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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 8, No. 10 July 25, 1945

World Student Relief Calling VUC Students

World Student Relief Calling VUC Students

Many thousands of our fellow-students overseas are without the means to study. They have seen their universities burnt, their books destroyed and have suffered unbelievable privation. We, the fortunate, must help these students. It means giving, and giving implies sacrifice; if you want world peace, then give to these men and women in whose hands rests the future leadership of their countries.

ISS week in this College will be from July 30-August 3. There will be Student Relief collections August 1, 2, and 3; give generously even if it means going without.

One war has ended in Europe, but another has begun—the war against cold, starvation, and destruction!

Surely the only adventure of youth is not that of dealing death or escaping it in an embattled world. Man, possessor of a spirit of infinite worth, and of a mind capable of creative power, has a right to live. Instead, his body lies rotting in the mud of Belgium, in the snowy wastes of Russia, in the jungles of the Philippines, and in other blood-soaked soil of yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Is it an illusion to believe that lives are worth saving in our day? Is it an illusion to believe human society can be constructed in which lives are worth living? Is a rational and humane international society hopelessly unrealistic and utopian?

Higher learning is extinguished temporarily in many places, enslaved in others. Many universities (such as Caen in France) have been destroyed. Creative humane learning is unnatural to this time of unreason and passion.

But out of these literal and figurative ashes of universities rise the ruddy flames of a new birth. The students of the evacuated colleges of China, integrated constructively into the common life of the vast interior of China, are already participating in the great democratic revolution of the land. Universities and university life can never be the same again in China. Students in Norway, Belgium, Holland, and France have announced the profound reformation in education they intend to lead. There will be no stopping these students.

What Can We Do To Help Them?

Can we students out of our plenty give sacrificially to our fellow students in distress?

Within this next decade our comrades, the students of the world, must have food, shelter, clothing, the where withal to live. Our fellowship and faith will help them recover morale. Universities will re-open, will be rebuilt and re-stocked. Beyond student relief and rehabilitation lie reconciliation and reconstruction. Education must be reformed at home and abroad. Students must build an international student community.

The fight for the future is on! Students of VUC, are we going to join in?

The following extract from a pamphlet issued in Great Britain, forms a useful summary of the present position and plans of World Student Relief:

World Student Relief was constituted in 1943 through a tri-partite agreement between International Student Service, Pax Romana, and the World Student Christian Federation, with the object of coordinating student relief programmes throughout the world. During the present war, a student relief service has been maintained among prisoners-of-war, refugees and starving students. As early as March, 1942, our headquarters office in Geneva possessed individual dossiers for 7,349 students of ten nationalities scattered over 150 camps in Germany and Italy. Since that date both the number of prisoners served and the number of text-books, magazines and writing material supplied to them, have increased greatly. In Switzerland itself, to which large numbers of Polish boys and men escaped, University centers and a High School have been set up within the internment camps. Several hundred boys have graduated from school to university. Hundreds more are taking the degree course of Swiss Universities.

China's Plight

In China, medical help, food, and books are being supplied. ISS has also established "student centres" to make possible community life in those towns of Western China in which, in order to provide a trained personnel for the country's future activities, the Chinese government has replaced the universities of the occupied Eastern territory. Such a "student centre" has, for instance, been set up at Shapinga, near Chungking, and hundreds of students and professors are daily using its reading room and library; from this centre, students are being sent to war orphanages and other relief institutions to give instruction to young boys and girls—some of them the university students of the future.

Students suffering the extremes of malnutrition in Greece, Yugoslavia, and Belgium have received aid in the form of food by means of our organisation, and the Rector of Athens University himself has written a letter of warmest appreciation in acknowledgment of this particular form of student relief.

World Student Relief Headquarters are in Geneva, and it has branch offices in London, New York and Stockholm. It exists to serve in each country, when requested, the material and cultural needs of the Indigenous student groups. In order to do so, it is ready to cooperate with all bodies, official and private, which have the cause of student relief at heart; it has begun an experimental co-operation with the United—Nations' Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in connection with projected relief work in the Balkans.

Re-establishment and UNRRA

WSR is studying the problems incidental to the re-establishment of the universities after the war. Special training courses are being organised for university people who are prepared to work in specific areas after the war. Britain, USA, Sweden and Switzerland, have started this work.

WSR has worked out a plan with UNRRA whereby some WSR representatives will go in under UNRRA during the period of occupation. The two organisations are co-operating to the full. UNRRA recognises the specialised function of the World Student Relief representatives with reference to the university field.

Russia

In the Soviet Union there is tremendous emphasis on the rebuilding of liberated universities. Students and prefossors work together to restore the universities at Stalingrad, Kiev, Odessa and many other big centres. Students are learning building trades so that they may in a practical way expedite the work. The present aim of the Russians is firstly to improve the quality of training "by making the students, take the responsibility for their own work and lay less responsibility on the shoulders of professors and lecturers."

Question 1: What are actual student needs in liberated countries?

In Paris 3,000 students need rooms; at Toulouse 600 students need supplemental meals. The University of Caen must be rebuilt. Books and whole libraries have been destroyed. Blankets, laboratory equipment and furniture have been wrecked or stolen by the German army. Pencils, paper, ink, chalk, blackboards, must be supplied. Nor will money alone help. Only actual supplies from abroad will meet the shortages.

Question 2: Won't physical needs be cared for by the nations themselves?

Yes. WSR cannot rebuild the University of Caen, nor restore university libraries or laboratories. But students are tackling problems of immediate aid. A student foyer with a fire (I discovered how utterly precious a fire can be) in every university centre will not take the place of rebuilding the university itself, but it can be the centre for a programme of mutual aid which no other general programme of relief will ever provide.

Question 3: Will liberated countries insist on doing their own relief jobs?

Liberated countries do not want outside help. But they do welcome renewed contact with the organisations they know and trust from prewar years. Ways in which French students would welcome outside assistance for their own relief schemes are:—
(a)Financial aid.
(b)Shipments of blankets and clothing.
(c)Libraries for student foyers.
(d)Two or three "experts" to help develop student mutual aid programmes.
(e)Opportunities for international contact.

Question 4: Won't WSR be snowed under by huge inter-government programmes?

No. The danger is that this type of control will be too slow to meet the need. Voluntary agencies with roots in the country will be called on to the maximum.

And finally, there is no use talking about student responsibility for helping to build a new world order of justice and co-operation unless students in the favoured countries—America, Canada, Australia, Britain, Sweden, etc.—do care enough to provide the money that is needed, the blankets, the shoes, the clothing, the books, that will enable their fellow students in Europe to live and study this winter.