Untitled Page 1

OverviewTranscribeVersionsHelp

Facsimile

Transcription

Status: Indexed

May 20, 1960

Hello folks,

Goodness- George has been to Berlin and returned and even taken another
excursion- and here I am, late again. Perhaps by now you are used to
this routine. At any rate, as I wrote to him only last night, he just
got to see Berlin in time with that Mr. K acting up. And, frankly, I
shall be very happy to greet him on June 11th in San Francisco. Some-
how we will prefer to have him on this side of the "pond" and he seems
to be counting the days too.

April 28th, 1960

I have a few minutes before going to the Berlin Philharmonic so will
start a letter to you.

We have spent both morning and afternoon in seeing the refugee situation.
We began this morning at the main reception center here in west Berlin,
where the refugees come first of all after crossing the border into east
Berlin
and then crossing again into west Berlin.

First of all we had a very informative lecture from the director of the
center, himself a refugee in 1951. Some statistics he gave were well
worth repeating: Since world war 2 there have been 3.4 million refugees
from east Germany, not counting those from other lands such as Latvia,
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland etc. Germany has a present popultion
of about 54 million; of these, 13 million are refugees from somewhere
behind the iron curtain- i.e. 25% of the whole population! That is a
lot of people to absorb especially when three foirths had another lang-
uage, customs, etc, and of, course, none of them could bring more than a
suitcase or so with them, many of them not even that much, so it was
also quite an economic problem and still is.

Even more interesting are the more current figures; for example, the
monthly refugee flow so far this year: January 5,300; Feb. 5,900;
March, 8,000; April to the 26th, 14,000. One reason for the rise since
Feb. is that the Communists have put on a big push to collectivize the
farms and also the handworkers etc who remain self-employed. This has, as
the numbers show, driven thousands of farmers to make the very dangerous
trip to Berlin to escape to the west, where they must now face the diffi-
culty and hardship and uncertainty of starting life from scratch. The no.
of farmers jumped from 200 in Jan. to 2,400 in the first three weeks of
April, after the new laws came in. The phychological [psychological] importance of west Ber-
lin
as an escape valve for refugees from Communism cannot be exaggerated!

After the backgroung [background] speech we split up into groups of ten to sit in on
the actual interviews given to all new refugees. These people must show
good reason for having left the Communist country in order to be granted
refugee status in west Germany (this preventing infiltration and also
preventing the complete flooding of west Germany with refugees to house,
clothe, and feed) and hence they are questioned by a committee of three
former refugees to verify these reasons. We got to listen to four cases,
were permitted to ask questions when we didn't understand something- this
was, I thin [think], the most informative experience of the day, giving a unique
insight into how Communism goes about its slow but relentless job of
taking over the lives of the common people in service of the state.

Notes and Questions

Nobody has written a note for this page yet

Please sign in to write a note for this page