REFUGEES: The Huddled Masses

Bedraggled and mud-soaked, footsore and soul-worn, the first planeload of Hungarian refugees debarked into the crisp free air of New Jersey. A few carried cardboard suitcases holding the residue of the past. Weary men in caps, somber-faced women in babushkas, children suddenly aged, paraded into the warmth of American hands. As the U.S. Army Band played Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No. 5 hundreds of waiting Americans wept.

For American officialdom, inured to the cold, classic ploys of bureaucracy, the 1956 wave of huddled masses was a strange but warming experience. In Vienna, the U.S. Consulate staff processed the stream of Hungarians round the clock; even Pennsylvania’s Democrat Francis Walter, co-author of the restrictive McCarran-Walter Immigration Act, returned from an inspection trip along the Austro-Hungarian border (where he saw a rebel shot down) to demand that the U.S. quota of arriving refugees be raised from 5,000 to 17,000. The Army reached fast, far and wide to find GIs of Hungarian descent, to include them in a special detachment mobilized to provide food, transportation and other services for Hungarians arriving at New Jersey’s McGuire Air Force Base.

To Milwaukee, home of some 7,000 Americans of Hungarian background, another plane brought a cargo of 73, fresh from the perilous escape across the border. Clutching their cheap cloth satchels, they shuffled gratefully to shelter. One boy, dressed in a knitted hat and an oversize leather coat, carried all his belongings in a paper bundle strapped to his back with brown twine. An old woman proudly displayed the packet of soil that she had dug from her garden.

And so they came: day after day the transoceanic planes brought them—engineers, clergymen, mechanics, bakers, nervous women, bewildered children. Shepherded by welfare groups, volunteers and relatives, they turned to the glittering cities to find promises of the future. “My mouth stands open,” said one refugee, in wonderment. Said a young wife: “It is so beautiful. The new life is waiting for us. We are going into a dreamland.” “To think,” said a father, “that my children can have orange juice and eggs for breakfast. It is just like a paradise here.”

From a young father-to-be, escorting his pregnant wife, came the ultimate observation. Said he: “The child will be born an American. We hope it will adopt us.”

Into Vienna last week as a Hungarian refugee came Communist John Santo, once an officer of the C.I.O. Transport Workers Union, who sailed from the U.S. in 1949 to escape deportation. Before he departed for Hungary, where he became a government official, Santo had hurled a final diatribe: “Rulers” are riding the American people to the profit of Wall Street, using “labor lackeys and traitor agents” to “turn back the tide of history.” Escaping Hungary Santo told New York Herald Tribune Correspondent Barrett McGurn that he hoped for “asylum in my own country —America” where he would “take my chances with the American system.” No longer was he worried about U.S. “labor lackeys” and “traitor agents.” Said Santo: “I think Oct. 23 [when the uprising broke out] was the beginning of the end of Communism.”