RUMANIA: Child Labor

When in need of more child workers than they have whelped themselves, tough Rumanian gypsies and hard-fisted peasants sometimes buy a “child slave” from professional kidnappers. Such a snatcher was feeble, wheezing Katinka Barbalate, 35, who was finally caught at lessy last week. Police nabbed her on a blanket charge of “kidnapping hundreds of children and selling them to gypsies and peasants.”

Third-degree technique in Rumania is Grade A, and coughing Katinka soon confessed to 25 specific kidnappings and sales involving girls aged between 7 and 9. Chief factor in the slaver’s long-successful activities, police said, was her system of breaking the kidnapped children’s morale and cowing them so thoroughly thai after being “sold” few of the “slaves” dared to run away. “I kept the children locked up in lonely houses and ‘trained’ them in my own way to be good workers,” confessed tuberculous Katinka Barbalate. “Yes, I tortured them.”