World Battlefronts: Children at War

In a learned gathering in London last week a Yugoslav made a scene, but no one was embarrassed for him. Dr. Milan Grol, Yugoslavia’s Minister of Education, was speaking to 230 educators from 16 countries, convened to add a “Children’s Charter” to the Atlantic Charter.

“Before discussing the ideal program of tomorrow,” said Dr. Grol, “we must confront the grave and immediate problem [of] how to keep thousands of children alive . . . children without parents, children with neither bread nor roof, some mown down by epidemics, others grown slowly blind through starvation. . . .

“It was the shooting at Kragujevac . . . that has sown panic throughout our youth. … To reach the prescribed number of hostages — 2,300, which was afterwards doubled — they made the children with their books in their hands leave four classrooms of a secondary school, cover their faces before the bullets. They were all machine-gunned. After that massacre, the number of children wandering along the main roads and through the forests like wild beasts increased.”

So saying, Grol broke down and cried.