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Show STARVATION STALKS ALONGje BUG FIVE MILLION PEOPLE ARE AT POINT OF STARVATION IN EASTERN UROPE. Weak From Lack of Food and Terror Stricken From War, Living in Devastated Homes, People are Perishing. New York. The itiver Pug, which served until recently as a boundary of the liolsbevik fighting, is today a boundary boun-dary of anotbed kind. Its eastern shore bounds on one side the hungriest find the most diseased, und' Ihe most stricken territory in t lie world. Five million people are at the point of starvation east uf the river Hug, according to figures given out by the American Jewish Ilelicf committee, und compiled by the American Hed Cross, and American Jewish relief agents. A great number of them are Jews. The war has left 0,000,000 destitute desti-tute and stricken Jews in eastern Europe, Eu-rope, a number as great as the entire population of New York City, utterly helpless, in many cases sick, in every case hungry and dependent. Fast of the river Pug these people are living In devastated houses, in stalls of old stables, on roofless platforms plat-forms built for refugee families, one family to a platform, in old freight cars, in holes in the ground, or under the open sky. They are weak from many months of semi-starvation, for they have gone for five years without with-out one square meal. They are still terror-stricken from tiie war. Their number is being reduced every day by a series of the most terrible epidemics that ever swept any section of the world. - Typhus, cholera and smallpox are all raging in the territory east of the river Bug. No estimate of the actual number of those smitten with typhus in Poland has yet been compiled, but it probably is greater than in Siberia, where the American Bed Cross found 100,000 cases? Dirt and malnutrition are the two great causes of the epidemic of disease. dis-ease. All through Poland may be found children of eight or ten years old no larger than youngsters half their age ordinarily are. Two out of three infants do not survive their first year of life. The average child in the territory ter-ritory east of the Bug river has never tasted milk, even mother's milk. Americas Amer-icas Red Cross investigators say that an abnormal number of children are born blind, because of the malnutrition of their mothers. |