Refugee camp

“ There were no horses or mules among the refugees to make a trail through the woods that could be followed by the Home Guards and soldiers, and no dogs to attract their attention by their baying; but there were canoes and boats in plenty, and, except when in use, they were concealed in the bushes, so that they could not be seen from the mainland. There were several snug lean-tos in the camp, to which the refugees retreated in stormy weather ”

“ Almost hourly our headquarters were filling up with refugee workers flushed with their sad adventures; but this young fellow had been through more than most; a man had been killed in his hut, and he himself was in the last stages of exhaustion. ”

“ Children are born in the hugger-mugger of such conditions, but the good Holland citizens see that the children are cared for and that the babies have milk. Devoted priests teach the children, and the value of military organization illuminates the whole panoply of misery. Yet the best of the refugee camps would seem to American citizens like the dark and dreadful life of an underworld, in which is neither work, purpose, nor opportunity. It is a sight repugnant to civilization. ”

“ Larger Image Refugees Quartered in Army Wall Tents on the Presidio Reservation.
[Pg 97]
Larger Image Refugee Camp on Gas-House Flats, at Lombard Street, Near Fort Mason.
Larger Image Los Angeles’ Relief Committee’s Food Station in Golden Gate Park;
first hot meals in three days for rich and poor Refugees alike.
[Pg 98]
Larger Image Refugee Camp in Golden Gate Park, one week old; U. S. Army tents.
Larger Image Same Refugee Camp in Golden Gate Park, two weeks old;
board barracks taking the place of the tents.
[Pg 99]
Larger Image The largest Refugee Camp, on the Presidio Reservation ”

“ Calls upon all parties to armed conflicts to respect the civilian and humanitarian character of refugee camps and settlements, and ensure the protection of all civilians inhabiting such camps, in particular women and girls, from all forms of violence, including rape and other sexual violence, and to ensure full, unimpeded and secure humanitarian access to them ”

“ Encourages MINURCAT and the United Nations country team to continue to assist the Government to prevent the recruitment of refugees and children by armed groups and to maintain the civilian nature of refugee camps and internally displaced person sites, in coordination with DIS and the humanitarian community ”

“ In Gaza and in Jordan, I met with Palestinian refugees who for generations had known no life but that in the refugee camps -- men, women and especially children trying to maintain their dignity under dismal conditions and restrictions. ”

“ It has been demonstrated that refugee camps are no longer needed as a major method of relief in Nanking.
There are sufficient looted and damaged houses to shelter the present reduced population. Relief can best proceed through homes and personal services, supplying food, medical care, employment, credit, aid in reuniting separated families, to such degrees as ability, intent, and resources permit. ”

“ Our forces, on their side, are compelled to denude the country of everything moveable, in order to frustrate these tactics of the enemy. No doubt a considerable amount of the stock taken by us is not wholly lost, but simply removed to the refugee camps, which are now being established at many points along the railway lines. But even under these circumstances, the loss is great, through animals dying on the route, or failing to find sufficient grass to live upon when collected in large numbers at the camps. ”

“ The refugees numbered all told about 300,000. At least 75,000 of them made their way to Oakland, Berkeley, Alameda, Benicia and neighboring cities while many more fortunate and prosperous succeeded in reaching Los Angeles.
The work of caring for the homeless in the refugee camps was splendidly managed under the direction of the citizens’ committee, the military authorities and the Red Cross. ”

“ The American flag was hoisted over the Mission buildings, and before a week was out there were over ten thousand refugees housed in the yards and rooms, where they remained for five months, the places of the dead being taken by fresh influxes. The dining-room, the sitting-room, the church, the school, were all given over to these destitute people, and from the beginning fear of massacre, as well as prevalence of disease, haunted the camp. It was impossible to move dead bodies outside; they had to be buried in the thronged yards, and every day children were born. ”

“ At present our hospital has taken in all the soldiers and refugees that it can, and we are seeing sick refugees in the clinic all day long. To-day I counted 21 women and children in one of our waiting-rooms, mostly lying on the floor from sheer exhaustion, one child moribund, two others nearly so, and half the rest of the group quite likely to die in a few days, if they are allowed to remain where they are in the camp. Many of the villagers are mountaineers, and, lying out on the hot dusty plain by day and exposed to the cold of night, they quickly succumb. ”

“ Since, in any event, the military authorities must necessarily continue to participate in the program for all displaced persons, especially with respect to housing, transport, security, and certain supplies, it is recommended that there be a review of the military personnel selected for Camp Commandant positions. Some serving at present, while perhaps adequate for the mass repatriation job, are manifestly unsuited for the longer-term job of working in a camp composed of people whose repatriation or resettlement is likely to be delayed. ”

“ The position—an immense clearing in the centre of a pine-forest—is healthy. Nothing will be wanting: there is abundance of water, electric light will be installed, large windows will give light and air to the huts, the roofs will be thick and the walls made of bricks lined with wood.
Later, when the camp is on the point of being finished, the General who commands the district will let neutral notabilities and journalists visit it, and will present it to them as the future residence of those poor French prisoners over which Germany watches with a mother’s love. ”

“ The former is populous and stirring, but the latter has [Pg 319] more mounds already than the other has living souls. The refugees are widely scattered; some are in the hospital, some are packed as closely as the logs and dead bodies at the stone bridge in the houses yet tenable, and the rest are at Camp Hastings. ”

“ Perhaps in the gray of early dawn they would return to the camp, the men tired, and almost frozen; but with glowing accounts of the immense damage they had managed to inflict on the concentration camps of the enemy. ”

“ STORM REFUGEES PRECIPITATE A PANIC IN A CONVENT.
The Ursuline convent and academy, in charge of the Sisters of St. Angelo, proved a haven of refuge for nearly 1,000 homeless and storm-driven unfortunates. No one was refused admittance to the sheltering institution. Negroes and whites were taken in without question and the asylum was thrown open to all who sought its protecting wings.
In the midst of the storm the hundreds or more negroes grew wild and shouted and sang in true camp-meeting style until the nerves of the other refugees were shattered and a panic seemed imminent. ”

“ This report, gentlemen, has attached to it a photograph, which you will find at the end of the document book. I beg to hand it to you. The unfortunate beings that you see in that picture are not the victims of a concentration or reprisal camp. They are simply the patients of an asylum in the outskirts of Paris who fell into this state of physical weakness as a result of undernourishment. If these men had had the diet of the asylum prior to rationing, they would have been as strong as normal people. ”

“ Day after day, and night after night, the one or other part of the camp is entertained by the edifying spectacle of natives being thrashed, tents being burnt, and white people surrounded by ferocious crowds who can scarcely be kept back from carrying out their desire for vengeance by a small truncheon and a thick thong. ”

“ It strikes us all that to give them like this an opportunity for steady work is about the best service that can be rendered. The largest enterprise of this committee is the maintenance of a concentration camp, which houses 6,000 refugees. Though they have to live in tents they are otherwise under the best of care. The government is military, the sanitary conditions are excellent and everyone directly under the eye of the workers. ”

“ Not only were several hundred homeless men, women, and children sleeping on the cold stone floors of the draughty station, but other hundreds were lying about in odd corners here and there, in empty trucks and freight cars, lying within a few feet of where the crowded refugee train had left them, with no hope or ambition to make them move on. Still other hundreds, more fortunate than these, were sheltered in three sheds, similar to the "Refugees' Restaurant" in their unfinished board construction, which had been built by the Government. ”

“ To provide places of temporary asylum to which refugees whom it may be possible to evacuate from European countries may be removed, these refugees to be supported in camps for the duration of the war, with the understanding that they will then be repatriated in their own country or be provided with permanent homes in other ways. ”

“ Their only consolation under circumstances of such deprivation is that of the devoted exterior guards of a camp—that their sufferings secure tranquillity and safety within. Are there any of their countrymen, who would subject them to greater sacrifices, to any other humiliations than those essentially necessary to the security of the object for which they were thus separated from their fellow-citizens? ”

“ The hospitable wayside inns, the quaint villages, the picturesque peasant cottages which the tourist in this region knew and loved are but blackened ruins now. And the people are gone too—refugees, no doubt, in the camps which the Government has erected for them near the larger towns. One no longer hears the tinkle of cow-bells on the mountain slopes, peasants no longer wave a friendly greeting from their doors: it is a stricken and deserted land. ”

“ They came at night, when the flickering camp fires of the blue hosts shone like vast unsteady stars along the black horizon: old men, and thin, with gray and tufted hair; women with frightened eyes, dragging whimpering, hungry children; men and girls, stalwart and gaunt, – a horde of starving vagabonds, homeless, helpless, and pitiable in their dark distress. ”

“ I have always urged the authorities to send away, as fast as possible, those who have arrived as refugees. We have a vast camp, or rather position, five miles in circumference, and we are constantly obliged to take every man into the field. The guard for our sick is trifling enough, and our difficulties would be increased were there women also to be thought of ”

“ I have told this poor little story to illustrate a fact which, as time passes, is beginning to be lost sight of: the fact that we workers among the refugees are trying, first and foremost, to help a homesick people. We are not preparing for their new life an army of voluntary colonists; we are seeking to console for the ruin of their old life a throng of bewildered fugitives. It is our business not only to feed and clothe and keep alive these people, but to reassure and guide them. And that has been, for the last year, the task of the American Hostels for Refugees. ”

“ Jack declared that he would take to the swamp before he would fight for the Confederacy, and why shouldn't I do the same? I will. I'll become a refugee rather than shoot at the flag my brother is sailing under. Refugee: one who flees for refuge or safety. That's me, as Dick Graham used to say. I'll seek safety among the Union men who spend the most of their time in the woods. It's my opinion that from now on they will have to spend all their time there, for I don't believe that the prisoners Burnside released will leave any houses for them to go into. ”

“ And though most of these guests be now gone into the Camp, because there is little left here for them to devour, do not the cellars, the store-houses, the kitchen, and every part of the house speak of their having been here, and of the poverty and disorder in which they have left us?”
“Aye,” said the refectorarius, “wonderful hath been the waste! The revenue of the abbat, the common property of the house, and the incomings allotted to the several officials to enable them to bear the charges and do the duties of their offices, have all been anticipated and consumed! ”

“ As the enemy advanced the inhabitants of one village would fly for shelter to the next, only by the shells to be whipped farther forward; and so, each hour growing in number, the refugees fled toward Brussels and the coast. They were an army of tramps, of women and children tramps, sleeping in the open fields, beneath the hayricks seeking shelter from the rain, living on the raw turnips and carrots they had plucked from the deserted vegetable gardens. The peasants were not the only ones who suffered. The rich and the noble-born were as unhappy and as homeless. ”

“ Our camp is surrounded by crowds of beggars, famished, gaunt and wizened creatures, most sorry objects to behold. Boys and girls, of from ten to twenty years of age, wan, pinched, and wrinkled, whine around us in piteous tones all day and all night, and vainly call on Ali for aid. ”

“ Among these were many thousands of German colonists who had formerly been residents of Cholm (p. 243) and Volhynia, but had been removed from there by order of the Russian Government previous to the Russian retreat. The fate of all these hundreds of thousands of refugees by the time winter will have arrived will be horrible. What, for instance, will happen to about thirty thousand farmers from Galicia who were removed by force and now are located in a concentration camp on the River Slucz with nothing over their heads except the sky? ”