Some weeks ago a haggard man limped into the headquarters office of the American Relief in Warsaw. He had come to seek assistance for his daughter. She had just escaped from Kharkov, where she had been held a prisoner by the Bolshevists for many months. Her health was broken with hardship; if something were not done for her, she would die. Unfortunately he could not offer money; but whatever was done for her he would consider a debt, which one day he would repay. By profession he was an engineer. The Georgian Government owed him the equivalent of over three hundred thousand dollars. He had only that day recovered his daughter and learnt of her condition. While she was being taken prisoner at Kiev and carried a thousand miles into the interior, he had been cut off in the Caucasus by another Bolshevist offensive. She had been escaping while he also had been escaping, and neither had known of the other's predicament. From places as far apart as continents, after life and death adventures, they had both reached Warsaw on the same day and had arrived at the house of a relative within a few hours of each other. He was almost as spent as she was. From being rich he was penniless. She was the apple of his eye; she was only fourteen and in danger of dying. There was no one to whom he could turn in his distress. So he had bethought himself of the Americans.

Upon investigation his story proved correct. His daughter, Wanda Marchzcloska, was in the last stages of exhaustion. The American Children's Relief took her in hand, feeding her first of all on milk, a luxury in Poland, till at last she was brought back to strength. Her story is worth recording, as illustrating what relief work is doing and the kind of sufferings which children are called on to endure in this outpost of civilization. This is how she told it.

She was in Kiev with her mother when the Bolshevists stormed the city last May. In the confusion she got separated, her mother escaping while she was taken prisoner. With ten other Polish girls and eighteen boys, she was herded by rail and road to Kharkov, a town very far in the interior. On arrival there, after many miseries, they were lined up in the square and sentenced to be shot. On the instant that the sentence had been pronounced it was carried out. When the firing stopped, only she and another girl remained. A consultation took place; it was decided that she, on account of her youth, should be spared. The soldiers pleaded for her. But the other girl————.

The other girl had had a sister who now lay dead across her feet, killed by the first volley. When she understood that she also had to die, she commenced to weep bitterly. Wanda Marchzcloska placed her arms about her, whispering, “Remember, you are Polish.” The tears were dried. Standing up bravely, her hair loose about her shoulders, she met death with a smile. And so Wanda, aged fourteen, was left.

Throughout the summer her life was a living hell. She was made the drudge of the prison. She was worked to a shadow. She was given little to eat and scarcely any rest. She received many blows; her companions were brutalised men and women who had lost every instinct of mercy. It was hot within those walls, she told me—like a furnace. Very often she wished that the soldiers had not pleaded for her; she wanted to be dead. But the phrase she had uttered to the girl who was to be shot, lingered in her memory, “Remember, you are Polish.” She repeated it beneath her breath when the blows were hard to bear, “Remember, you are Polish.” Among all the foulness of people and surroundings, she kept her soul clean by remembering that she was different: she was Polish.

By August she had served her punishment and was released. Her one thought was to get back to her parents. She set out for Kiev. More than a thousand miles lay between herself and her goal. How she accomplished the journey even she cannot tell. The nights were very dark, she says; they caused her to fear greatly. She hid in woods. She slept on the bare ground. She lived on roots. Sometimes she thought that those dead children who had been shot in the square, accompanied her. By luck and cunning she made the last part of her journey to Kiev by rail. When she got there it was to find that the city was still in Bolshevist hands. She had no passports; if she had had them, they would not have served her. But how to get across the frontier into Poland?

She took to the woods again, this fourteen year old girl, with her body that was a bag of hones, tattooed with scars and bruises. Growing feebler and feebler she struggled on. The last hundred miles were the hardest. But she urged herself forward by repeating, “Remember, you are Polish.”

She does not know at what point she crossed the frontier, or how, or when. There are gaps in her memory and visions of blank fields across which moves a scarecrow figure; it must have been her own, she supposes. After that she forgets everything, till her father's arms were about her, and she was realising that he was as woe-begone as herself.

That is one child's story. It could be multiplied by thousands. Her life was saved by the random generosity of some chance giver in America. I wish he could have seen her today, grateful and demure as she stood before me. I think he would have slipped his hand again into his pocket and before he counted his loose bills would have whispered, “Remember, you are American.”