The Unwanted

There are 46,000 of them left, the last of the 5,000,000 displaced persons who surged into Germany after World War II and huddled there. The rest have been sent back to their own countries or resettled in new ones by the International Refugee Organization (I.R.O). The ones who remain are the culls, or in social workers' lingo, the "residual group."

This week, at the end of 1951, the I.R.O. went out of business, leaving the 46,000 behind as a legacy to a nation that does not know what to do with them. Before these unwanted D.P.s--nearly all Slavs, almost no Jews--stretched a black future: mere charity subsistence from the West German government, and a gradual descent from misery to despair.

In the Sokolowski Hut. The 46,000 live in 104 camps scattered through Germany--104 Ellis Islands, with no entrances into the mainland of normal life. One of the camps is Augustdorf, in Westphalia. Nearly a quarter of the 1,800 people there have tuberculosis; 180 of the children are illegitimate. A spot on a lung in Augustdorf, as in the other camps, is a standard blackball against emigration; there is a black market in X-ray plates of healthy lungs.

In one of the camp's huts lives the Sokolowski family. They left their native Poland as the Red army moved in in 1944. The father, Jan, held a railroad job briefly, but now is unemployed. For seven years he has lived from camp to camp with his wife and four children: Olga, now 19; Roman, 18; Irena, 16; and Eugenia, 15. Recently he got an offer to move to the U.S. to work on a tobacco farm near Buffalo. The family packed and got set to go. Then pale Olga pressed her flat chest against the X-ray plate: a spot on one lung--active TB. Ineligible.

After an agonizing debate, the family decided to split, leaving Olga behind to try to make her way as a dressmaker. But the Sokolowskis' sponsors, the National Catholic Welfare Conference, opposes splitting families, and would not undertake Olga's guardianship.

The Down Escalator. When they heard the bad news, the Sokolowskis showed no emotion: repeated disappointments have made people like the Sokolowskis dull-eyed and apathetic. Blocking their exit is a barricade of bureaucratic tests, sensible safeguards imposed by governments who are glad to admit the useful, but firmly exclude the physically ailing and the politically suspect. They have been picked over like animals, their teeth inspected, their arms examined. Some lack the ability to work; some are ex-Communists, or are rejected on the grounds of moral turpitude--which may mean either that they stole some bread or coal in the horrible winter of 1946, or that they are hardened criminals, as a number are.

Many even develop a kind of attachment for the dreary camp life, the crowded rooms, the bare electric light bulbs. In this lazy, squalid existence they keep warm and they get food. Whatever skills the men once had have rusted from disuse. It would take strong character to resist decay, and many of these people do not have strong characters. Out of the lives of the rejected have gone dignity and hope.

The Waves. During and after World War II, the D.P.s came into Germany like the waves of the sea, millions of them, wave upon wave. All the waves looked alike: bewildered people in ragged clothes, clutching children and bundles. But the waves were different:

P: Some had been brought to Germany as Hitler's slave workers; others came voluntarily to take good jobs. Some sluiced into Germany in terror before the advancing Soviet armies. Some fled from Tito. This broad wave totaled 5,000,000. P: Then there was the wave of ethnic Germans, the Volksdeutsche, whom the Big Three at Potsdam agreed to return to

Germany from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. These toted up to 8,000,000. P: There was another wave of 1,000,000 Germans, fleeing from East Prussia. P: In 1946 a pogrom in Poland sent 100,000 Jews fleeing into Germany. P: In 1948, when Stalin took over Czechoslovakia, a new wave began to roll: those who fled the Iron Curtain.

Many of these waves have been absorbed. The Zionists took care of most of the Jews, and the Germans, whose economy is now going at a higher rate than in Hitler's heyday, have absorbed the 8,000,000 Volksdeutsche and the 1,000,000 East Prussians, as well as a few of the early D.P.s and most of the recent Iron Curtain refugees.

Of the 5,000,000 D.P.s at the end of the war, the I.R.O., which was created by the United Nations in 1946, has helped send 3,500,000 back to their homes, has resettled more than 1,000,000 in 70 countries (the U.S. has taken 300,000). At one time the I.R.O.'s chartered ships made up the largest fleet of passenger steamers in the world.

To replace the I.R.O., a 23-nation conference, meeting recently in Brussels, decided to set up a successor organization, which is expected to take over the I.R.O.'s chartered ships. The U.S. pledged $10 million to it. The emphasis will be not on D.P.s, however, but on a different problem : the resettlement of the great surplus populations which exist in some countries, especially Italy.

Two Problems. The West still has two refugee problems on its hands--and is doing almost nothing about either of them. One is the new problem of refugees from behind the Iron Curtain. They are now detained for weeks in a squalid camp at Valka, outside N"umberg, until they get a job or emigrate. Most of them are strong hands and are being absorbed, but at Valka a new group of unwanted is developing. Nothing is being done about them. Although Radio Free Europe carefully does not urge Iron Curtain listeners to escape, its iteration of the attractions of freedom often stirs the discontented to seek it.

The second problem is what to do with the Sokolowskis, the 46,000 people left over from the early wave of D.P.s. TIME Bureau Chief Eric Gibbs cabled after touring the D.P. camps:

"We might as well face it honestly that these remaining D.P.s are for the most part no economic, social or political asset. There are a few good hewers of wood & drawers of water to be exported. The remaining people are liabilities, and the problem must be tackled in those terms. It is no good peering at their X-ray plates and exclaiming in horror, 'Oh, but this girl has active TB!' Of course she has. That is why she and her family are still rotting in Germany.

"What we are now faced with is frankly a salvage operation. The numbers are not so large that the whole Christian world could not handle the problem if the people were distributed among the nations."

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