Displaced Diplomats

Not all refugees had to take to sailing ships to escape the Red grasp. Last week's news was full of D.D.s--displaced diplomats. In Washington the Polish embassy military attache, General Izydor Modelski, ordered home by his Communist-run governme'nt, had point-blank refused to go, asked asylum in the U.S. He had a soldier's blunt reason: "I have never been a member of the Communist Party, nor have I ever been in sympathy with its aims."

Jan Wojnowski, Poland's consul in Milan, Italy, was a bit subtler about it but he had the same general idea. A studious, courteous, bespectacled book collector, he had never been very happy in his consulate. Last summer, after a trip home, he cut out meat, ate only tea and toast for supper and gave up buying books. Staffers wondered why he was saving his pennies. Last week they found out.

Two days after his replacement arrived from Warsaw, the ex-consul bade them all farewell and proudly displayed two tickets for home, via Venice. Boarding the train next day, he bundled his family off before it reached Venice, roared across the Swiss border in a taxi and hopped the first plane to Johannesburg, South Africa. At the same time the Czechoslovakian Ministry in Rome became impervious to telephone bells. Czech Minister Jan Pauliny-Toth had slipped across the Swiss border, London bound.

Timid, red-nosed Grigor Moisil, Rumanian ambassador to Turkey, may have longed to do much the same thing. He heard that Foreign Minister Ana Pauker had purged his good friend Justice Minister Lucretiu Patrascanu, and lived in fear that he himself would be called home. Last week, within a 24-hour span, four announcements in Ankara gave a clue to his state of mind: 1) the Turkish government announced that Grigor had decided to quit his post and move to Switzerland; 2) the Rumanian embassy announced that he had died of eating poisoned mushrooms; 3) the Rumanian embassy announced that its first announcement was a hoax to get even with the Turks for their announcement, and 4) Grigor himself announced that all former announcements were greatly exaggerated.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.