Untitled Page 48

Dearest Annie and Folks

28.4 5:30 pm I have a few free minutes now before going out for the evening -
this time to a concert of the Berlin Philarmonic - so I'll begin a letter to you,
finish it late tonight or tomorrow morning as I have time.

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. A sketch might make the various geographical
terms [clear?]

[sketch]

First of all we had a very informative lecture from the director of the center,
himself a refugeein 1951. Some statistics he gave were well worth repeating.
Since WWII there have been 3.4 million refugees from East Germany, not counting
those from other lands such as Latvia, etc, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, etc.
Germany has a present population of about 54 million; of these 13 million
are refugees from somewhere behind the Iron Curtain - i.e. 25% of the whole
population! That's a lot of people to absorb, especially when 3/4 of them had another
language, 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 too!). Even more interesting are the more current figures -
for example the monthly refugee flow so far this year: Jan. - 5300
Feb. - 5900
Mar. - 8000
Apr. (to 4/26 only) - 14000.

Over the Easter holidays they had over 1000 every day!!
One reason for the rise since February is that the communists have
put on a big push to collectivize the the farms, and also the hand workers, 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 difficulty and hardship and uncertainty of starting life from scratch.
The numbers of farmers jumped from 200 in January to 2400 in the first 3 weeks of
April, after the new laws came in. The psychological importance of West Berlin
as an escape valve for refugees from communism cannot be exaggerated!

After the background speech we split up into groups of 10 to sit in on the
actual interviews given to all new refugees. These people must show good
reasons for having left the communist country in order to be granted refugee
status in West Germany (thus preventing infiltration, and also preventing the
complete flooding of West Germany with refugees to house, clothe, feed), and
hence they are questioned by a committee of 3 former refugees to verify these
reasons. We got to listen to four cases, were permitted to aks questions when
we didn't understand something - this was I 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.

continued 4/30

The first case was a man and his grown daughter; the family had been