KRISHNANAGAR INDIA. - For more than 5 million destitute uprooted persons from East Pakistan there is harrowing uncertainty about their future.

In addition to the threat of disease, there is lack of adequate shelter, insufficient food, and a massive shortage of clothing. Most of the refugees are in tatters.

You see them pitifully trying to wash their rags in muddy puddles without soap.

You see long queues of children on the shoulder of a busy highway near Calcutta airport lined up for their milk ration. Each youngster grasps a pot or container in his hand .

The line never seems to end. It was there in the morning when we went north. It was still there in the early evening when we returned,

MOVEMENTS BY TRAIN

You see efforts to move refugees by train to more suitable locations than Calcutta outskirts. But the train is hours late in arriving, and there are dead left on the platform when it finally pulls out jammed to the roof.

You hear, although there is no confirmation, that not all looting and burning in East Pakistan is the work of its Pakistan Army or brigades. Some local people, it is said, have begun looting their own neighbors.

Yet amid these sights of unmitigated misery and hopelessness there are stirring examples of courage and self-sacrifice.

A grief and terror-stricken mother who had lost several members of her family in fleeing from Pakistan was found wandering aimlessly at the roadside after abandoning her third child.

Fortunately both the child and mother were picked up by Roman Catholic sisters of Mercy Clinic in this town. Both still need care, but they are recovering.

At one time the clinic had an estimated 5,000 refugees in its courtyard all needing food and shelter and many needing medical attention as well.

More encouraging is the story of Sister Jacinta de Cruz of the same mission. She stands about 4 feet tall and looks 12 years old, although she is 22,

ORPHANS LED ACROSS BORDER

Yet plucky little Sister Jacinta led 40 orphan girls across the border to safety at night in a thunderstorm. They ranged in age from 3 to 18.

When armed men began menacing the orphanage at Bhobarpura in East Pakistan Sister Jacinta decided to lead her charges to India just I mile away. "I was surely frightened" she told me. "It was raining and thundering and muddy and slippery underfoot.

"We were afraid of being killed. So we packed bundles of clothes. We had no time or breath, to pray, or sing, or even speak as we hurried along the path."

Older girls helped carry younger ones some only 2 years old. They all made it through the storm to the border and on to Krishnanager.

Now 40 girls are happy and busy in the orphanage here. But Sister Jacinta says they still shiver about their experience "although we are not so frightened any more."