Hunger

A month ago the storks passed south over Berlin. Last week the violet skies of Avignon were grey and winter rains shuddered over the cobblestones of Paris. Ice edged out from the banks of canals in Holland, and in the Dolomites snow crunched underfoot. Ukranian peasants used to say: "nash didus ide," meaning that winter, a bundled-up old grandfather, had come to visit. They did not say that this year. All Europe feared the fourth winter of World War II. It would be known as the year of organized hunger.

When the Germans first marched in, the soldiers had clicked their heels, given up their seats on trams to old ladies, tried to make friends. Theirs, they said, was a program for a salvation of Europe. There would be a New Order in which all men had work and all had bread.

Last week the Nazis were carving out their New Order with terrible fury. For millions in Europe the cost was, at the very least, hunger--the sustained hunger of malnutrition. Yet the hunger that diminished Europe's strength also increased Europe's hatred and rebellion.

Norwegian Gjestost. Before the Germans came to Norway there were big breakfasts of goat's-milk cheese (Gjestost), fish puddings of haddock, eggs and butter, fried cakes cooked with brandy. Last week 2,250,000 Norwegians (out of 3,000,000) suffered from malnutrition. Hitler's Gauleiter, Josef Terboven, had flatly announced that he did not care if thousands of Norwegians starved. The Germans confiscated cattle, whale meat, the herring catch, potatoes. Starvation, as tragic as that in Greece, confronted the descendants of Vikings.

An explosion wrecked the Goering-operated Fosdalen Iron Mines. A 400-mile strip of central Norway, including Trondheim and Skien, the home of Henrik Ibsen, was promptly placed under martial law. The Nazis rushed 25,000 troops to the coast and other danger points. In a floodlit courtyard in Trondheim, six blackshirted SS men shot 25 hostages picked haphazardly from civic leaders. North of Trondheim the Nazis also turned on their own troops, executed one in every seven of 1,000 men who had mutinied.

Swedish Snaps. The polar bears in Stockholm's Scansen have not had their full rations of raw meat for three years. Neither have the Swedes had their sill & snaps (herring & aquavit) as often as before. They have managed to maintain their national Thursday evening meal of pea soup and pancakes--and they have managed to stay out of war.

But the Norwegian flag, draped in black crape, was flown at half-staff last fortnight in some Swedish towns.

Finnish Kalevala. When tourists came to the land of 1,000 lakes, the co-op restaurants in Helsinki served stuffed cabbage, onions and great slices of roast beef. In the summer young people danced on the hilltops under the moon. In the winter they leaped from steam baths into snowbanks and shouted that life was good. They ate wild strawberries and boasted of their glass works, their great forests and their splendid modern buildings.

Last week the Finns dug their potatoes and prepared for the Northland's long and dreary evening. Germany sent occasional shipments of corn to the Finns. It scarcely compensated for the cripples haunting the street corners.

Danish Faarikall. The thatched and whitewashed Danish farms sent their bacon and butter to Germany. The folk schools brayed the teachings of Nietzsche. The quiet of Copenhagen's Wivex coffee house at the entrance to the Tivoli Gardens was broken by the shouts of Nazi officers. Danish chefs no longer cooked their Faarikall, of lamb, cabbage and sour cream.

Lacking food, the Danes still had a king. On his 72nd birthday, Sept. 26, Christian, the elder brother of Norway's Haakon, sent a curt answer to Hitler's flowery message of good will. The answer: "Thank you, Christian, Rex." This week Christian lay injured by a fall from his horse* and the Nazis had applied new pressures to make Denmark a "model province" of the Third Reich.

Hollandsche Biefstuk. The proprietor of the Restaurant Royal in The Hague, where Hollandsche Biefstuk was a specialty, used to say: "My patrons eat me poor and drink me rich." They drank him rich no more. Holland's food ration was cut as winter approached. The Nazis announced that all men capable of bearing arms would be conscripted for service in Germany ("Dutchmen must not only work with their hands, they must also use weapons to guard Europe"). To enforce their decree the Nazis said that Dutch parents "who do not collaborate in the new order will have their children taken away from them to be molded in the Nazi pattern." These were the children who, in 1940, when Nazi cars entering Holland drove off ferries, politely opened the doors and announced: "Gentlemen, welcome to England."

Belgian Rutabagas. Often has Belgium been in the path of conquest (Caesar, Wellington, Kaiser Wilhelm, Adolf Hitler). Last week the Belgians were starving again. Gaunt young mothers carried babies doomed to die. Where there was one pre-war tuberculous patient, there were now four. The wide-moated farms of the polders produced food for Germany. For the Belgians there were rutabagas. Said the Swedish Committee for Relief of Belgian Children: "The mortality among children in Belgium is now . . . as bad, if not worse, than in Greece." Yet . . .

A bomb exploded in a Brussels theater when the Germans showed a film of the Russian campaign to a picked audience of Rexists and Flemish nationalists. A warehouse filled with machines and cereals mysteriously burned. For acts of sabotage in Brussels, Liege and Mons 100 men were to be deported. "Do not forget," said a Belgian who escaped to London, "that people who are obsessed with the threat of famine and disease are scarcely in condition to fight against a perfectly organized army and police force."

Polish Miod. In front of the Castle of Kings in Cracow the Germans have demolished the statue of Tadeusz Kosciuszko, who fought beside George Washington. In Warsaw the ghetto boundaries are squeezed tighter each month as more dead are carried out. Food supplies are now one-quarter of what they were before 1939. The Fukier wine cellar no longer has its miod (old fermented honey). The Germans have left only black crusts of bread for Poles and there is no longer bigos, brewed of wild game and cabbage.

Hitler once said: "Five minutes before the end of the war, whichever side may win, all the Jews in Poland will have been wiped out." By last week more than 700,000 had been starved or shot.

Greek Tragedy. Nowhere in Naziland is there greater suffering than in the olive-green countryside of Greece. Shipments of Canadian wheat are only a temporary relief to a few thousands. There is no clothing for children, no fuel for winter. The death rate from starvation is at least 500 a day. But it took the Germans and Italians a full week to break a general strike in Athens. In the mountains the Cretans trapped a German punitive expedition and annihilated it.

French Omelette. After two years under German rule the French remembered Voltaire: "Ah, how wretched men have been, and how much to be pitied; and they were wretched only because they were cowards and fools."

There were no eggs for omelettes at La Mere Poulard's famous restaurant on Mont-Saint-Michel. Customers shivered in the cold behind the glass winter windows of the Cafe de la Paix, the Deux Magots, the Dome.

Pierre Laval and Marshal Petain tried to keep up the illusion that there was food in France. Frenchmen knew that French food, like French heavy industry and French labor, was being transferred to Germany. Hitler was following Machiavelli's preachment: "He who becomes master of a city accustomed to freedom and does not destroy it may expect to be destroyed by it, for in rebellion it has always the watchword of liberty. . . ." In France last week the sound of the watchword was growing louder.

* Reported the Berlin radio: The King's horse "shied for some unknown reason, then bolted. The King was thrown and his head hit a stone. He did not suffer brain concussion."

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