Suffering Children

The creator of the war's most shocking book published it herself. A collection of 62 8 1/2 by 1 1 1/4 photographs, Europe's Children was rejected by ten U.S. publishers before Photographer Therese Bonney brought it out herself, with no imprint beyond the cryptic message : Limited autographed edition $3. Send your check to National City Bank, 32nd Street Branch, 1 Park Avenue, New York, N.Y. account No. 123. By word of mouth and an occasional unillustrated review, the fame of Europe's Children spread so fast that its edition of 2,000 was quickly exhausted.

Last week orders were pouring into Account No. 123 at the rate of 50 a day, with no books available. Duell, Sloane & Pearce was preparing to publish a commercial edition this month.

What makes Europe's Children a moving study is that its unposed photographs of children among the ruins are not primarily atrocity pictures, although there are a few ghastly studies of starvation.

These superb photographs of children are different from others only in their back ground: behind them the world is in ruins and over them the stricken faces of their parents leave their imperishable imprints on child minds. Some of the childish faces are drowsy, dying of fatigue. Some of them are incredibly beautiful, the maturity and purpose on their pondering faces giving to the photographs the wild quality of early Christian art.

Also devoted to the plight of Europe's children is They Shall Inherit the Earth, by Czech Novelist and Playwright Otto Zoff (John Day; $3). It is written from the relief workers' point of view, with an enthusiastic foreword by Dorothy Canfield Fisher; its greatest lack is the statistics that would give substance to its disconnected case histories and its well-intentioned but sketchy stories of distress among the 100,000,000 children of the Axis-occupied countries. Most shocking question it raises: When Europe's uprooted children grow up, what will they do to a world which has done such things to them?

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