Safe Haven

Twenty-two miles west of Milwaukee, in the little (pop. 1,190) town of Hartland, pupils and faculty members of the Arrowhead High School paraded into an apartment for which they had paid the $55 month's rent out of student-council funds, set to work scrubbing the floors, hanging curtains, stocking the larder. Soon a grateful Hungarian butcher, his wife and five children moved in. For Otto Bauernhuber, who just a few weeks before was cutting beef to feed his fellow rebels in Budapest, the warmth of new friendship and the brightness of his new home were marvelous if bewildering realities.

On Chicago's South Side, a Hungarian carpenter named Felix, his wife and two children settled down in a small apartment furnished by friends and relatives. Soon Felix got a job in a furniture factory at $1.25 an hour. Like many of the new immigrants, the couple still so strongly showed the boot marks of Soviet terror that they could not shake off their tenseness or wariness, kept their window blinds drawn, reporters at arm's length. Said a Hungarian friend, who arrived in the U.S. in 1948: "It takes about two years to realize what America is like. Not the things you can buy, but the things you can say. I can say something about President Eisenhower, and nobody will lock me up. Felix, he is just like a monkey put in a box and released somewhere in Alaska."

The U.S. was doing its earnest, if at times disorganized, best to meet the Hungarians' needs, and to make its position clear to the world. When Russian tanks drew up before the U.S. legation in Budapest to intimidate Hungarians who were seeking American aid, Deputy Under Secretary of State Robert Murphy called in the Russian embassy's Counsel Sergei Striganov in Washington, condemned the Soviet action, called it a reflection of the "deplorable situation in Hungary." demanded that his message be brought "immediately to the attention of the Soviet government."

Proclaiming United Nations Human Rights Day, President Eisenhower called upon the nation to "take to heart the lessons the Hungarian people have written in their blood ... in their indomitable will to be free." This came on the heels of his order establishing "Operation Safe Haven," a plan to bring the announced quota of 21,500 Hungarians (TIME, Dec. 10) to the U.S. by Jan. 1. Set into motion by the Defense Department, Safe Haven will carry 5,000 people aboard three oceangoing transports, about 10,000 aboard MATS and commercial planes. U.S. Labor Department officials aboard the three ships will process the Hungarians, hope to have them job-classified by the time they reach U.S. shores.

At New Jersey's Camp Kilmer, where a few hundred refugees still await help from eager welfare agencies, U.S. Army detachments prepared new shelter and service facilities for the big rush. In the hurly-burly of processing, the bureaucracy managed to remember that Dec. 6 was St. Nicholas Day. In many European countries, St. Nicholas leaves presents in the newly polished shoes of the good children, switches and pieces of coal for the naughty ones. For the 51 children still awaiting settlement at Kilmer, there were toys, dolls and candy. No such observance had been permitted Hungarian children since 1947.

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