REFUGEES: The Easy Stage

REFUGEES The Easy Stage

Not since the great potato blight of 1846 packed U.S.-bound Irishmen by the thousands into stinking steerages had the people of Cork seen such seaborne misery. “What’s to become of them?” asked one spectator emptily, as he gazed at the puny, battered British landing craft clinging to the Cork wharfside. Strings of ragged laundry hung on her forepeak. Bales, boxes, kiddie cars and prams overflowed from some of her lifeboats. In others, passengers, unable to find space on cluttered decks, sat patiently and nibbled at their meager rations.

There were 372 of them in all, on a vessel built to carry 50. They were children and grownups, Poles, Estonians, White Russians and Latvians. Fleeing the terrors of totalitarianism in their homelands, they had found temporary asylum in Sweden but they had never felt safe. “There is many a Russian spy there in Sweden,” explained 28-year-old Grace Kupper. who had escaped her native Estonia in a fishing boat five years ago. Soon afterward her parents were taken to Siberia. Now Grace was on her way to the U.S.

Like the others, she had managed somehow to scrape together 800 kroner to help pay for and provision the refugee barge. With Hugo Ennist. an inexperienced young captain hired at the last minute to guide them, they had set sail from Gäteborg at 2 o’clock one morning a fortnight ago. On the way out of the harbor they hit a rock and stove in the ship’s plates. Many of the mattresses got soaked. The passengers slept huddled in corners. The air was hot and fetid in the packed cabin, and drinking water ran low and thirst high long before the five-day trip to Cork was over.

At Cork the sympathetic Irish did what they could. Bustling, white-haired Mrs. Tom Barry cajoled bakers into giving free bread, and greengrocers into supplying fruits and vegetables. She collected old clothes, rushed an Estonian mother to a maternity ward just in time (twins), and browbeat the government into giving the refugees an unused army camp for their stay. Cork’s taxi drivers even sacrificed good fares to take the penniless voyagers by the carload up to kiss the Blarney Stone.

“If you must go to America, man.” said Cork’s kindly harbor master, Albert Barnes, last week as the old vessel was hauled out for repairs vital to the journey, “for pity’s sake, take the easy stage by Spain and the Azores.”

Captain Ennist nodded. “I am determined,” he said, “to get my ship to America.”