বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ ত্রয়োদশ খণ্ড
food, insufficient medical supplies-and worst of all, no hope.
MISS PAT BENNETT, CHURCH MISSIONARY SOCIETY
You know how bright children normally are. Well, some of the children we treated in the camps were just little lifeless bodies, hardly able to move in their mothers' arms, let alone to smile. The reports of malnutrition have certainly not been exaggerated at all, in spite of the fact that the Indian Government has been doing the most tremendous job. Nevertheless, the need for outside help is essential and is growing all the time, particularly for the children.
ALAN HART, BBC PANORAMA
They'd been hacked to death with knives and clubs. Twelve bodies. From some of their wounds the blood was still gushing. And when you thought they were dead and finished-they weren't. They went on twitching, some of these bodies, for several minutes.
These are the images that I captured for my first film report from inside East Pakistan during the opening weeks of the war. I shall never be able to wash that scene from my mind, yet strangely enough it disturbed and angered me much less than another incident I saw several months later.
I was watching a young girl dying of starvation. I who held by her eyes. They were accusing me “You don't care do you" they were saying I knelt down beside her and took her hand. I wanted to tell her that we really did care all those of us in the outside world. I opened my mouth to speak. But I couldn't tell her something that was untrue.
MICHEL BRUNSON, ITN NEWS
Things do not usually happen just as television reporters want them to happen. So the tragedy of West Bengal is that you only have to get the cameras out of the cases to get the evidence of death, of starvation, of disease and of suffering on record. Imagine Britain from the Highlands to Cornwall with columns of refugees on many of the roads, a refugee camp in most of the villages. That's what it's like around the border of East Pakistan. Only two things—thousands of deaths and thousands of pounds worth if of money or medical supplies-are in the end going to let us put our cameras back in their cases.
CLAUDE MOSSE, RADIO SUISSE ROMANDE
Between 1942 and 1944, there were ten million deaths in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. A quarter of a century later this memory is still in our minds. There are ten million refugees in East Bengal and apart from some news especially in the Anglo-Saxon press, the whole world accepts with complete apathy the slow agony of these human beings whose horizon was limited by the muddy marshes of the Ganges valley. The Indian Government has already withdrawn one billion Swiss francs from its investments to save these ten million living skeletons. Now India is exhausted. Without immediate and continuous international help we will have to resign ourselves to the fact that two million children under eight will die of hunger and cold. They turn their eyes in our direction. They ask for nothing. Their acceptance of a tragic destiny which has made of them our shame
