the (post-war period. Dr. Kershner, who directed relief for the American Society of Friends in Europe from 1989 to 1942, related instances in which, he said, the ob jection of the British Government alone prevented! the -shipment of food to children in occupied countries, al though the plan involved no move ment of food through the blockade. “If the democratic people of Eo- rope perish and the Germans alone have the health to reconstruct Eorope after the war, the British Govern ment will bear the responsibility,’/ Dr. Kershner asserted. “Its unyield ing policy of preventing the saving of the children of our friends and allies will be the cause.” Summing up the physical condition of children in the Nazi-domnated countries, Dr. Kershner said: “I have seen the starved wrecks that women become by the time they give birth to babies of half-normal weight. The children of the occu pied countries -are coming to school in the morning with little or no breakfast. They .sit with practically bare feet on stone floors in unheat ed schoolrooms. “Examining their lunch baskets, we found a small piece of bread and perhaps a few radishes of a boiled turnip. For dinner, vegetable soup, with occasionally a scrap of meat of cheese. Large categories got no more than seven to nine hundred calories iper day. This is about one- third of what we give our children and not enough to sustain life over a long period of time. “The children of Europe are dy ing.” Dr. Kershner, who appeared on be half of the National Committee on Food for the Small Democracies, New York, said that in November 1941, he bought 360 fons of powder ed milk in Switzerland and got per mission to take it to France, but that the Treasury Department, on the objection of the British Embassy refused permission to pay for the fund out of blocked dollars in New York. , As a result the milk went to Germany, instead of giving a new lease on life “to the starving babies of France,” he declared. Afterward he said that he found 10 tons of beans in storage in Mar seilles since before the war, but that again the Treasury, “because of opposition stemming apparently from the British Embassy,” refused a lic ense to pay dollars to the New York owner, and “not one of these beans was eaten by our hungry little wards in Southern France.” He told of instituting a vitamin distribution to 250,000 of the most needy Children in southern France in the fall of 1940. Each chocolate square was wrapped, in a piece of tin foil carrying a message of friend ship from the people of America to the children of France. “To sihow their appreciation, the girls made bows of these wrappers and wore them for hair ribbons for days,” he said. “Everyone knew of this feature of friendship, a nd every body was talking.” The papers were filled with col umns of publicity on the action and the whole nation was grateful, but the following winter permission was refused for bringing the vitamin concentrate from America he said. Quoting from President Roose velt’s radio appeal for contriutions to the National War Fund and from th e literature of the fund’s cam paign to show that the money was solicited for feeding the hungry in the occupied' countries, he declared': “If we do not send food to the children of the German-occupied countries, we will have obtained $125,000,000 from the American people in part under false pretenses. The people have been promised that some of their money would be used for this purpose and' they expect that promise to be kept.” x < M * * X 1 6 6 CONGRATULATIONS To t V V I ! V £ x 1 A | A Upon Resumption of Publication and a MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL A % Johnson-McCrackin Co. X