Chapter VIII: 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.

Rubble is turned into homes. All the family helps.
]

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