GERMANY: The Unwanted

There are 46,000 of them left, the last of the 5,000,000 displaced persons who surged into Germany after World War II and huddled there. The rest have been sent back to their own countries or resettled in new ones by the International Refugee Organization (I.R.O). The ones who remain are the culls, or in social workers' lingo, the "residual group."

This week, at the end of 1951, the I.R.O. went out of business, leaving the 46,000 behind as a legacy to a nation that does not know what to do with them. Before these unwanted D.P.s—nearly all Slavs, almost no Jews—stretched a black future: mere charity subsistence from the West German government, and a gradual descent from misery to despair.

In the Sokolowski Hut. The 46,000 live in 104 camps scattered through Germany—104 Ellis Islands, with no entrances into the mainland of normal life. One of the camps is Augustdorf, in Westphalia. Nearly a quarter of the 1,800 people there have tuberculosis; 180 of the children are illegitimate. A spot on a lung in Augustdorf, as in the other camps, is a standard blackball against emigration; there is a black market in X-ray plates of healthy lungs.

In one of the camp's huts lives the Sokolowski family. They left their native Poland as the Red army moved in in 1944. The father, Jan, held a railroad job briefly, but now is unemployed. For seven years he has lived from camp to camp with his wife and four children: Olga, now 19; Roman, 18; Irena, 16; and Eugenia, 15. Recently he got an offer to move to the U.S. to work on a tobacco farm near Buffalo. The family packed and got set to go. Then pale Olga pressed her flat chest against the X-ray plate: a spot on one lung—active TB. Ineligible.

After an agonizing debate, the family decided to split, leaving Olga behind to try to make her way as a dressmaker. But the Sokolowskis' sponsors, the National Catholic Welfare Conference, opposes splitting families, and would not undertake Olga's guardianship.

The Down Escalator. When they heard the bad news, the Sokolowskis showed no emotion: repeated disappointments have made people like the Sokolowskis dull-eyed and apathetic. Blocking their exit is a barricade of bureaucratic tests, sensible safeguards imposed by governments who are glad to admit the useful, but firmly exclude the physically ailing and the politically suspect. They have been picked over like animals, their teeth inspected, their arms examined. Some lack the ability to work; some are ex-Communists, or are rejected on the grounds of moral turpitude—which may mean either that they stole some bread or coal in the horrible winter of 1946, or that they are hardened criminals, as a number are.

Many even develop a kind of attachment for the dreary camp life, the crowded rooms, the bare electric light bulbs. In this lazy, squalid existence they keep warm and they get food. Whatever skills the men once had have rusted from disuse. It would take strong character to resist decay, and many of these people do not have strong characters. Out of the lives of the rejected have gone dignity and hope.

The Waves. During and after World War II, the D.P.s came into Germany like the waves of the sea, millions of them, wave upon wave. All the waves looked alike: bewildered people in ragged clothes, clutching children and bundles. But the waves were different: