Now Is the Hour

One day last week, Polish Counselor Aleksander W. Rudzinski wearily rose from his seat on U.N.'s Committee on Statelessness. He pattered obediently after his Soviet puppetmasters who were putting on yet another walkout to protest the presence of a Nationalist Chinese delegate.

Soviet walkouts were an old story to Rudzinski. But this time he kept on going. He walked out the door of U.N., out the door of the Polish consulate in New York where he was also legal counselor, and out the door of Polish citizenship. Stateless Person Rudzinski appealed to the U.S. for aid and asylum, in the cause of preserving Poland's "independence and initiative . . . in relation to the Soviet delegation." --

Similarly, and almost simultaneously, the time for decision was at hand for two members of Czechoslovakia's consulate in

New York. Since the February 1948 coup in Prague, Acting Deputy Consul Vladislav Matejcek and his colleague, Arnost Fried, had been mulling over when to break with their Communist government. On the same day Dr. Rudzinski mailed his resignations to the Polish U.N. delegation, Matejcek and Fried mailed theirs.

The Czechs, too, asked the U.S. for asylum. Tall, good-looking Matejcek, 40, brushed off reporters' questions about a "sailing order" said to have been handed to Fried. "Those recall orders," he laughed, "are ludicrous. They don't exist. You get a phone call, are escorted to a plane or ship, never even given your tickets, and that's the last that's ever heard of you."

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