Members of the United Nations group which is now visiting camps for displaced Jews in Germany and Austria were visibly impressed here during their visit to the Rothschild Hospital where they found more than 4,000 Jews Jamed into a building with a normal capacity of less than 1,000.
The majority of the 4,000 are refugees from Rumania, fleeing famine and fear of pogroms. The members of the U.N. sub-committee were informed that Jews from Rumania are still pouring into Vienna at the rate of 100 per day. All of them are directed to the Rothschild Hospital. There they live on the floors, in corridors, in the basement where considerable furniture is stored and under the roof, clambering over like bats and picking their way over wooden plants to makeshift cubby-holes.
“You cannot send these people back to the countries from which they came,” a member of the UNSCOP group said today. He was Venkata Viswanathan, Indian alternate on the sub-committee. Hitherto pro-Arab on the Palestine issue, Viswanathan stated that he was not ready to admit that Palestine is the only solution for the problem of the displaced Jews, but after what he saw at the Rothschild hospital and in other DP camps he considers the trip “a distressing experience.”
“I have never heard of such barbarous, inhuman treatment as these people have suffered from civilized countries of the world,” he declared. “It is obvious to me that the DP’s are an international problem. Something must be done. I think perhaps all countries of the world might be asked to take the DP’s in proportion to their abilities to absorb them.” He was asked: “Does that include Palestine?” He replied, “Palestine is a country of the world, isn’t it?”
Harold Trobe, Joint Distribution Committee director in Austria, told the U.N. group that the J.D.C. took over the problem of feeding the DP’s on April 21, 1947, when the U.S. Army declared that it could no longer handle the job. He estimated that the J.D.C. had spent $250,000 on food for the refugees since that time. He said there were 9,360 DP’s in Vienna as of today and that the J.D.C. spends $4,500 a day to feed them.
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