There are over 40,000 people living in freight-cars in the railroad yards in and around the city. They lack every means of sanitation. Epidemics are continually springing up among them which threaten to spread throughout the country. At the present moment measles and scarlet fever are rife. There is no means of ventilating a freight-car, except by letting in the cold, and no means of heating it, except by keeping the doors shut and stifling. I visited the freight-car dwellers today and was notified of their presence by a smell not unlike an open sewer. Men, women, and children lay dying in those boxes, while the living slept beside them. There was no attempt at decency. Decency is a weak word. All sense of elementary cleanliness was forgotten. Here women bore children in the publicity of their families and all the intimate details of married life were witnessed by the most innocent and the youngest. The freight-cars of Budapest are not a series of homes, but an itinerant jungle. When the smell becomes too obnoxious in one spot, they are hauled to another. The fate of their occupants is nobody's business; they are left to die.
But these people form only a minute fraction of the sum total of misery. There are upwards of a thousand factories in Budapest and only a hundred of them are in partial operation. Why? The lack of coal. There are no woods in Hungary; it is a land of tillage. Most of the mines were apportioned among other nations. The fields are of little service for food; the Roumanians carried off the seed which was being hoarded for the sowing of the next harvest. The Government hands out ration-cards, designating shops at which the recipients may apply. Queues form early in the morning, but at the end of a long day's waiting the supplies are exhausted. One queue is waiting for fuel, another for milk, another for potatoes. The people who compose them are half-naked; their feet are unshod; the snow is melting; the women carry babies. Can you realize the tragedy at the mid of the day when these people return to their families empty-handed?
Misery is best depicted in individual cases. I went to a maternity hospital, where devoted Hungarian women are working without thought of reward to save the lives of the unborn. They have no bed-linen, no medicines, few instruments. The establishment could be run at a cost of two hundred dollars a month—less than the cost of a woman's dress on Fifth Avenue. If the next two hundred dollars are not forthcoming, in the near future the wards will be closed. As it is they are so crowded that a mother can only be cared for for ten days.
As an adjunct to the hospital they have a preventive department, into which they gather the young girls who would become mothers if they were allowed to run at large. It sounds incredible, but girls are so hungry in Budapest that they will sell their souls to the first comer for a hunk of bread. These girls are collected by the department I have mentioned and are taught to make lace. When I was there today the thread had given out and no more was obtainable. They make their lace for two dollars for eleven yards; in America it would be worth at least two dollars for one yard. As a mere business undertaking it would pay some firm to send the thread from America and purchase the product.
I went to see the homes from which these girl-children came. There is a section of Budapest called Tivoli—why I do not know. It consists of old factories, now stripped and empty. In these buildings the utterly forlorn have taken up their abode.
I wish instead of writing, I could cut down the distance that separates me from America. Then I could bring you by automobile to see for yourselves. A glance would be enough. You would not be able to rest till these wrongs had been righted.
The roads which lead up to Tivoli are mud.
The place is avoided as a contagion. In many of the homes only one member of the family is able to appear at a time—the rest are naked. If they possess a bed, it has nothing but a mattress and the mattress has been slit so that they may crawl in among its straw for covering. As a rule the bed is the only piece of furniture; all the rest has either been sold or broken up for fuel. Everything that will burn has vanished from the landscape—palings, posts, everything. One pushes open a door—not one door, but a thousand; the same sight meets the eyes. There's a mother gaunt with famine, a bare room, an evil odour, a baby thrust into the mattress, boys and girls in rags, almost naked, and a few rotten potatoes lying jumbled on the floor. Of any other kind of food there's not a sign. The moment you appear they start to crawl towards you, hailing you as a deliverer. Any face that is new and unexpected serves to spur their desperate hope. They weep and try to kiss your hands, cringing indecently like animals.
Don't run away with the idea that these people are the scum of the earth; before the war they were as respectable as you or I.
Take the case of Mrs. Richa. She lives in one room with seven children, all of whom are tubercular. Yesterday the room had yet another occupant, but I arrived too late to see him—this morning he died. He lay in one corner, a little apart from the living and, seeing that he would not usurp it long, he was allowed to have the mattress. This other occupant was Private Richa, the husband of Mrs. Richa and the father of the seven children. He had caught his disease in the winter campaigns against the Russians—consumption. His youngest child—a baby not yet two—was stark naked. The room was bare of everything. None of them had been fed for two days. There was snow outside. When one considers the situation placidly, Private Richa has done rather better than his family.