A man went from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among robbers. He was aided by a stranger and the story of his rescue has written itself so deeply on the heart of the world that I propose it as front-page news. During the past twenty years wave after wave of those who had been beaten, robbed and tortured has swept across the west of Europe. People grew accustomed to them, as one does in war to the sight of wounded men. I recall as if it were yesterday the throngs of Belgians encamped in ancient, dismantled French abbeys; the tens of thousands of Germans driven from the Volga regions of Russia and housed in barracks by Catholic and Protestant charity organizations; huddled groups of anti-Fascists in retreat before the triumph of Mussolini. Still it was always possible, in a world shy of man-power after four years of carnage, to make room somewhere.
The situation is different now. Today the terrain to which the refugee can go is fearfully restricted. There are only five countries in continental Europe inside the borders of which he could find safety—countries with a total population not as great as that of Germany from which the majority of exiles come. A year ago there were many more countries. Austria has been swallowed up since then. Czechoslovakia has been decimated. The Balkan states have virtually been cut off from the West. And beyond the seas? Modern transportation may be a kind of miracle, but it might just as well not exist in so far as the majority of refugees are concerned. Few of them have money, passports or permissions to enter. They are trapped human beings, facing hatreds more ferocious than mankind has known for hundreds of years, and surrounded by an impregnable line of water, steel and hunger. There is no exact parallel. In the days of Roman persecutions, the hunted Christian could hide in the mountains with Cyprian or in the catacombs with Clement. Now there is no hole in the ground out of which an organized police cannot rout their fox.
After more than two centuries of progress and humanitarianism, after twenty years of the League of Nations, after libraries written in praise of modern man, this is the heart-searching finale to which we have come.
A man went from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among robbers.
The cup of cold water is a permit of entry into the Kingdom.
There are still multitudes of men and women for whom these words are literally true. But how are they to cope with the problem? I have seen an old French abbe, with scarce enough to eat himself, begging coins to save an Austrian refugee from starvation. He did not succeed in keeping the poor fellow from committing suicide. But he tried. That is one leaf out of the note-book of experiences I gathered studying the German Catholic refugee problem. I am going to talk about that because I know it best. And because also it has so often been neglected.
At this point the reader must pardon a digression. These days, when our victims are going from bread-line to bread-line, when our nuns are adrift in thousands, when our priests are embattled and our laymen scorned, an organ of liberal intelligence believes there is nothing more serious at stake than a discussion by amateurs of the “tie-up between Fascism and the Catholic Church.” I may be patting myself on the back, but I believe I may honestly say that no one in the United States has spent more time studying the European Catholic situation from within than I have. Nor will anyone easily assert that I have ever swerved from my democratic principles, even when the going was hard. And I wish to declare here and now that I shall cheerfully guarantee to refute, under decent auspices, the easy statements made by any of the gentry who think that assertions like those fostered by the New Republic should be irresponsibly scattered to the four winds. Of course there are Catholic fascists. But is it necessary to remind Mr. Seldes that there were German Jews—and not a few of them—who hoped to the last that Hitler’s race laws would not prevent them from rallying to the cause? Nor is it necessary to add that the word “fascism” implies something more than the ability to sense that the regime of Stalin is not all sweetness and light, but rather a bloody morass. This current business is something worse than a mere error, however. It is a stupid blow at hundreds of Catholic leaders who have seen the inside of a concentration camp solely and simply because they could not endure the treatment accorded a victimized Jewish minority. And so I will say bluntly, by the shade of Herbert Croly, that these articles are a deplorable manifestation of intellectual illiteracy. And also of moral degradation.
That having been said, I propose the question: Do you know what it means to be a refugee? One has somehow managed to get across the border. In no country, however, is it possible any longer to secure a permit of residence. The police say bluntly that so many days are granted, and that then one must move on. There is no work anywhere—not even a day’s work. Perhaps the refugee is bitter at such treatment, but the police cannot help themselves. Their own countrymen are looking in vain for employment; many are on the dole. The system of economic autarchy set up in Central Europe saps the substance of every smaller people. And so the refugee trudges wearily to the relief agencies, of which there are not a few, all unprepared to meet the demands made on them. Perhaps a kindly individual offers lodging and board—many have done so, only to find that the psychological unsettlement through which their guests have passed has produced mental and spiritual difficulties. Many of these men and women were wealthy, prominent, accustomed to having their way. Now they are the lowliest of the lowly, with scarce enough to eat, conscious of being burdens, and unable to find any task at which they might be employed.
Take a specific instance. A fairly young single man this, a Catholic artist, Nordic as I am myself, deeply aware of the ineradicable conflict between Hitler and Christianity. He thinks there must surely be someone who needs a portrait. But the police chase him from hiding-place to hiding-place, he is virtually in tatters, and is finally arrested and escorted back to the German border. The police orders do not include seeing to it that he actually reenters Germany. And so they go stiffly away, he turns round, walks all night and finally discovers another refuge. This goes on and on. He acquires a long list of names on which he can rely for a bed, a meal, a pair of shoes. In other words, he has become a tramp. Little by little he comes to wonder why it is that the maxims of Christianity are so little respected. It seems to him that all the comfortable people who go to church on Sundays could easily, if they wanted to, get him out of his predicament. He does not see, as I have seen, poor miners each giving a week’s pay for the sake of their exiled brethren from across the border. He does not understand that a thousand cases such as he mean $10,000, a week—at the very least—and that the weeks go on and on.
One little country has at least 1,500 such Catholic refugees. Most of them cling desperately to some person who has hardly more than they; for in this little country, too, the strange phenomenon of modern Catholicism is repeated—that those of vast means feel a certain sympathy with Hitler, who has outlawed strikes, and that the support for the refugee comes in the main from the same people who once built St. Patrick’s Cathedral. But just try to imagine what that means—1,500 people without anything and without even hope for anything. In addition, 1,500 people the majority of whom have become a trifle neurotic. I met a poor German priest—an excellent man, by the way—who was in tears because he couldn’t shine his shoes. He was without money, without work, without a home; but the one thing that now seemed to matter supremely was a bit of blacking. I met a woman with two small children. A cleric had befriended her; the little family was living in frugal comfort. But she had worried so about her husband in a concentration camp that she imagined the food provided was injuring her babies.
Let us go to Paris. It may be said to the ever-lasting honor of French Catholics that they forgot their own troubles long enough to rescue hundreds of families from starvation and even to polish up the little remnant of German they had retained from school. But what can be done with such a problem? In France one cannot even dare talk aggressively about the refugee situation, lest inner and outer political repercussions follow. And so every morning the relief agencies see long queues of hungry, bedraggled men and women line up for the pittance that will keep body and soul together. Not all these people are cultured and agreeable companions. Some are filthy of body and maybe of soul. Little esthetic pleasure is to be derived from working with many of them—indeed, often enough one feels like bringing a chair down on somebody’s head. That is one reason why so many rescue organizations last only a little while. I suppose that since 1933 at least 5,000 such organizations have been established. But few—very few—have survived.
There are brighter spots, to be sure. Now and then an opening is made, in spite of everything. I remember in particular the little home somewhere in France which the tireless generosity of a great gentleman made a place of refuge for some German-teaching Sisters. Yet though no one can criticize the effort made, the results to date are on the whole catastrophic. We have saved neither the lives, nor the honor nor the talents of men and women who in large numbers are martyrs to the Faith. The reason is primarily that we have been slow to awake to the dimensions of the problem. We are accustomed to letting the state and the regular welfare organizations deal with hopeless poverty; and here is a situation that neither can handle. Three major needs exist. First, an international pooling of Catholic funds to provide money with which to work. Second, a careful survey of the immigration and employment facilities which are still available. Third, actual organized care on a scale which will rehabilitate shattered men and women. I believe that when Catholic America is aware of the truth, it will respond generously. After all, our cases can still be numbered by thousands … though what the future may bring nobody can tell. We have not forgotten the man who, going from Jerusalem to Jericho, fell among robbers. We believe nothing more firmly than that a cup of cold water has an eternally valid benediction. The bishops of the United States have established a Committee for Catholic Refugees, the address of which is 123 Second Street, New York City. Though of course I have no right whatever to speak for this committee, I am certain that it will welcome not only the statements made in this paper but also the conclusions which may be drawn from them.
May we be spared long from knowing what it means to flee in haste from ominous terror, penniless and frightened, into a strange land! May we never have to learn what it means to find that there is no room in any inn! But it will do us no harm to think that there are thousands of such frightened, penniless, terror-driven people, many of them with their hands in those of little children whom they brought into this world. Children on whose foreheads is His image Who said no gift was too small to give and no cross too heavy to bear.
