The Long Road

When Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia back in 1939, Hans Lenk's world was washed from beneath him. In the years after World War I--during which he served as a captain in the Austro-Hungarian army--he had built up a prosperous export business in Carlsbad. But the Nazis, busily stripping Jews of their fortunes, sent him to the Dachau concentration camp, then released him and told him to get out of the country--or else.

Hans and his brother Fred got visas for the Philippines, hoping eventually to begin life anew in America. Six months after they got to Manila, the Japanese attacked. Both men volunteered their services to the U.S. Army and went into action. They fought through the whole campaign on Luzon, went through the Bataan death march, spent three years in Jap prison camps. Fred was later killed by American bombs, but Hans--stricken with tuberculosis and weighing only 90 Ibs.--was still alive on V-J day.

He was full of hope. He believed that his war service entitled him to citizenship. Then he was told that he had merely been a civilian employee of the Army, and could expect none of the citizenship favors bestowed on aliens who serve as U.S. soldiers. He stayed in shattered Manila three more years, spending his back pay from the Government on medical treatment. Finally, in 1949, he got a visa to the U.S. He was shipwrecked off Okinawa; by the time he got to San Francisco, the TB had flared up again.

Relatives in the U.S. helped him gain admittance to the National Jewish Hospital at Denver and this winter, his TB arrested, he arrived in Kansas City. Friends saw to it that special bills for permanent residence were introduced in both the Senate and the House, but Congress did nothing about either. Last week, 60 years old and almost penniless, Hans Lenk was beginning to lose hope at last. Unless Congress acted, he would have to leave the country in less than a month and start all over again the whole slow and painful task of trying to become an American.

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