Petkoff's Grave

One of the most shocking facts of recent history is the moral imperturbability with which democratic nations, like the U.S. and Britain, have handed over millions of people in eastern Europe to the inhuman mercies of a police state.

In Bulgaria last week, three visiting U.S. Congressmen, Senator Carl Hatch, Democrat, and Representatives John Davis Lodge and Walter H. Judd, Republicans, decided to perform a simple act of reverence that would dramatically assert the traditions of Western civilization.

But in police-ridden Sofia, the three Americans had to act surreptitiously. Quietly they bought a funeral wreath. They waited until shortly before they were due to leave Bulgaria by plane. Then they put the wreath in a jeep, headed for the airport, but turned off to a cemetery. On the fresh, unmarked grave of Nikola Petkoff, executed eight days before for his opposition to Bulgaria's Communist-dominated Government (TIME, Oct. 6), they laid the wreath. Each spoke a few words in memory "of one of the greatest democrats of all time."

In the sum of history, their simple gesture might prove to be a moral aid to Europe as important in its way as material aid. For they had answered, for all free men to hear, the silent question posed by Petkoff's grave: "Am I my brother's keeper?"

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