The Welcomed

Pressed against the breast-high wooden barrier, a bearded elder stared at a faded photo, glanced up, stared again, then strained his eyes searchingly across the New York pier (see cut). Everyone in the crowd behind him was searching too. A pair of hands reached up out of the throng, jiggling a rudely crayoned sign: "Yaget--Welcome."

The welcomed, looking anxiously from side to side, walked timidly down the gangplank. A flock of orphan children huddled protectively together, like sheep filing into a chute. A tired old woman scanned the faces along the barrier, paused, drew a great sobbing breath, then collapsed into the reaching arms of her daughter.

Thus, last week, Europe's dispossessed began to pass through the gates of America. The gates, once wide and welcoming, then shut, had been swung slightly ajar by a presidential directive admitting refugees under normal immigration quotas.

Many of the first arrivals carried the tattoo brands of Nazi concentration camps or the less visible, equally indelible marks of the sole survivor. Most had the cautious and disbelieving air of those who have learned that no journey has a safe or happy end.

Bluma Berman's parents had been killed in Poland and her husband had died a prisoner. Bluma had told a U.S. soldier, while in an UNRRA shelter for displaced persons, that she believed she still had an uncle and aunt, Max and Jenne Grossman, living somewhere in New York. The soldier wrote to his sister in Pennsylvania, the sister wrote to Travelers' Aid in New York. Travelers' Aid looked up every Grossman in the New York phone book. When Bluma stepped off the boat, Max and Jenne Grossman were on the pier.

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