Smugglers' Trove

In Manhattan last week, three forlorn people mingled with the crowds and peered wistfully into the shop windows of the promised land. The young couple was Rumanian, the slim youth Polish. To get there, they had endured years of homelessness, hunger, danger and bitter waiting--and now that they had arrived, they could not expect to stay. They were illegal immigrants, caught on a last desperate attempt to smuggle themselves into the U.S. Temporarily, they were at liberty on bond.

For 15 hours, they had lain, nearly suffocated, in the noisome hold of a 45-ft. schooner as it rolled and pitched on the voyage from Havana to Florida. But the U.S. border patrol had been tipped off from Cuba; an amphibious plane had spotted the ship and radioed a report to shore. They were seized as the schooner slipped into the little fishing village of Marathon, 100 miles south of Miami on the Florida Keys.

They were the latest victims in a traffic that has made the southeastern U.S., and Florida in particular, the center of the U.S.'s newest and busiest smuggling operation. Since 1939, more than 150,000 of Europe's homeless refugees have poured into Cuba, nursing hopes of hurdling the narrow barrier between them and the land of opportunity. More than 4,000 were turned back last year, as they tried to enter the U.S. illegally through the ports and coastline of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina. For smugglers, they had proved a treasure trove of desperation.

Beans & Rice. The refugees had found no welcome in Cuba, where aliens (except for a few technicians) are not allowed to work, and naturalization takes five years. Unable to leave or support themselves, they wrote frantic letters to friends and relatives in the U.S., besieged the U.S. consul for a place on the quota (the best they can hope for is a five years' wait), entered into hundreds of deals for spurious visas and fake Cuban citizenship papers. They moved from one shoddy rooming house to another, ate black beans and rice at corner kiosks and fly-ridden restaurants, endlessly cadged and figured and wangled. As their savings dwindled, many became desperate. Some stowed away on ships; others turned to the smugglers.

By night, the smugglers' boats crept into the mangrove-fringed inlets of Florida's Keys, their running lights doused, their engines throttled down to a throaty chuckle. Among the trees a car waited, ready to whisk the refugees northward through Miami. The smugglers' boats are mostly goletas--small, dirty fishing smacks and schooners used in the coconut and banana trade. Often, the goleta will rendezvous with a faster U.S. boat for the run to the Florida coast. Masters of bigger boats prefer to land their cargoes further up the coast, as far north as Norfolk, to elude the border patrol. Lately, light planes had entered the traffic, flown by ex-service pilots.

Black Smoke. The three refugees were typical. Slight, nervous Arthur Woloski had the number 166773 tattooed on his arm. His parents perished in Nazi gas chambers. His own knowledge of Nazi concentration camps was thorough: it showed in the black gaps in his white teeth, the bayonet wounds and whip marks on his shoulders and ankles.

At Auschwitz, he said, "We could tell by the color of the smoke whether those being burned had been starved to death or still had flesh on their bones. If they had starved, the smoke was black. If it was white, they still had flesh."

U.S. relatives got Refugee Woloski as far as Cuba. But he could not get on the quota, could not get a visa as a student, could not get work. At a restaurant where refugees congregate in Havana's cobbled barrio judio (Jewish quarter), he met a smuggler's agent named Simowitz. The price was $600.

Pink-cheeked, stocky lancu Hersju was a prisoner in Buchenwald, his wife in a concentration camp in Rumania. After three years in a D.P. camp in Italy, they wrote an uncle who runs a small grocery store on New York's East 96th Street. He wangled their entry into Cuba, sent them money for the trip. Like Woloski, lancu could not get work in Cuba. The smuggler's price to the Hersjus was $2,000.

This week a U.S. lawyer, hired by their relatives, prepared an appeal to the Immigration Service. He pleaded that it was political persecution to send them back to Poland or Rumania, or back to Cuba to starve. However their case was decided, they would get no help from a strict reading of the U.S.'s muddled immigration laws. There was no direct provision in the statutes for Woloski or the Hersjus and thousands like them.

Last week the Displaced Persons Commission reported that the 80th Congress' Wiley-Revercomb law was just what Harry Truman had called it--"a pattern of discrimination and intolerance wholly inconsistent with the American sense of justice." The law, the commission declared, was "all but unworkable." Because of its restrictions, only 2,499 had been admitted in the first six months of its operation (it was scheduled to admit 205,000 in two years). The law excluded thousands of Jews and Catholics who fled from postwar pogroms and Communist coups. As written, the law also required job assurance for adolescents and aged grandmothers as well as for the ablebodied.

The commission recommended that D.P.s be required only to give the assurance given by quota immigrants: that they would not become public charges.

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