The Face of America

To the dazed eyes of Hungarian refugees in Andau. a small Austrian border town east of Vienna, the awful majesty of the United States of America was seen in the face of a bureaucrat. It was a stern face, a doubting face, and behind it lay the answer as to whether each particular refugee could find haven in the U.S. The tired, dazed refugee could hardly be expected to notice that it was also a red-eyed face, a face sagging with weariness in a round-the-clock humanitarian effort. From their Communist masters, the Hungarians had heard much about the face--all of it bad.

Somehow, they had held on to a visceral faith. This, in Andau. was the moment of testing.

There was no air of Christmas holiday in Andau's refugee camp. Men, women and children slept in utter exhaustion on straw pallets. A middle-aged woman awoke with a start, already weeping. She stared around in hysterical terror. Near her, a young man gazed emptily at the ceiling, suddenly leaped from his mat, clutched a filthy rag to his mouth and ran for the door, vomiting as he went. A little girl danced happily around the room, holding a tattered rag doll to her breast, then sat down on the dirty floor and cried soundlessly, helplessly in the shocking, numbing discovery that the long trip of escape was ended.

"We Are Jews." Morning, noon and groaning night, all conscious attention was turned to the closed doors behind which American immigration authorities worked to speed the screening process for entry into the U.S. They were hampered by the impersonal provisions of the McCarran-Walter Act, which took everything into account but the human heart. Nonetheless, under orders from Washington and by their own compassion, they were straining the law to its utmost to make their nation live up to the refugees' unseeing, unreasoned faith.

In one room, a thin, taut refugee and his handsome wife sat before an immigration inspector. The man answered questions rapidly. He was a skilled instrument maker. He had belonged to a union--but never to the Communist Party (membership in the Communist Party is the one sin that the inspectors, under the McCarran-Walter Act, can never forgive). What was his religion? The man and his wife paled with fear. "We are Jews," he whispered. The inspector nodded. Down went his hand--to stamp approval on their entry papers. Speechless, the man and wife arose, reached for their children and hugged each in turn.

"Perhaps I Was a Coward." In the next office, another inspector questioned an aging woman in a shabby black overcoat. She was a spinster, a piano teacher. How and why had she fled to Austria? Her answer was confused: she had never been mistreated; she had simply been afraid. The inspector looked at her thoughtfully. Down went his stamp.

Up the hall sat a third inspector, confronting a big, soft, middle-aged man and his wife. The man was a factory worker. He had never joined a union. How, then, had he kept his job? The man squirmed. Well, he said, it had never been necessary to join. The inspector's eyes narrowed. Had the man taken part in the Budapest revolt? The man looked at his wife. She looked at him. They shared a mutual agony. Whispered the man: "I stayed with my wife in our flat. Perhaps I should be ashamed. Perhaps I was a coward." This was truth, the truth itself. The inspector stamped the papers.

By this week more than 6,000 such Hungarians had been airlifted to the U.S. They had gazed, no longer with dead eyes but with new hope, at their new land. They had gone through a good deal of red tape--but red tape, when skillfully cut, can make a beautiful Christmas ribbon.

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