Bridge to Freedom

Icy winds whipped the dry snow into waist-high drifts around the little police station at the Austrian border town of Rechnitz. Inside, a policeman huddled close to a well-tended fire. Suddenly there was a knock, and the door slammed open to admit a wintry blast of air and a man with a baby in his arms. "Please," he muttered. "Out there. My wife. More women and children. More people." Then he fainted. The policeman cranked his old-fashioned telephone, muttered a few words. A siren wailed and within minutes the able-bodied men and women of Rechnitz were mobilized to aid another group of refugees from the other side of the Hungarian border, offering succor, shelter, food, warmth and welcome.

It was an old story in Rechnitz and in many another border town of the nation which more than any other has opened its heart and its hearths to refugees from Hungary. Committed to formal neutrality by the treaty that drove the Russians out of their country less than two years before, the people of Austria have been far from neutral toward the refugee Hungarians. Alone of all nations, they welcomed the halt, the blind, the sick and the aged among the refugees and did not seek to pick among them.

In the weeks since October, most of the nations of the West and a host of private charitable organizations, ranging from non-sectarian groups such as the International Rescue Committee to Catholic, Jewish, Quaker and other religious charities, have pitched in to help. But Austrians still carry most of the burden. Of the 170,000 refugees who have poured over the border since October, 65,000 remain in Austria, and the cost of maintaining them runs $40,000 a day.

Winter winds and stricter regulations on the Hungarian side have cut the nightly flow across the border to a mere trickle, but even this trickle adds up to about 700 refugees a week who must be cared for, along with those already there. Last week Austria's Interior Minister Oskar Helmer complained:

"Austria is utterly tired of having to ask. beg or haggle for every dollar and over the acceptance of every refugee." His complaint is directed chiefly against the U.S., which, if it took in as many refugees in proportion to its size and wealth as has Austria, would have to "admit 500,000 Hungarian refugees instead of 24,000." Most of the 65,000 still in Austria refuse to go on to other European countries, he added, for fear "they will lose their chance of being admitted to the U.S.": under present U.S. law, Hungarians are no longer regarded as refugees once they have left Austria.

"Little Austria has been a bridge to freedom for 170,000 people," was the way one Austrian puts it, "but you can't stay on a bridge forever."

West Germany, which has taken in 14,000 Hungarians, last week closed its doors against any more. Reason: it has enough refugees of its own to take in. The flood from East Germany increased from 3,500 a week before Christmas to 4,500 a week in January.

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