বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ ত্রয়োদশ খণ্ড
iBut for how long can morale be maintained, how long can they be saved from despair and hopelessness?
John Stonehouse, Member of Parliament
The horror of Bengal is one of the greatest man-made disasters in this half century. To see the pathetic refugee camps is to marvel that human beings can survive such terrible conditions after many of them had walked over one hundred miles from the insane brutality of the Pakistan army. It is frightful that the world community has done so little to help. The crisis which now threatens is likely to be many times worse than the horrors of the last six months, for with the continuing chaos in East Bengal a famine is coming which could lead to ten million deaths.
The appeals to the President of Pakistan might well have been made to a deaf and blind man. This however, is no excuse for the world community failing to act. It must act soon.
Dr. R. B. M'Clure, Ex-Moderator, United Church of Canada
It was raining and the man came to me clad only in a worn breech-clout. He begged me to come over to Hut No. 85 to see a woman and four boys. We sloshed through the mud and jumped the ditch surrounding the “long house", and there was the remnant of a family. Mother was huddled under some old sacking and around her, three boys aged from 4-8 years. In her lap was one about 3 years of age. The children looked exhausted, their eyes shining in fever reddened faces.
I knelt down to take their pulse and feel their foreheads and pat their abdomens. The four boys had typhoid fever and the youngest one nestled against his mother probably would not make it through the night. The others had a chance. Under the sacking I asked mother if she was ill. She said: “I don't know. You feel me and see." I felt her forehead and she had no fever, her abdomen was soft and her pulse not too strong. She was confused mentally, and who would not be? The man was her uncle. Her husband has disappeared at the border-been led off, shot or conscripted as a coolie and never to be heard from again.
Why was she under the sacking? Well, when you come on a trip like this you don't have any spare saris and the youngest boy had soiled her only sari. She had washed it and hung it out to dry.
It was a wet day, and would take a long time to dry. She was under the sacking until she could wear it again. One Canadian dollar would give her a sari.
James Ramsden, Member of Parliament
In June I visited India and Pakistan as one of a delegation of British MP's. We spent one of our days being shown the condition of the refugees in the neighborhood of Calcutta.
One’s first impression is of the sheer tragedy of so many helpless and homeless human
