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ECOLOGICAL “We are seeing an ecological catastrophe”, sighed Frantisek Urban, director of nature conservation in Czechoslovakia’s Environment Industry, as he surveyed the barren, soot-covered moonscape of Eastern Europe | after decades of Marxist industrialisation. As the veil of the Communist Party secrecy is slowly withdrawn from East Germany, Czech- oslovakia, Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria, the world is witnessing an environmental holocaust on a scale that almost dwarfs the , nuclear wreckage of Hiroshima. The once green and bountiful heartland of Europe has become a treeless plateau of blackened stumps, concrete buildings and an ashen landscape coated with a thick layer of toxic grime. Acid rain from twenty years of an industrial smokestack inferno has decimated the centuries-old forests of Eastern Europe into virtual annihilation. In Yugoslavia, West Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland and East Germany more than half of the nations’ forests are damaged. Some of the most beautiful forests in the world are now bare-limbed skeletons hanging in motionless clouds of black acidic smoke. “Tourists once scaled the majestic Fechtelberg Mountain on the border of East Germany and Czechoslovakia to marvel at the view of the Erzgebirgean mountain forests,” writes Mike Leary of the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Now they weep. At the top of some of these mountains not a single tree survives — just barren landscape NEXUS 18 with a few remaining stumps”. Wherever you look in Eastern Europe there’s a thick pall of deadly smog a few feet from your face slowly filtering into your lungs, your water and your foodstuffs at a deadly rate. In many parts of East Germany, the-air pollution is so thick that drivers turn on their headlights in the middle of the day. While in Poland the government has declared five villages in Silesia literally “unfit to live” because of the heavy metals in the soil. In Czechoslovakia, residents are fleeing northern Bohemia in droves to escape the gas chambers of their hometowns, such that the government is’ actually paying them to remain. . In Northern Bohemia, children are routinely shipped out of the toxic region for a month each year to breathe freely as an official health measure. Last year 20,000 residents wearing gas masks in Zenica, Yugoslavia, marched through the city shouting slogans like “Zenica is Chernobyl in instalments!” in a protest rally against the rising tide of pollution. The situation has become virtually unbreathable. According to last year’s Environment magazine, air pollution in Poland is reportedly 50 times above the permissible limits and a quarter of Poland's soil is too contaminated for safe farming. No less than 95% of Poland’s water is unfit for drinking. In southern Poland, people actually scurry down to the abysmal depths of a salt mine to breathe clean air. It should come as no surprise then, that the rates of respiratory ailments and cancer are 30-50 times above that of the national average. Perhaps the most frightening news is from a study of new mothers in southern Poland which revealed that more than half of the 1,000 placentas examined were deformed or damaged “most likely by the high level of carbon monoxide and sulphur dioxide in the air’. The fruits of this massive poisoning have been flowering for some time. Five years ago, a 1985 report by the Polish academy of Sciences cited an “appalling increase” in the number of retarded school age children. So far the Polish Academy of Science has declared that one third of the nation’s 38 million people lived in areas of “ecological disaster”. And that's optimistic. _The rest of Eastern Europe is ais Bees not much better off. In Hungary, biologists calculate that illnesses traceable to environ- mental pollution consume more than 13% of the country’s health budget. Officials estimate that at least 1 out of 17 Hungarians now die from environmentally induced causes. In Leipzig, life expectancy is roughly calculated 6 years less than the national average. In Espenhain, East Germany, 4 out of 5 children develop chronic bronchitis or heart ailments by the age of seven because of the dense blanket of industrial smog that strangles the city. For-150 miles around Copsa ” Mica, Romania, everything from grass to trees is coated with an oleaginous black soot, so that even hardy livestock needs to be rotated outside the region for survival sake. “Even horses can stay here for only a couple of HOLOCAUST IN EUROPE