Not Just Numbers

Two years ago the S.S. Marine Flasher put into New York with the first postwar group of Europe's displaced persons. Their entry had been eased a little, but not much, by presidential directive. Since then only a corporal's guard--some 36,000--of the continent's driven D.P. army of 900,000 have been permitted to push past the gates.

How had they been received and how had they fared? Last week, as the U.S. observed "I Am an American" Day, the answers could be found in hundreds of U.S. cities and whistle stops. The answers were heartening.

Room for Lots More. In Peacock Station, Va., Farmer Paul Rhinehart, 76, stood before a rachitic barn and pointed to Marian and Irma Zielezinski, who were feeding a yardful of clamorous chickens. Said he: "Here I was with 600 acres of the best land in northern Virginia. I just decided to get ahead of Congress in this building-a-new-world business."

The Zielezinskis, who are Poles, arrived a fortnight ago with their two baby boys, two suitcases and nothing else. Dark-haired, snub-nosed Marian had been a German prisoner for four years; he met his wife in a Salzburg D.P. camp. At Farmer Rhinehart's, they would get not only a house but $100 a month. "A dream," said Marian.

Said Farmer Rhinehart: "Right away he puts his hands like he was giving them to me for a present--like to ask me where he should start working. We can't speak a word to each other but we sure piled up a heap of understanding. I hope this is just the beginning. Room here for lots more Poles, Jews and whatever kind of farmers they got left."

There was room, too, for girls like 21-year-old Vera Harvey in Boston's suburban Brookline. Her parents had been killed in a gas chamber. She had been put to forced labor, kept in concentration camps, dressed in the torn garments taken from the bodies of other prisoners. Friends of her family brought her to Boston a year ago. Now she works for the National Council of Jewish Women, waits on table in a Cambridge restaurant, assiduously studies English. She says: "The most important thing here is freedom."

"The Greatest of All . . ." In Shorewood, a suburb of Milwaukee, strapping, 17-year-old George Kalman, once a Hungarian, rolled up a sleeve, displayed the blue, tattooed numbers of the concentration camp on his arm. His hardest problem in the U.S., he said, had been "to adjust myself to being a human being again, not just a number." Sent to the U.S. by United Service for New Americans, Inc., he spent a year in the Milwaukee Jewish Children's home, now lives with foster parents. At Shorewood High School, he plays football, boxes, is an orator of parts. But in the timbre of his voice there was more than rhetoric: "We have everything here . . . super highways, aspirin, fine hospitals, penicillin, atomic energy, bubble gum, Buck Rogers ... All these, plus the necessities of life. But the greatest of all is the temple of liberty."

To thousands of D.P.s in Europe, George Kalman's temple of liberty was still a remote sanctuary. Last week, two Democratic senators proposed that 200,000 displaced persons be admitted to the U.S. in the next two years. A Republican measure would halve even that number.

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