Letter from Marieli Benzinger to President Harry S. Truman

PIRES CHILD switgerland. CHALET DON BOSCO BRUNNEN fill 19 45 (Switzerland) ELIEF July 8, 1947 Mr. Harry S. Truman, President of the United States, Whitehouse, Washington, D.C. Dear President No are here since 1945 doing relief work in the name of a small group of American volunteers. As a first cousin of Bernard M. Baruch I want to thank you for your magnificient speech on July 4th. We have just returned from a tragic tour of Austria where we have seen thousands of Yugoslavs who have fled from Yugoslavia. The suffering endured for two years inside prison camps under the Partisans is identical to those of Nazi days. We have met countless Hungarians who daily live under the threat of being forced to work as slaves in Siberia. We know that in Hungary and Yugoslavia, by day and by night, factories are working making new forms of bombs. We know of camps inside of Austria where three and four times a week the thousands of inmates are forced to listen to Communist propaganda, to attacks against the United States government over loud speaker systems set up through- out the entire camps. We know, unfortunately, that even inside the American zone inside Austria Communists are at work and have obliged our CIC and the military police to turn over children to Tito. The hierarchy of Linz has openly protested to the commanding American general. The chaos that exists throughout Europe is one sponsered and fostered by none other than the Russians and Tito and his Partisans. We have been across the Brenner Pass - two American women alone distributing American food and clothes, and after traveling thirty- six kilometers up a lonely mountain pass and finding it armed with hundreds of armed men prowling around waiting to shoot down some unsuspecting refugee or displaced person who, in hopes of freedom, has fled from the Austrian camps to Italy - now finds himself either shot at or forced to return at the point of a gun. We distributed our food and clothes and came back the same way we had come because we considered it unsafe to travel alone on those mountain passes. We are Americans - yet as Americans terror fills our hearts at what we have seen on every side inside Austria. The nearer we got to Vienna - the nearer we were to Yugoslavia - the greater the pressure. Communist propaganda is at work - innocent victims