OCR Text |
Show Hungry People Dot Reich Grain Fields 7 -., As FaVmcr'fir-isIios Harvest, 'Locus?:;' Take Over. , FRANKFURT. Grain fields in Germany arc covered by swarms of hungry people who scrouge for single sin-gle ears of grain in their search for enough to pad out their diet. In one field covering three acres on the outskirts of Frankfurt, 174 German men and women were counted on the afternoon the farm-or farm-or declared his crop was harvested. 1 As long as the grain is still in the shock, the population stays oft the land. But when the farmer has completed the harvest, the human locust brigade takes over. Men, women and children, from the ration-squeezed cities, walk or ride bicycles for miles in search of fields to conquer. A typical rye field is scattered with dozens of bicycles while Germans Ger-mans scramble about on their hands and knees within an hour after aft-er a farmer has finished his harvest. Some gleaners take only the ears. Others grab stalk and all to save time. After several hours of work like this, an ear of rye is as scarce as a ham sandwich in a Frankfurt restaurant. Willi Knotte, an interior decorator decora-tor living in a suburb north of Frankfurt, Frank-furt, showed 50 pounds of rye grain in his larder wages of days of work he and his wife put in at harvested fields. Willi said he took his ears home, beat them with a board and fanned the result in the wind to eliminate the chaff and husks. Then he ground the grain by hand in a little coffee grinder. His product prod-uct was a dark, coarse rye flour from which he can make black bread, soup or porridge. Germans .began this hunger-inspired hands-and-knees gleaning during the last war years. But it never became a mass movement until the war ended and real hunger hun-ger began! ' ' " ' L This year, with bread rationed to two pounds per person per week and with scanty other food supplies, Germans by the thousands are spending as much time as possible to "follow, the harvest" on the knees. After all, 50 pounds of rye flour is equal to six months of bread rations. |