_The Long Procession_
“The blight of the detention-camps in time of peace, which is the
blight of innocent brothers’ and sisters’ frustrated lives, and the
plight of millions who now must answer to the hideous appellation
of ‘expellees,’ are no longer simply a subject for humiliation and
regret. There is more here even than a stark challenge to Christian
compassion. You have been able to see and judge for yourselves: more
insistently than ever at this hour that the agony of the so-called
‘displaced’ is a summons to prompt and responsible community
action.”—His Holiness Pope Pius XII to group of American Congressmen
studying problems of the displaced and expelled of Europe.
Opposite the railway station in the town of Salzburg, Austria, is a
tremendous hotel, now partly ruined by bombing. The large sign on the
front of this hotel reads: HOTEL EUROPE—REFUGEE CENTER.
This sign is symbolic of all Europe and more particularly of Western
Europe. The entire Western continent is crowded with people who have
fled from their homes, or who have been forced out of their homes and
homelands. There are the regular Displaced Persons who are cared for
in camps; the new displaced persons who are fleeing from tyranny and
persecution in Eastern Europe; there are the thousands of displaced
Jews, the pitiful remnants of a race which has undergone the most
terrible holocaust of blood of the ages; and finally, there are the
Expellees, close to 12 millions of them. I have tried in these chapters
to give a realistic picture of life among these Expellees because, from
the point of view of large-scale help, they are the most abandoned, the
most helpless, the most inconsolable of the refugees of our day.
EXPELLED WITHOUT RELATION TO INDIVIDUAL GUILT
The HOTEL EUROPE—REFUGEE CENTER contains close to 500 of these refugees
within its partly destroyed walls. These men, women and children were
evicted from their homes and farms in Yugoslavia without relation to
any individual guilt or crime. They were dumped into a partly destroyed
Austrian hotel in 1945, and they are still there. The men have all
found some kind of work because they are energetic people and are
willing to do anything to keep their families alive. The women try to
make homes out of the corners of draughty rooms. They look to the world
for a word of recognition of their plight. Up to now, they have found
little recognition or understanding. This symbolic HOTEL EUROPE is the
end of the road for these expellees whom we call the Pilgrims of the
Night.
It happens that the Expellee group in and around Salzburg represent
one aspect of the whole problem, that of the Volksdeutsche, or ethnic
Germans. These had been, for centuries, the citizens of such countries
as Yugoslavia, Rumania and Hungary. Their ancestors had been invited
to settle in uncultivated regions in an earlier age in European
history, when boundary lines were not so sacred as they are now, and
when racial and national distinctions had not attained the tremendous
importance now granted to them. Three hundred years ago the ancestors
of the Germanic minorities drained swamp-lands of the Voyvodina area of
present-day Yugoslavia, and laid the foundation for making this area
one of the most productive of the entire region. Though the descendants
of the settlers continued in most cases to speak a dialect of German
(owing to the compactness of their village colonies and the lack of
communication facilities) they were considered Yugoslav citizens on an
equal basis with the other heterogeneous nationalities that were joined
together after World War I to form the new country of the South Slavs.
Similarly, the German ethnic groups in the Banat region of Rumania and
Hungary were citizens of those countries, with the same duties and
rights as other citizens, including the duty of conscription into the
armed forces of the country in which they lived.
Expulsion was particularly bitter for the Volksdeutsche groups of
South-Eastern Europe because to them Austria and Germany were alien
lands. There was little or no feeling of kinship with the local
populations which were forced to receive them. Besides their different
mode of speech, it was found that even their manner of dress was
distinctly alien. It was as though the United States descendants of the
first settlers from England and Holland were driven back into English
and Dutch communities precisely because their ancestors in some rather
remote past had originated there. The kinship would certainly have been
lost over the centuries even though similarity of language remained.
These Volksdeutsche colonies are sometimes understood to have been
planted by Hitler for imperialistic purposes. Nothing could be further
from the truth, although some members of these German ethnic groups
did prove themselves amenable to Nazi arguments. Because of these
individual traitors, whole masses of people have now been deprived
of their rights and dispossessed of their farms, their homes, their
businesses and factories. Of the three hundred and ten thousand
Expellees in Austria, the greater number are Volksdeutsche.
Such tracts of rich farmland, such businesses and factories carefully
built up over years of patient effort, fell as rich plunder to the
new regimes of these Eastern countries. They were used as booty for
distribution to other settlers—innocent pawns who by reason of the
acceptance of these homes and lands are now bound in vassalage to the
regime that can take and give away without reference to any of man’s
needs or his rights.
All savings, pensions, accumulated possessions for old age, were lost
to the expelled people and they found themselves starting life as a new
kind of pioneer—unwilling pioneers in already overcrowded and partly
destroyed regions—pioneers not of hope, but of despair.
It is open to question how long the communities sheltering these
unwilling settlers can bear the cost of this heartless dumping of human
cargo into their midst.
Public welfare agencies find that their heaviest burdens in welfare
and in unemployment payments, come from the presence of the expellees.
Local taxes go in large measure to the upkeep of the expellees who
are invalid, aged or infirm. Payments to expellee dependents of dead
servicemen, to the disabled, and to the necessitous Expellee families
on an emergency basis, etc., totalled one billion three hundred and
fifty million D marks in the last three years. The religious charitable
agencies have performed a work of rescue that is almost unparalleled
in history. For example, Caritas, or German Catholic Charities, had
collected up to the end of 1948, 210 million D marks for direct help to
expellees. In addition to this, scores of new institutions have been
opened since the war to take care of the aged, the sick, the orphaned
and returned POWs of the expellee group. The Hilfswerk and the Innere
Mission of the Lutheran Church have performed a rescue work of similar
magnitude and Christian generosity.
However, the solution of the expellee problem is far from being
found. The crisis of expellee help is now. Unless energetic action is
undertaken within the next year to find basic solutions for the problem
of the twelve million expellees, of whom seven and a half millions are
in the Western Zones of Germany, it is unlikely that Western European
recovery will become a fact.
THE PYRAMID OF CHAOS
As this is being written, unemployment in Western Germany is rising in
such a way as to suggest the terrifying army of the unemployed in an
earlier era—the era that ushered in Hitler. More than 2,000,000 men
are already out of work, with prospects of a rise to 3,000,000 in
the winter to come. Any economist who analyzed the pyramid of chaos
in Western Germany could have foreseen the shattering of a false
prosperity by so enormous a drop in employment. The pyramid of chaos
of post-war Germany is a five-tiered structure, at the base of which
is the indescribable destruction of modern warfare with its saturation
bombing of urban centers. It would have been the task of a generation
to restore life and health into a battered and almost lifeless economy,
without the hindrance which came from the next tier, or block, of the
pyramid—the division of this highly centralized nation into Eastern
and Western zones. In addition to the sealing off of the zones from
each other by artificial economic and governmental barriers, there is
the graver problem of the complete detachment from Germany of large
agricultural and industrial areas to the East. The products of these
areas might conceivably have made the difference between solvency and
economic bankruptcy to a Germany which must eventually attempt by
some measure to feed its own population, and balance expenditures for
necessary imports with credits earned by exports. A third tier was the
dismantling of factories that had been turned to wartime uses—a program
that provided much employment during the three years immediately after
the end of the war. Such dismantling activity was deceptive because
it gave a wrong impression of the problem of unemployment in post-war
Germany. But all the time, the workers knew they were destroying their
own livelihood with every day’s work; and they knew, too, that many
of the plants could have been reconverted to their earlier peacetime
operations.
Higher in the pyramid of chaos is the problem of the forced labor
of German prisoners in Russia. By virtue of this, a labor force of
enormous proportions is kept from the reconstruction of a destroyed
economy.
As the highest block in the pyramid, and conceivably the block that
will topple the whole structure of Germany’s economic life, is the
presence of the Expellees, if we wait until the structure topples, as
well it may when and if 3,000,000 Germans find themselves unemployed,
there will be frantic measures, hastily rushed into execution, to meet
such problems as that of the Expellees. But waiting only endangers the
stability of Western Europe as a whole, because nothing can happen in
Western Germany without deep repercussions in Free Europe as a whole.
It would be well then to take a realistic view of the Expellee problem
and see it as the “inflammatory material” for the West that it really
is. It was the High Commissioner for Germany, John J. McCloy, who
stated in his broadcast to the nation entitled “Progress Report on
Germany” that, “Inflammatory material exists in the _vast numbers of
refugees_ and in homeless youth.”
Whether we look on the expellee problem as a human, social, religious,
or as a predominantly economic problem, we cannot escape the fact that
this group of expelled and unsettled people is a danger to the recovery
of Western Europe as a whole.
That little piece of earth which a man owns and from which he draws the
sustenance to nourish his children, belongs to him under the laws of
God and man, and cannot be alienated from him without breaking asunder
those laws. The only real solution to the problem of expelled human
beings is to restore the operation of the natural law, and of the moral
law which used to guide nations as well as individuals, by giving back
their homes, farms, and businesses which were expropriated. Regardless
of any political considerations, regardless of frontiers, regardless
of historical bitternesses, or desire for retribution, this fact is
irrefutable. Naturally, anyone with a broad vision of Europe’s past,
present and future, must see in these mass expulsions of millions of
human beings from the land which gave them sustenance, the unmistakable
symptoms of a deep and malignant sickness of society.
The vision of Europe with these millions of homeless driven creatures
is one that must give rise to the deepest concern, since peace cannot
be established without real justice, and real justice demands that all
those from whom homes have been taken should have these homes restored
to them—whether it be in Eastern Poland or in Eastern Germany.
Failing a solution based on real justice, there are other solutions
which take the problem as it presents itself, and proceed from there.
Herewith are four ways in which we as Americans, with concern for
our neighbor’s welfare, can at this moment approach the problem of
expellees:
(1) RECOGNITION OF EXPELLEES AS INTERNATIONAL PROBLEM
Since the expulsion of these people was begun and given impetus by
international agreement, it is unthinkable that the whole burden of
resolution should lie upon the people of an impoverished and destroyed
nation. This problem internationally created (after the Potsdam
agreement) should be studied and resolved by international action of
the countries who can help or receive the expellees.
(2) RELOCATION WITHIN GERMANY
The expellees were distributed in Germany and Austria on a haphazard
basis. Intellectuals were unloaded in out-of-the-way villages, farmers
were dumped into industrial towns, and skilled workers and artisans
found themselves in agricultural sections. The land reform in Germany,
with its breakup of the remaining larger estates, will allow for the
resettlement in Germany of only a certain number of farming families.
A. _Agricultural Resettlement_
A brilliant overall study of the Expellee problem has been prepared
by the Catholic Refugee Council of Germany under the sponsorship of
Cardinal Frings of Cologne, the Papal Protector of Refugees. This
study, published as a pamphlet in English and German, and entitled
_Economic Rehabilitation of Expellees in Western Germany_, analyses
the make-up of the refugees as regards former livelihoods, and finds
that more than 250,000 families now in Western Germany (embracing a
total of 750,000 persons) were self-employed as independent farmers
before expulsion from their homesteads. It is estimated that in the
next decade about 80,000 farm holdings in Western Germany will become
available for resettlement, owing to lack of heirs and other causes.
Forty thousand of these farms will be allotted to Expellee farming
families. In addition to this, the breakup of larger estates, the
utilization of former army and Nazi property, and the reclamation of
waste land and unused farmland, will release farmsteads to accommodate
another 60,000 Expellee family groups. Even the resettlement in this
manner of 100,000 Expellee families would require the use of more
credits than now seem available in the German economy. But granted
that these 100,000 family groups are placed back in their professions
on the land, there is still the problem of 150,000 family units whose
accustomed mode of life was independent farming. We will mention this
group again in discussing emigration possibilities.
Another 1,400,000 persons in the Western Zones were engaged in forestry
and in other forms of agriculture; many of them were laborers and
agricultural artisans. The resettlement of this group has been somewhat
easier, since many have already adapted themselves to a life which
involves working on the farm holdings belonging to the native German
population. As the Expellees belong to more favorable age and sex
groups than the native population, their placement in such labor was a
natural solution in innumerable cases to a shortage of manpower.
B. _Redistribution and Rehabilitation in Work_
Very little further work can be done in the advantageous placement
of workers according to their skills until the haphazard dumping
process of the Expellees on the German landscape has been corrected by
a planned redistribution of the newcomers in areas that can in some
measures absorb their particular work-experiences. While I was in
Germany, a general relocation of this type was getting under way—the
process of transplanting the Expellees from their temporary haven in
Schleswig-Holstein to the Southern area of Germany, or what was the
French Zone. While Schleswig-Holstein, a poor province industrially,
had to accept an enormous number of expelled people, the large area
under French occupation did not take any of the homeless group. The
argument was that as France had not signed the Potsdam Agreement,
allowing for the mass expulsions, the French authorities were not
obligated to accept any of the people uprooted by the expulsions. Now
that the three Western occupation Zones are unified in the Bonn Federal
Republic, the area of the French Zone is being used to accept settlers
from the most overcrowded provinces.
The redistribution process begins with the finding of job opportunities
for the working member of the family. The worker comes first, and
after living quarters are found for his dependents, the family unit
is reestablished. This process of relocation, while it relieves the
population pressure in Schleswig-Holstein, does not solve other
economic problems. Uneconomic family units, for example, widows
with small children, grandmothers or grandfathers with younger
non-employable family members, are not accepted in such a scheme, and
must remain in the relatively poor province as heavy burdens on public
and private welfare agencies. However, the relocation of the workers is
in itself a great good, since many people who could not find work in an
agricultural area will become producers in a more diversified economic
setting.
This redistribution process must go on all over Western Germany, until
the maximum number of Expellees are again made producing citizens
in fields that are allied to their experience and skills. Already
the native diligence of the various groups among the Expellees has
manifested itself in the setting up of enterprises under the most
difficult and unpromising conditions. In this connection, I would
mention the St. Stephen Village, near the destroyed city of Darmstadt.
Here in a sandy waste, marked by bomb craters, a group of Hungarian
Expellees of Germanic origin saw the opportunity to grow vines similar
to those they had cultivated on a sandy tract of Hungarian soil. With
help from Catholic agencies, this group cleared the sandy expanse, and
not only planted it with vines, but with the other crops, including
potatoes, that are complements to the vine-growing economy. Working
at first with borrowed tools, the men later found it possible to make
their own cultivators and other farm tools from the scrap they found in
the neighborhood of flattened Darmstadt. Three barrack structures were
erected for the first settlers, and later, 14 families were placed in
barracks quarters in a nearby village. The little village, named after
the patron saint of Hungary, was created out of zeal and faith during
the darkest days of hunger and chaos in Germany.
A similar tale of zeal and hard work comes from the village of
Mottgers in Hesse, where a group of weavers from the Sudetenland found
themselves placed after the expulsion. In a few abandoned army huts,
they immediately set to work to fashion handlooms. When twenty had been
made, and by some means the men and women were already busy weaving,
these ingenious exiles were granted seven mechanical looms as long as
they could manage to obtain the raw material. In a short while, the
new enterprise was turning out 22,000 yards of textiles every month.
This particular group was a unit under the guidance of its parish
priest who, fortunately, was able to stay with his parishioners in
their exile. Under the guidance of the parish priest, the workers are
now able to mobilize their resources to turn rubble into bricks for
the erection of new homes. Wherever some kind of work is provided, the
hunger for a little home asserts itself, and every privation is endured
until the four sheltering walls are raised.
Other enterprises of the Sudetenland exiles already under way are
glove-making, glass-making and lace-making establishments. These
growing businesses are further testimony to the traditional energy of
the people of the Sudetenland area, the products of whose hands and
brains were for a long time made for world markets. The taxes on the
Sudetenland enterprises were a large source of the monetary support of
the Czechoslovak republic.
[Illustration:
Rubble is turned into homes. All the family helps.
]
[Illustration:
The St. Johann housing development for Expellees proceeds as the
builders place their homemade bricks one upon the other.
]
Twenty-five thousand among the Expellees in Western Germany are said to
be former owners and operators of independent industrial enterprises.
About a fifth of their number have already established small factories
or industries in their new environment. One of these industries I
saw in operation near an Expellee village in Westphalia. An old barn
had been converted into a wood-working establishment, where skilled
woodworkers turned out door frames and other necessary items to convert
mass barracks quarters into individual dwelling units.
Statistics reveal that there are among the Expellees, about 150,000
formerly self-employed artisans, or skilled handicraft workers. These
in the main lack tools, raw materials, and places to work, and are
therefore prevented from making any real contribution to the economy of
their present surroundings.
The self-help projects initiated by the Expellees with such
indescribable ingenuity, have been carried just about as far as is
humanly and materially possible. After the currency reform, when
holdings in marks were all but wiped out, the Expellee enterprises
suffered cruel set-backs. It must be remembered that the small capital
of the Expellees was in marks because they did not own equipment or
real property. Some of the small industries, begun with such sacrifice
and back-breaking work, went under after the currency reform. The
capital levy (lastenausgleich) for the equalization of burdens, was
designed in some measure to equate the sacrifices of the money reform
over the whole community by taxing real property. But the exiles often
lost their precariously organized livelihood just the same.
From all accounts, the greatest need in the setting up of productive
enterprises today, is for credit. The larger, well-established
industries, if they are operating at all, get help under the E.C.A. in
the form of raw materials. The health of German economy, and of German
social life as a whole, depends and will depend in a particular way, on
the nurturing and keeping alive of the small industrial enterprises.
These are the economic units that can absorb the skills of the uprooted
and the disinherited, and turn them back to the ways of peace and of
contribution to others—rather than to the nihilism that surely faces
them if their hands are idle, their skills unused. The nurturing
of these smaller enterprises would be the only way to absorb into
useful work the half million youths whose lack of future imperils a
whole generation. Too great a rationalization of work processes with
labor-saving devices is no solution in an economy where there are so
many idle hands. The small workshop would seem to be one answer. The
various land governments of Western Germany already understand this and
have managed to guarantee credits of 300 million D Marks for workshops
and small industrial enterprises. Even this sum is only a small
beginning but it shows an awareness of social and economic realities.
Now that the D Mark is more stable, and gives a real economic incentive
to work because of its buying power, the availability of credit is
crucial to any revival of employment in Germany, and for the increased
employment of Expellees in particular. To avoid the further social
disintegration of greater unemployment, I would propose that the new
Ministry for Expellee Affairs in the Western German Republic be given
a real role to play. This Ministry might receive through E.C.A. the
means to extend credit for the continuance and initiation of Expellee
enterprises and for the necessary redistribution of the Expellees
according to their skills. Some counterpart funds have already been
allocated for this, but it would hardly be fair to tie up a great
amount of counterpart funds in this way. What I am suggesting is an
entirely new grant under E.C.A. for the uprooted people of the West as
a token of understanding of the urgency of the problem.
A special study of the costs of the economic reestablishment of all
the Expellees within Western Germany, reveals that about twenty-seven
billion D Marks, or about seven billion dollars would be needed for the
task. A fraction of this sum, if allocated now, would obviate great
tensions and dangers later.
Already the Expellees are forming into political units to plead their
cause. If little recognition of their plight comes to this disinherited
group from the West, there are fears that a nihilistic trend will seize
them—a trend of thinking that nothing could be worse than their present
sub-proletariat existence.
“Here is the rock on which all our plans can smash,”[2] an Allied
official was quoted as saying in reference to the success of political
agitation among the Expellees. Political strategists are described in
this dispatch from East Germany as trying to take advantage of the
fact that “the refugees largely unemployed and many of them living in
desperate poverty present an area for political agitation unparalleled
in any Western European country since the advent of the Marshall Plan.”
It is precisely because the Marshall Plan has not touched the lives
of these forgotten people that it is proposed here that a substantial
grant be made through the Western German Federal Republic to the
Ministry for Expellee Affairs. The lifeblood of credit would then begin
coursing through the economically moribund community of exiles.
C. _Reestablishment of Families through Housing Projects_
I have tried to describe the housing conditions in which the Expellees
have been living these years of peace. A few figures will clarify the
overall situation. Approximately five million housing units are needed
in Western Germany as a whole to give a decent minimum of living space
to the inhabitants crowded into the already densely populated area.
Even if a quarter of a million housing units were built each year, it
would be twenty years before the situation would be regularized.
The Red Cross of Switzerland surveyed the housing situation in Bavaria
with reference to the Expellees, and came to a more pessimistic
conclusion. Whereas in May, 1939, there were just about seven million
rooms for the seven million inhabitants in Bavaria, there were in May,
1949, only six million two hundred thousand rooms (as a result of war
destruction) for an increased population of nine million four hundred
thousand inhabitants. To return to the conditions of ten years ago,
three million two hundred thousand units would be needed. Were these to
be constructed at the rate of 100,000 yearly, it would take thirty-two
years to return to the housing situation of 1939.
The Catholic Church in Germany has been in the forefront of the
struggle for improvement in housing conditions for Expellees, as well
as for bombed-out native Germans. There existed in Germany, until it
was liquidated by the Nazi regime, a Catholic Settlement Service, for
the promotion of adequate family dwellings and housing developments.
This Catholic Settlement Service was reconstituted on the initiative
of Bishop Maximilian Kaller by the Fulda Conference of German Bishops.
In every German Diocese there is an autonomous branch of the Catholic
Settlement Service, whose headquarters are located in Cathedral Place,
Frankfurt-on-Main. Already, housing developments for Expellees are
springing up all over Germany, developments that show remarkable
degrees of initiative and community cooperation.
The diocesan Settlement Committee consists of representatives of
Caritas, or Catholic Charities, and lay representatives including
engineers and architects. This Committee serves as advisers to the
self-help group which initiate the projects. There is a three-month
course given at the Frankfurt-on-Main headquarters of the Catholic
Settlement Service on the planning aspects of housing developments,
while another three-month course in the actual building and financing
processes is given at a new housing development in Hettingen near
Buchen. The housing project in Hettingen was one of the first to be
realized, and is under the inspired direction of a forward-looking
priest, Father H. Magnani. In Hettingen, the Church gave to the
homeless some land it possessed, and a building cooperative was formed.
Planning was done in the winter, and in the spring housing for 150
homeless people was begun and carried to completion.
In the diocese of Aachen, the Church deeded over enough property for
4,000 people to plan homes for themselves on a self-help basis. In
the diocese of Augsburg, the “Christian Housing Aid” has rebuilt more
than 1,000 homes, while in the Bamberg diocese a large housing project
for Expellees is under way. This is the “St. Joseph Expellee Housing
Project” in Bamberg itself, while in Erlangen, in the same diocese,
the diocese has set aside a large parcel of property for a similar
development.
Many more examples could be given of the Church’s tremendous struggle
to put the uprooted families back into homes of their own. The
Catholic Church works side by side with the Lutheran Church on this
social problem, since there exists also the Settlement Service of the
Evangelical Church to carry out a similar task. The mutual concern of
the Christian Churches is the protection and rehabilitation of the
family, and of family life.
The energy and zeal of Church leaders in this regard has been
magnificent, and is matched by the hard work of the homeless, once
they see there is hope of reestablishing their families outside the
barracks or mass quarters. In almost every destroyed town in Germany,
the visitor can see men and women making bricks, often with the aid of
rubble-crushing machines. Children join in the work after school, and
the houses are raised in record time. Voluntary effort, however, can
only point the way. Large-scale resettlement within Germany calls for
extensive credits and overall planning. A housing development plan for
Expellees, wisely planned in connection with relocation according to
skills and available work, would go far toward solving the unemployment
problems for several years to come. Without these extensive credits,
which can only come through the E.C.A., there is no real hope for so
large a scheme.
(3) PLANNED EMIGRATION
Much has been said regarding emigration from Germany as a solution
for the Expellee problem. Within limits, there is certainly much to
be said for the emigration of some groups to areas of the world that
could absorb them. However, one must bear in mind that the demographic
picture of the German population is catastrophically out of balance
now, and that any emigration which would unbalance it further, would
be a disaster. Thus, any large-scale emigration of able-bodied men,
already so few in relation to the dependent population (orphans, aged,
war-wounded, etc.) would cause great concern to those interested in the
future well-being of the people as a whole. As was mentioned before,
there are about 150,000 formerly independent farming families for whom
there is little hope of reestablishment within a Germany from which 28
per cent of all arable land has been taken since the end of the war.
There are among Expellees, as I have pointed out, many groups who come
from far away, and who by the fact of their history and experience
are natural pioneers. These are the Germanic groups from Yugoslavia,
Rumania and Hungary, whose fame as hardy farmers and colonizers is
well known. These people are not attached to German soil because their
forebears have not lived on it for generations. In this, they differ
from the native Germans who were expelled from such areas as Silesia
and East Prussia. The Germanic groups from East Europe would make
excellent emigrants.
At the same time, a siphoning off of about one hundred fifty thousand
to a quarter of a million families by emigration would allow the
remaining Expellees to be integrated into the industrial and
agricultural life of Germany. The St. Raphael’s Union, a Catholic
emigration organization which was disbanded by the Nazis because of its
rescue work for persecuted Jews, has now been restarted and is ready
to help in any and every emigration scheme. However, the St. Raphael’s
Union, though helped by funds from American Catholics, has not yet been
able to effectuate much in the line of emigration from Germany because
of the restrictions placed by the Allies on any such plans. Since its
reactivation, the St. Raphael’s Union has been able to resettle only
9,000 people in various receiving areas of the world. The inclusion
of 54,744 Expellees in the latest United States D. P. bill, and the
assurance of paid transportation for them as for other displaced
people, give increased proof of the growing realization that active
measures must be taken towards a resolution of the Expellees problem.
Renewed hope for the reactivation of the program of emigration has
arisen as a result of the inclusion of 54,000 Expellees in the latest
United States legislation to admit DP’s.
Selected groups from among the expert farmers and technicians might be
valuable adjuncts in any and every scheme to raise the living standards
of peoples in backward areas—and might well be used as colonizers in
connection with certain aspects of the so-called Point Four Plan for
the development, industrially and agriculturally, of far-flung areas of
the world.
(4) CONTINUATION OF VOLUNTARY AID
It is understandable that Americans are beginning to wonder why it
is necessary to continue giving to Europe so many years after the
war was ended. They know that their taxes are being used in the
economic rebuilding of Western Europe. So great was the catastrophe
of destruction and mass expulsions, that Western Europe needs every
help that can come from governmental sources, as well as the continued
support of religious relief organizations. It is hard for us to realize
the staggering difference between World War I and World War II in the
indescribable immensity of destruction and dislocation of life.
Caritasverband, Catholic Charities of Germany, is heavily overburdened
with the large dependent groups among the Expellees. It is Caritas
which reaches out to the helpless aged and the helpless young, to
the orphaned, to the sick prisoner of war who comes back from slave
labor to find that his family has disappeared. Three hundred and three
Caritas institutions have been founded or replanned to serve the
Expellees in the past five years of privation. Of these, one hundred
and sixty-eight are Homes for the Aged, sixty-five are Children’s
Homes, while the remainder are hospitals, Prisoner of War Hostels and
other institutions to meet special Expellee needs. If the protective
and loving hand of the Church of Christ were removed from these people
in their hour of helplessness and need, their night of despair would be
unrelieved by any light.
The religious problem presented by millions of Catholics in
predominantly Protestant sections, destitute Catholics who lack
churches, parish centers, schools and even cemeteries for their dead,
is a problem that we Catholics can ignore only at great peril to the
future of the Church. These little chapters have been attempts to bring
closer to ordinary Christians the enormity of the burdens placed on
other ordinary people—and to remind all who are able to help that they
must give that help in this time of crisis.
THE LONG PROCESSION
Up to now, the expellees living in their slave labor barracks, in their
half-destroyed hotels, even in their stables, have not been recognized
as a great international and human problem. It is because of this
that they have been excluded from international help and international
planning. We have called them “The Pilgrims of the Night,” because they
have walked a road that was so dark and impenetrable in its misery and
hopelessness. We Catholics of America, whose hearts are so open to
the anguish of others, must see them as part of the long procession
of those who have suffered since the beginning of the persecution in
Europe in the last fifteen years. The dispossessed have been driven
forth, wave upon wave, from their homes: Poles and Balts to the unknown
wastes of Siberia, Jews and Poles and the rest to the ovens of the
crematoriums. There are the Displaced Persons of many lands who can
never walk back to their beloved homes and homelands, the men and women
and even little children who flee in terror from the East to the West,
and the Expellees, whose procession is so long because there are so
many millions of these poor driven human beings still unsettled, still
homeless.
In an article entitled “The Homelessness of God,” Ida Gorres relates
the homelessness of the millions to the homelessness of God who has
been driven out of our hearts. She says:
“Millions of men have been taken from their native soil and driven
like loose sand over the face of the earth, refugees from every class
and of every kind, defenseless strangers meeting with strangers,
having a good reception from good men and a harsh one from hard
men. How many new words our language has produced which would have
been incomprehensible to anyone some years ago, and all intended to
describe the one thing, that men are without homes any more. In every
street in the world, down to the last out-of-the-way village, one
can hear strange tongues and see strange faces belonging to foreign
peoples and to different stocks but all betokening an encounter with
the same cruel fate, both men and women, young and old. No, never
since the dawn of history has the like been known. Is this not in
truth a sign, a pattern and a likeness of what we have ourselves done
to God?”
If we did not contemplate this long procession of anguished humanity
with the eyes of the spirit, it would be difficult not to give in to
despair. Only the Christian answer to the great mystery of suffering
gives any clue to the understanding of the limitless anguish that
has beaten its way over the face of the earth in our time. The long
procession only has meaning when we remember that each poor driven man,
woman or child who walked in it trod in the very footsteps of One who
long ago made a lonely pilgrimage—burdened by the cut tree that is the
symbol and explanation of all our suffering, and of all our hope.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] _New York Times_, February 19, 1950.
Transcriber’s Notes
Pg 26 Changed: at any time during his capitivity
To: at any time during his captivity
Pg 52 Changed: between the ages of fourteeen and twenty-five
To: between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five