The Long Road Home

P:In Germany a horse-drawn wagon crawled slowly westward. Three ragged men and a woman sang with sad irony: "Nie rzucim ziemi skqd nasz rod, nie damy pogrzesc mowy" ("We shall never leave oar fathers' land, we shall never let the Polish language die").

P:In Paris a small, thin Jewish boy from Budapest was learning to say the Pater Noster. Since he had come to live with French foster parents he had almost for gotten the old prayer, Mole ani lefa-neha. . . .

P:Freight cars rattled eastward across Ger many. Russian and Polish repatriates were packed in until there was no room to sit. Some, looking happy for cameramen, sunned themselves (see cut), waved at Red Army soldiers, ducked when the train crawled through a tunnel.

P:In Silesia, the Sudetenland, East Prussia and Pomerania, surly, stony-eyed Ger mans hid their belongings against the day when they would have to move. Some would go east, to Russia and forced labor. The lucky ones would go west, to a new and humbler life.

The Unraveling. One of Europe's greatest mass migrations was at its height. The complex racial pattern that Nazi expropriation, exile, imprisonment and slavery had woven was fast unraveling. The Germans had taken years to create the fabric. The western Allies and Russia had largely demolished it in two months.

In the first weeks of victory the release of millions of displaced persons ("D.P.s," the armies called them) threatened to create a civil anarchy in Germany far greater than the social dislocation of war. Hungry, sick, and bitterly vengeful, the slaves and prisoners burst their bonds and started home, sometimes looting and destroying, sometimes killing. But in remarkably short order the hordes were corralled, deloused, fed, shown movies and systematically sorted out. The U.S. and British armies had done most of the good work. Now they were turning the job over to UNRRA specialists.

The Seven Million. Almost seven million D.P.s had been found in the western Allies' zones of Germany. Most of them were Russian or French. But there were also Poles, Belgians, Dutch, Greeks, Yugoslavs, Austrians, Spaniards, Lithuanians, Letts and Estonians. By last week almost half had been repatriated. Many of the rest would be home by September. Uncounted millions in Russia's half of Germany were also on the move. More than 300,000 had come west and more were still to come.

By fall only the "nonrepatriables" would remain. These were the stateless thou sands who no longer had homes, or those who were unwilling to go home. The Allies could do as they wished with Germans and with nationals of Germany's former satellite countries. The Soviet Union insisted that all Russians come home. But some Russians did not want to. But the Allies could not force the nonrepatriables to leave. They might number a million people.

Largest single group were Poles who feared Russia. Estimates of their number ran into hundreds of thousands. The discarded Polish government in London hoped to draw some of them into its large, stateless army (see FOREIGN NEWS). But that government wanted no Jews. The British and U.S. occupation armies absorbed thousands as laborers. Many more thousands were going to French, Belgian and Dutch farms and mines to work.

No Hiding Place.The Jewish thousands had no property, no place to turn. Anti-Semitism was still apparent even in the democratic European countries, particularly when the return of confiscated Jewish property was concerned.

The hopeless also included refugees from Russia's Baltic states, Greek leftists for whom the rightist Greek regime had no use, Spanish republicans still at war with Francisco Franco. For these and others the United Nations would have to devise some status--perhaps World War II's equivalent of the Nansen passport, issued by the League of Nations to stateless persons after World War I.

Whether homebound or homeless, Europe's millions of D.P.s constituted a vast sociological problem which repatriation alone would not solve. Whatever their politics, whatever the country they had left, they were people whom society had failed. For them every guarantee, human and political, had broken down. The thousands who had been in concentration camps had seen all the normal values of life--and life itself--reduced to zero. In the mass, would they be willing to buy personal peace and security at any price? Or had they lost all faith in peace and security? Their reactions would have a good deal to do with the shape and temper of the new Europe.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.