Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 26, 1995 TAG: 9511270003
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAN SEWELL/ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: ATLANTA LENGTH: Long
They suspected a trick, and why not?
They had spent months subsisting on cabbage soup in a camp in Bayonne, France. Putter had been among the defeated soldiers who accepted an offer to clear land mines in return for better rations and, after 1,000 mines were cleared, freedom to go home.
Neither reward materialized.
Instead, on what Putter remembers as mine No. 2,684, he heard the snapping of a spring below his foot, threw himself on the sandy ground, then gritted his teeth as the mine exploded. A severed artery and other injuries landed him in the prison hospital.
There, he recuperated and brooded, about his two years as a soldier, spent fighting a losing battle on the Russian front, and his now-interminable stay in a stark camp in war-ravaged France.
The arrival of packages marked ``C.A.R.E.,'' said to be supplies donated by Americans, his country's enemies, seemed to offer potential for yet another setback.
``We were really run down. We actually debated for three days and two nights - why are they doing this? What is the snag? There must be a snag!
``Would we have done that for Russian prisoners? The answer we came to was `probably not.' Finally, one prisoner said, `I think I have the answer - these Americans are different. They just like to help people.' ''
Opening the packages brought revelation - in the form of chocolate, cheese, biscuits, sugar, cigarettes, canned meats.
``We were very much overwhelmed,'' Putter recalls. ``It was a ray of light for us. It was a very, very important moment.''
In this year of anniversaries marking the end of World War II, CARE, an organization that filled bellies and lifted spirits in the grim years that followed, celebrates its 50th year of existence.
``Not only were the goods we supplied important, but the compassion from America that they represented was vital to people who had been both friends and enemies,'' says Peter Bell, president of CARE, which moved its headquarters here from its New York City birthplace two years ago.
It was Nov. 28, 1945, when leaders of 22 religious groups, labor unions, businesses and charitable cooperatives agreed to combine forces for a large-scale effort to ease the widespread suffering and shortages in a postwar Europe of bombed factories, battle-torn fields and households whose breadwinners were killed.
They obtained some 2 million packages of U.S. Army field rations, each package with enough to feed 10 soldiers, that had been stockpiled for an invasion of the Japanese mainland that never came.
The outpouring of generosity and eagerness to help far exceeded what the organization's founders expected, as Americans lined up to pay $10 to send shipments to relatives, wartime acquaintances, anyone they might reach.
In 1948, Japan was added as a destination. Later, as the Cold War chilled the 1950s, the role of CARE packages for winning hearts and minds was recognized in ad campaigns that urged Americans to ``be a diplomat for America'' by sending them to countries caught in East-West conflicts.
CARE began preparing its own packages, with ethnic-sensitive diets and sewing materials, shoemaking kits, mechanic's tools and farm seeds and equipment, and expanded its development work overseas.
The organization estimates that more than 100 million packages have been sent since the first delivery to France on May 11, 1946.
For Klaus Putter, the drab-brown packages and their simple contents gave him both hope for the future and an enduring admiration for America. Within a few years, he had a job with Coca-Cola driving a truck, and eventually worked his way to a senior vice president position in Atlanta before retiring in 1987.
Irena Urdang De Tour, now of Deep River, Conn., eagerly awaited the packages in the ruins of Warsaw after years of slave labor in Berlin.
``There was soup, chocolate, Spam. I thought it was ambrosia,'' she says. ``I felt they were the answer to an SOS, like Robinson Crusoe; a blood transfusion, salvation - I could go on forever.''
De Tour, who went on to become a literary editor and gallery owner whose tastes run more to steak Diane and lobster Newburg, has been a philanthropist most of her life and keeps a can of Spam in her cupboard as a reminder of those who helped her.
``It was an absolute blessing,'' says actress Elke Sommer, whose family was living in postwar Germany on wild mushrooms and foraged potatoes and wheat. ``I don't think I would have been what I am today without CARE. I don't know if I would have survived.''
CARE has been transformed over the years, focusing now on help for developing countries, with offices around the world helping run long-term programs for health, education, agriculture and environment.
Even the letters making up its acronym have changed - from Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe to Cooperative for American Relief Everywhere to today's Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere.
And the trademark ``CARE packages'' - a term now often used generically by Americans for any shipment of aid, including homebaked goodies sent to college kids - were phased out nearly 20 years ago as a major function of the organization, although they are still used for emergency relief in such places as, most recently, Haiti, Rwanda and Bosnia.
``These efforts are really preventive,'' Bell says of today's concentration on development help. ``They're more subtle, they're more complicated, but they are just as important.''
With a series of anniversary commemorations this year and next, CARE hopes to boost its $50 million in annual donations that support missions in 66 countries with a total of 10,000 employees.
Among them is Bosnia, where CARE workers have dodged artillery shelling and sniper fire to provide medical care, trauma counseling, water purification, home repair kits and food to Muslims, Serbs and Croats alike under its nonpartisan tradition.
Wearing flak jackets and sometimes traveling inside a U.N. armed personnel carrier, they visit the homes of thousands of what Brenda Cupper, CARE's Zagreb-based Bosnia director, calls ``the invisible elderly'' - people isolated because of minority ethnicity, living in shelled apartment buildings without power.
Some of the elderly being helped now also received CARE packages five decades ago.
``They like to tell stories about the CARE packages they received after World War II, remembering what was in there,'' she says. ``To them, CARE means survival.''
``We actually debated for three days and two nights - why are they doing this? What is the snag? There must be a snag! Would we have done that for Russian prisoners? The answer we came to was `probably not.' Finally, one prisoner said, `I think I have the answer - these Americans are different. They just like to help people.' ''
by CNB