Life in the Shade

Frank White, chief of TIME'S Bonn Bureau, reported last week from Berlin:

THERE was a time when everybody in West Berlin was a hero. That was during the Russian blockade, when the allies with their airlift and West Berliners with their quiet solidarity and their brave mixture of patience and humor broke the siege and made fools out of the Communists. But day by day, in the four years since, West Berlin has been living under another kind of Communist siege, encirclement and calculated harassment. Nobody finds himself a hero any more. The drip treatment has left its mark on the once jaunty spirit of West Berliners.

It has even touched West Berlin's massive, rumpled Mayor Ernst Reuter. Last week, gazing over a raddled cigar into the cold grey of the morning outside the Rathaus window, he grumbled: "Terrible. Terrible and depressing. I wish I were away somewhere, in the sun."

Fresh Furrows. The sunlessness of life in West Berlin is an observable thing. It is reflected in the headlines, telling of fresh furrows in the "dead zone" which the Reds are digging between their own sector of Berlin and Communist East Germany beyond. It shows in shabby gangs of unemployed who shovel slush out of ice-clogged streets--obviously refugees unused to manual labor.

Americans may picture refugees as stoic people with babushkas and cardboard suitcases. Actually, they are scared, often hopeless people, and they come with nothing, for baggage in East Germany is a sign of flight or intent to flee--punishable offenses. Though the Communists methodically plug one exit after another into West Germany, 1,000 refugees a day now pour into West Berlin, and authorities expect the figure will eventually climb to as much as 3,000 a day.

They slip into West Berlin furtively, usually on a streetcar or subway train. Dazed by fright and fatigue, they seek out a policeman; he directs them to a three-story brick building in Kuno Fischer Strasse in the British sector. In a jostle overhung with the smell of sweat and disinfectant, they are registered and assigned to a refugee center. Berlin now has 78 of them, large & small. One is a former bomb shelter without windows. Another, which I visited last week, is a hastily reconditioned former factory where each of 11,800 refugees gets a cot, about 2 sq. yds. of floor space and a mess dish.

There is no hot water and the food is ladled out of five-gallon cans. As I talked to broken men, silent women, sick children, the sameness of their clothing, their sadness and their words was crushingly monotonous. Many were farm people. Last season the Communists made them give up their seed crops and slaughter their pigs, cows and calves to meet agricultural quotas. The farmers knew that they could not possibly meet next year's higher quotas, so they fled.

The Three Judges. At the camps, the refugees wait at least six weeks, often longer. They are screened by allied and West German intelligence. Ultimately each stands one day before a three-man tribunal and gets a chance to prove that he is a bona fide political refugee; this means he must show he stood to lose his means of livelihood or his life under the Reds. If he succeeds, he wins the cherished rating which qualifies him to be flown west (at the expense of the West German government) for a chance at a new life.

But the tribunal is severe and disqualifies 40 to 45%. Last week a woman who fled East Germany because she could not get insulin for her diabetic child was denied refugee status. The court was sorry, but her reason was insufficient. The rejected are not forced to go back to Communist territory; they enter a kind of purgatory, joining West Berlin's 125,000 other jobless pariahs, without work cards, and on a near-starvation dole.

A Leering Farouk. Along the 66 streets which connect West and East Berlin, there is still heavy pedestrian traffic, though Communists have now closed their stores to Western shoppers, and have a nasty habit of tinkering with the transport system, making it harder for the 35,000 West Berliners who work in the Russian sector.

At the other end of the 66 streets, something ominous and unfathomable is now going on, and Berlin is full of rumors. The Moscow-dictated purge, which has already hit two East German cabinet ministers, is pushing deeper. The two stooge "nonCommunist" parties of East Germany have been ordered to "cleanse" themselves. There are other signs: e.g., East German Premier Otto Grotewohl was conspicuously absent from a formal ceremony marking Lenin's death.

In West Berlin a nightclub named St. Pauli is doing well with a new striptease act billed as Venus im Schwimmbad, which features a Keystone cop and a leering King Farouk. The opera is packing them in. On Sunday frozen ponds in the Grunewald twirl with skaters. But over it all hangs the sunlessness, and the drip treatment continues. If the Russians should get even tougher and try to blockade the city again, Mayor Reuter says quietly: West Berlin has stocked enough food and fuel to hold out for a year, without resupply from the West.

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