MAY 13. 1949
THE CANADIAN JEWISH REVIEW
Y
7
ENTER: THE DPs BY LEGAL PERMIT OF THE UNITED STATES
By Loula D. Looker, In The Survey, Of New York
One crisp, sunny day last month I stood on a Hudson River pier watching the passengers leave a newly arrived ship. The last time I had been on a New York dock was almost ten years ago when I debarked from a liner which had left Europe just three days before Germany invaded Poland. Ours had been an escape de luxe from a Europe about to blow up in a devastating war. Today I had come to greet arrivals from Europe who had not been so fortunate as I. Europeans all, they had been caught in the catastrophe and had suffered experiences so devastating as to be almost beyond my powers of comprehension. The end of the war had brought them little comfort and for three years they had been living in camps for the displaced. I watched them as their pitiful baggage was examined by the customs � pitiful, but precious, for it represented all their worldly possessions. Except for their worn clothing they did not look "different"�as we are wont to think foreigners and immigrants must look. With few exceptions they might have mixed unnoticed with the native bom population in any part of the United States.
The pier was a hubbub of movement and noise. Tears, laughter, shouts mingled with a Babel of strange tongues. Relative meeting relative wept or laughed aloud in the release of long pent up emotion. A few babies wailed in the excitement. But in the midst of the confusion there was order and dispatch. On the pier with me were representatives of the United States Displaced Persona Commission, the International Refugee Organization, and of six of the national welfare agencies that are cooperating with the commission in helping Europe's homeless take advantage of our Displaced Persons Act of 1948.
The agencies represented were: th* Wax R�Ua� Barries* af-ikr. National Catholic Welfare Conference; the United Service for New Americans; the Church World Service; Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society; the International Rescue and Relief Committee; and the Ukrainian Relief Committee. Each had a booth at the pier, around which newcomers, tagged with the agency's initials, rallied for instructions on what to do next For most of the debarking passengers had come to this country under the auspices or at least through the services of one of these agencies. And the agency representatives were on hand to carry out the responsibility of getting them from the port of entry to the jobs and homes that awaited them in communities throughout the country.
The 399 arrivals on the 13,000-ton Marine Shark that day brought to 3,912 the total number of dis-.placed persons who had come to the United States since October 30, when the first boatload of DP's eligible for entry under the new legislation steamed into New York Harbor, The reconverted army transport had been chartered by the International Refugee Organization� the UN agency responsible for moving displaced persons to and from assembly and processing centers throughout the world to countries of resettlement. Here was the seventh group of DP's�men, women and children�who had arrived under the terms of the Displaced Persons Act.
In accordance with the law's requirements, jobs and housing obtained by some interested individual or agency were awaiting each family somewhere in the United 8tates. Sponsors or their delegates were ready to greet them. Transportation to their ultimate destinations had been secured. All these arrangements had been previously approved by the Displaced Persons Commission in Washington, set up to facilitate this latest hegira of the oppressed to our shores. The Marine Shark's passengers included artisans, farmers, professionals �a cross-section of a normal community, except that with the average age of twenty-nine, the group as a whole probably included a larger percentage of potentially
productive individuals than most communities.
These people had gone through soul-searing experiences. One wondered how they had survived, why they had not lost hope. I talked to a few of them at random. They seemed to be consumed by an overwhelming emotion at their good fortune at coming to the United States and their determination to become real Americans as quickly as possible.
There was the tall, handsome professor of chemistry from Vienna, with his charming wife and pretty daughter of eighteen and a laughing blue-eyed little son of three, born in a DP camp in Germany. A political refugee, he was how on his way to a small college in Minnesota, where arrangements had been made, via a Lutheran minister, for him to be in the research department "But only until he's more familiar with American ways," said his American aunt, explaining that the college needed a chemistry professor. Her own joy was tempered by the fact that the family could not stay with her for a while because a new semester at the college was about to begin. The man's wife, however, seemed anxious to get to Minnesota. "We must not look backward," she said.
Then there were the two sturdy peasants, originally from Augsburg and their five children, ages five to fifteen. They were on their way to a dairy farm in North Carolina where both the parents will work. The jobs were arranged for them by the Church World Service, whose representatives were looking after them on the dock. "We don't know our employers yet," the wife told me, "but we know we'll get along. For we're good dairy farmers, and well work night and day to make a home for our children."
One of the most poignant reunions I witnessed occurred between a yormg man and" woman, both probably in their twenties. Man and wife, they had been parted nearly two years ago soon after they were married in a DP camp. The new bride came to this country shortly afterward under the German quota, but her husband, a Pole, had to await special litigation before he could get a visa. Now, thanks to the Displaced Persons Act he was here. Amid tears and laughter, they told me of the job awaiting him in Chicago, where
the wife has been living with relatives.
I spoke to one man who stood apart from the rest, looking lonely and desolate. He told me he last saw his wife and daughter when they were all in Dachau, notorious concentration camp. "I was strong, I could work," he said. "They were weak, so they didn't let them live." He was en route to Newark, New Jersey, where he planned to continue his trade as shoemaker.
The youngest arrival was a healthy looking baby girl of eight months, who slept blissfully on a bench in the waiting room amid the noisy confusion. She was surrounded by admiring American relatives�ten of them! Her young parents were somewhere out on the cold dock not yet discharged�but the humane officials had given them permission to hand over the baby to the relatives so that she could be taken where it was warm. A cousin told me they were the only survivors of a wider family circle of "at least a hundred relatives�all victims of the Nazis." Their romance had also blossomed in a DP camp.
How much happiness or contentment any of these newcomers will find here depends on the attitude and actions of America at the grass roots. For they are headed for communities in every section of the country.
Interest at the grass roots is also the spark plug that sets in motion the complicated process of getting a displaced person out of an assembly center in Europe and into a job and home in an American community. For it takes an interested group or individual at the place where the DP will resettle, to find the job, home, and assurance against dependency that the law requires. The local communities are also the ultimate support of the voluntary national groups that are cooperating with the official agencies in adtnlBietitag shs W.
Stimulating grass roots interest is one of the major functions of national voluntary agencies working with DP's. To this end they work largely through indigenous groups � social agencies, women's clubs, service clubs, churches and synagogues � to make them aware of the DP's, not only from the humanitarian point of view, but also in relation to the advantages that DP's selected for their special skills can bring to the communities.
When an individual or a group asks for a DP who may be known or unknown to the sponsor, the national agency sets the machinery going that will bring him here.
But the procedure is complicated and time-consuming. An "assurance" that the DP will not become a public charge and will have a job and housing on arrival must be initiated in the United States by a public or voluntary agency, a relative or a prospective employer.
(Continued on Page Nine)
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BRAVE 13-YEAR-OLD GIRL SAVES BROTHERS AND SISTERS
WINS
DOW
AWARD
VIVIAN HARPER
of Hodgson, Man., writ frogody o> homo burnt 90 miot aorta of Wmmipog
13-year-old Vivian knew that it was up to her to save her 6 younger brothers and sisters. She tried to fight the flames, but when the blaze got out of control she took the children and started for the nearest house.
Exhausted from carrying two children, she collapsed . . . and told the others to carry on. It was below zero when the farmer arrived and picked up Virian and her two charges.
Her heroism resulted in the saving of 6 lives. We are proud to present her The Dow Award.
1. The fire beyond control, Vivian got the children out of the house . . . and, clad in only a light dress, she started the trek to a farm house, a mile away.
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