International: Doubts in the Dark Square

Americans also found some of Europe’s ways perplexing last week. Wrote TIME Senior Editor Max Ways, back from a tour of Germany:

“Of all the sights and incidents along 2,000 miles of Europe’s streets and roads, perhaps the most revealing was in a square in Metz where, about midnight, two Americans in a jeep paused to ask a bearded old man the road to Saarbrücken. He said he did not speak French. Nor German either. He was a Russian. One American who spoke Russian repeated the question. The old man could not help. He had fled Russia in 1920, had lived in Poland till 1939. When the Germans took it, he went to Germany. Later he drifted into France. ‘Where are you going now?’ asked the Americans. ‘I want to go home. To Russia, that’s where I want to go.’

“‘Well, why don’t you go? UNRRA will take you back there and the Russians will let you in.’

“The old man almost wailed. ‘But I don’t want to go.’

“The Americans, who still did not know the way, drove off into the Lorraine hills, leaving Europe’s doubts in the dark square.”

And in the ruins of Berlin’s Russian sector there appeared last week a large neat sign (see cut) with an inscription from the works of a great critic of U.S. and British “softness” toward the Germans: “THE EXPERIENCES OF HISTORY PROVE THAT HITLERS COME AND GO, BUT THE GERMAN PEOPLE, THE GERMAN STATE REMAIN—STALIN.”