Displaced Person

Omaha, a city with a "welcome stranger" past, has been good to displaced persons. When a slight, sad-eyed Yugoslav named Eugene Stefan got there this summer with his grown-up daughter Heddy, he felt that he had found a haven at last. World War II had made him a wanderer; his wife had died of hardship, his mother had died in a concentration camp and his sister had disappeared. Afterward, Tito's government had refused him the right to go home to Yugoslavia.

Stefan, a 54-year-old ornamental ironworker, was luckier than most of his fellow D.P.s: he had relatives in the U.S. His brother Martin runs a bar in Omaha and cousin Karl Stefan is a Republican Congressman from Nebraska. When he got to Omaha, brother Martin took him in and provided for him and his daughter. Last month his luck was even better--the Omaha Steel Wrorks needed an ornamental ironworker and Stefan got the job.

One morning last week when he got to the plant gates, he discovered that a quickie strike had been called, and that more than 300 structural steelworkers and machinists were refusing to go to work. Their reason: as long as there were 3,000 jobless in Omaha, the company shouldn't go and hire a foreigner. Stefan loitered uncomprehendingly outside the plant for some time before he discovered that he was what the fuss was all about.

Company officials protested that they had violated neither the spirit nor the letter of their contract with the union. Labor Leader Gordon Preble, a former steelworker, was adamant. The union, he said, was not impressed by "the song & dance about this guy's mother and sister being persecuted and murdered."

Next day Stefan quit his job and the union sent its men back to work. Said his brother, bitterly: "I had hoped to show Eugene our American heart and our American way of living. I have been here for 37 years and I never saw anything like this."

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