"Open on the World"

His mother rushed into the room, her arms filled with flowers, her eyes filled with tears. Then came his sister, the burgomaster, the scores of well-wishers from all over the bustling (pop. 14,000) city of Huy, Belgium. At first, the slender, 48-year-old Dominican priest could scarcely believe the news: the Nobel Committee of the Norwegian Parliament had just awarded him the 1958 Nobel Peace Prize. "I'm too young." Father Georges Pire protested. But an hour and a half later, he sent off his acceptance: "Say thank you to Norway, whose heart has replied so splendidly to mine."

For 20 years, thousands of wretched victims of this century's upheavals have learned to know the heart of Father Pire --"the heart open on the world." In 1938 he set up a nationwide organization to help the poor, during the war ran holiday camps for children who had been evacuated from the cities, and at night served in stealth as a chaplain with the Belgian resistance. Then, one day in 1949. he heard a lecture by a U.S. UNRRA official describing the plight of Europe's D.P.s. "It was such heartbreak," recalls Georges Pire, "such despair that it suddenly seemed to me that there was nothing I could do--except do everything I could to remedy all that."

"Monstrously Alone." After a tour of camps for displaced persons ("Our century has probably created no image more terrible than the one evoked by that expression"), he set up a network of godparents who "adopted" D.P. families. Relying solely on gifts, he opened a home for aged refugees in Huy. later opened three more in other Belgian towns. But he soon came to realize that providing food and money was doing next to nothing to cure "the malady of the D.P."

The displaced, he found, "suffer from 'a rusting of the soul,' from a total uprooting, not only from their own countries, but from the world of men. They are alone, monstrously alone, and completely deprived of love. These people are sitting on a suitcase in a station, and have been waiting all these years for a train that will never come."

The consuls and do-gooders from foreign lands seemed willing to help only the young and able--"a miner or a ditchdigger. We have a widow with nine children. No one ever came for her." Pire's idea was to build special "European villages" for the D.P.s--not a separate community, a potential ghetto, but "a neighborhood glued onto a city." Often he ran into ugly resistance: one Swiss village refused to allow him to start a home for aged refugees because it did not want to enlarge its cemetery; a German burgomaster got a letter threatening dire consequences should

Pire bring his "gypsies" around; an Austrian village wanted to erect a high wall around the D.P.s to keep them from stealing the farmers' apples. But one by one, Pire's five villages were begun. (One is named after Albert Schweitzer; he wants to name his next after Anne Frank.

Toit, Terre, Travail. The D.P.s came to them from as far away as Siberia--a Czech who once taught Latin, an elderly seamstress, a family who lived 14 years in refugee camps. But for Pire. they were never "beggars living off our crumbs." They got "toit, terre, travail" (roof, land, work): "We help them, but only halfway, the other half coming from them." He thought it essential for women to find pride in keeping a clean house with curtains at the windows, and men in earning their own wages, before the "weight of the odor and the noise" of the D.P. camps would fall away, and settlers would be capable again of love and hope.

In nine years Dominican Pire thinks he may have traveled 250,000 miles telling the story of the D.P.s. "My subject is not exciting," he warns his listeners. "My subject is misery." But that very misery, he feels, may "serve to unite us," to establish, at least as a beginning, a "Europe of the heart . . . Two ideas are dear to me. The first is that for us each refugee is a man, a being of infinite worth, who deserves all our attention, all our love, whatever his nationality, his religion, his learning, his poverty, his moral misery. The other idea is. so to speak, the certainty of the deep unity of the human race. Newton said. 'Men build too many walls and not enough bridges.' " For Nobel Laureate Pire. there are still many bridges to be built for the 200,000 European refugees that his heart has as yet been unable to reach.

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