According to the same statement. a further 4.500.000 are still expected1.530.000 from Poland. 2.250.000 from Czechoslovakia. and 500.000 from Hungary. If we accept this statement we must assume that the Russian zone will have rebeived animmigration of 12.500.000. As the normal population of this zone is about 18.000.000. the new arrivals would increase that population by 67 percent. were they to remain. * * * According to a statement made by Field Marshal Montgomery on November 11. anything between 4.000.000 and 8.000.000 of these refugees could he expected from the Russian zone and from Poland and Czechoslovakia as the British share under the Potsdam agreement. * * * These figures. from authoritative Russian and British sources. indicate the size of the forced migration which has begun in eastern and central Europe. The migrantsnearly all of them women. children. old men. and such men of middle age or youth as are wounded or unfitarrive in a state of complete destitution. usually exhausted by hunger and many days or even weeks of wandering. and often stricken by disease. to swell a population which already suffers from overcrowding and is. in most of the larger towns at least. itself underfed and almost destitute. * * * Competent observers seem to agree that the catastrophe must grow much worse in the winter which has now begun. and that many. very many. of the small children and of the old -and ailing will have perished before the spring. * * * The figures we have quoted show. although imperfectly. the vastness of the catastrophe. In the November issue of the same magazine Mr. Voigt had written in an article entitled "Orderly and Humane": We have in our possession. 17 statements by eyewitnesses of what happened in.
Keywords matched
migrantsnearly refugees