Untitled Page 141

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 day 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 the west Berlin
where the refugees came first of all after 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 refugees
from east Gemrany not counting those from other lands such as Latvis
Czechoslovakia Hungry Poland etc. Germany has a present population
of about 54 million of those 13 million are refugees from somewhere
behind the iron curtain i.e. 25% of those whole population: That is a
lot of people to absorb especially when three forths 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 5300: Feb. 5900;
March 8000; April to the 26th, 14000. One reason for the rise since
Feb is that the Communist 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 the west where they must now face the diffi-
culty and hardship and uncertainty of starting life from scratch. The no.
of farmers jump from 200 in Jan. to 2400 in the first three weeks of
April after the new laws came in. The psychological importance of west Berl-
in as an escape valve for refugees from Communism cannot be exaggerated;

After the 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 county 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 think the most informative experience of the day giving a unique
insight into how Coounism goes about its slow but relentless job of
taking over the lives of the common people in service of the state.