January 22
What makes the boys suffer the worst is that there is nothing to smoke. They smoke dry leaves or grass—anything they can. They pay 1 Serb dinar for 1 cigarette. Anyway the value of the Serb money has dropped greatly. Ferdinand sold a one hundred-dinar banknote for 15 lire.
The rate of dying is decreasing, so at last the disease has stopped. What helped most was a change in the food the Italians give us and the drinking water they bring here. Many lives could have been saved [if they'd done this earlier]! They let us out on a barren island without water, and they gave us canned food that made us very thirsty! Everyone was feeble; when they got cans, they ate the food raw immediately and died by the next morning.
Inserted: a cutout from the Samostatnost magazine dated February 15, 1918, by Otto Brokl:
The fate lead us to Italy. The cholera Asinara was our lot. On a barren and contaminated island, cholera killed many a man among us mercilessly again. And finally, when we were able to count the Czech survivors, we all felt distressed. Out of the proud 33,000 Czechs in Serbia, there were only three
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