Embarrassing Witnesses

France, with its generally proud record of hospitality to political refugees, was one of the first to open its borders to the Hungarians. But a good many of the 9,500 fugitives who made their way there were unhappy last week. Among other reasons, they themselves were living testimony to the failure of the workers' paradise, and thus were proving embarrassing to France's Communists, who set out to make the refugees' lives as miserable as possible.

The Communist newspaper L'Humanite, though hampered by the fact that most refugees were plainly workingmen, seized every chance to prove that if they could not be damned as rich reactionaries, they could at least be branded as fascists. L'Humanite delightedly front-paged a story claiming that one Frenchman had discovered an ex-Gestapo torturer among them. More purposefully, Hungarian-speaking comrades were smuggled into the camps to spread tales of alarm. They told refugees that they would get lower pay than Frenchmen in any job they were given, that if they accepted work at all, they would lose their refugee status and any chance of moving to another job in another country, that all the young men would be drafted into the Foreign Legion, and even that France was a Stalinist country and that they were destined for concentration camps. Three weeks ago, under pressure of such rumors, 300 Hungarians poured out of a refugee camp at Valdahon and made a wild scramble for the Swiss border 30 miles away, returned only when the Swiss refused to admit them.

Last week the Communist-run C.G.T., France's biggest labor union, instructed local officials to threaten factory and mine employers with a strike if any Hungarians were hired. Like any other confidence man, the party wanted no swindled customers mingling with the suckers and queering its pitch. Its alarm was well-founded. Already, C.G.T. membership has fallen off sharply in factories where Hungarians had gotten jobs.

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