Mankind is on the March

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23169, 15 October 1938, Page 3 (Supplement)

Mankind is on the March

Alfonso's royal ibex in the Pyrenees helped themselves illegally to French hares. They even thought that a bull fight should be staged for their amusement. The Spanish refugees, in their distress, laugh more readily than do their hosts in southern France. Tales of refugees are on the whole not success stories. Their drama is not a rise from poverty to wealth, but of descent from comfort, to rans and hunger. A barber from Seville is lucky if he still can be a barber in exile. There is many a Spanish grandee to-day who is glad to be a doorkeeper in Paris. Flight from Germany Sixty thousand refugees from Hitler's regiino have found shelter in Ilie Netherlands and have become such a menace to Dutch labour that 80 professions have now been barred to them. Still, though many are on relief, others have contributed notably to Holland's economy These new German settlors have founded 100 new industrial enterprises in the Netherlands. Hitler's anti-scmitism has done England the kind of service that Franco did when it expelled the Huguenots. They were weavers and silk workers and gave England its textile trade. Hitler has given England the Nuremberg toy trade as well as the Leipzig fur trade. lie also has helped the clothing trade. Thirty-one German and non-Aryan manufacturers of women's clothes have established themselves in England. An exiled button maker, now located in

MANKIND to-day is tragically on the move. Long lines of old and young, clutching a lew bundles of their only remaining possessions, are crossing the snows of the Pyrenees, staggering through the deserts of Asia, streaming across the bridges of Europe. In many parts of , the world there are uprooted men, people who have fled ifrom the Red Terror, from Black Shirt or Brown Shirt frightfulness or Spanish or Japanese atrocity. ■With wrath behind and an uncertain future ahead, streams of refugees pour over frontiers seeking asylum and asking charity. In London and Paris, Amsterdam and Alexandria, Shanghai and Hongkong there are colonies of exiles. German and Yiddish vie with the indigenous cockney in the speech of London's docks. The fur trade of Leipzig, as the result of Hitler's purge of non-Aryans, has been transferred to England. Civil War fugitives have made the south of France half Spanish. Elsewhere Slavonio tongues mingle with Arabic and even Amharic. Ethiopia, as well as Italy, Germany, China and Russia, Armenia ®nd Mesopotamia, has 'its exiles. Last Twenty Years -This is an age of exodus and exiles. Tno great dispersals of history, the fl| ght of the Israelites from Egypt, the pattering of the peoples of Europe before the hordes of Attila, the expulsion of the Moors from Spain, the dri**out of the Huguenots from France, *ll have found more than their parallel J* the refugee movements of to-day and last 20 years. There never was a period in the world *hen so many human beings have fled "Oni the sack of towns, invading armies ®Dd massacre and persecution Countries *hat have barred their doors to immigrants for economic reasons are from «>imanitarian motives forced to relax weir regulations. , The details of the great Chinese ® e gira are too recent to bo fully recorded, but it needs little imagination •o comprehend its horrors. The catastrophes when the Yangtse-kiang and Yellow River overflow their banks

are minor compared to the uprooting of millions of Chinese who flow into Shaniihai and out of Shanghai and out of Canton and Amoy and Hankow. China's roads are full of civilians in rout, more lamentable than an army in rout. Women carry under one arm their pots and pans and under the other their infants or what is left of them. Ono photograph recently received from China showed a young man and woman, with the filial piety for which Chinese are famous, carrying their bed-ridden mother in a canvas slung over a bamboo pole. Spanish roads have seen similar scenes. In the retreat from Malaga, 150.000 people, many of thorn barefooted, limped for 100 miles under shell fire from battleships along the foot of mountains that dip precipitously into the sea. In the north of Spain, in Basque country, the evacuation of 300,000 people from Bilboa was harassed by German 'planes which at Guernica 6cored their most notable triumph over refugees. In Southern France Those who fled by sea under the convoy of British and French warships had a happier fate. This exodus was mostly of children. A British steamer carried 4000 of them to a tented city near Southampton. France took many more thousands of them, many of whom were orphans. Some went to the United States. Others were taken to Mexico. French writers who have observed Spanish refugees in southern France have noted the resilience of the Iberian temperament. In fact, these uprooted Spaniards have shocked the good people in Bayonne and Bordeaux, in Hendaye and Luchon, Pau and other border points by their light-heartedness m calamity. Instead of chanting dirges they danced fandangos and strummed guitars. At St. Jean de Luz the refugee women demanded as their first need powder and rouge and were not as active. as local sentiment thought they should be, in lending French women a hand with the scrub brushes and brooms in cleaning out the building which was assigned to them as living quarters. Fortv-five of the vivacious visiting Carmens, after they secured the rouge and lipstick, were so devastating that the French authorities hastily repatriated them to Barcelona. Some of the j men who had poached former King I

Streams of Refugees Pour Over Frontiers Seeking Homes EXODUS FROM SPAIN, GERMANY AND CHINESE CITIES

By ROBERT WILSON—WorId Copyright Reserved

Willesden, a London suburb, has a factory with 200 workers. Daniel Prenn, once a German tennis star, has erected a candy factory. Two Germans, Zander and Weill, are making gliders at Dunstable.

Jt is now possible in London to get real Munich beer without sending to Germany for it. Exiled German sausago makers and rye bread bakers as well as brewers are adding variety to the British diet. The world's present tempest of exile blows some good. It has brought German stars such as Elisabeth Bergner, Richard Tauber, Peter Lorro and Conrad Vcidt to the English and American screen. It has expatriated distinguished writers like Thomas Mann and Ernest Toller. And it has enriched Anglo-Saxon science with many distinguished professors, 143 of whom have found positions in the United States, 212 in Great Britain and five in Canada. Nobel Prize Winner Dr. Fritz Haber, who invented the first prtison gas used in the World War, is in England, as well as Erwin Schroedinger, a physicist who won a Nobel prize. Michaei Polanzc, a great German chemist, is at Birmingham. A famous German professor of Latin is a refugee at Oxford, the last refuge of Latin. And last, but far from least, is the great Einstein, who now expounds his theory of relativity in the United States. Constantinople at the time of the Greek Renaissance,- generously gave

Greek learning to Europe. Now Turkey is helping to rescue European learning. It is as hospitable to exiled German professors as it was to exiled grand dukes. There are, to-day, in the University of Istanbul, 56 of Hitler's discarded scholars. These are bright spots in the dark cloud of exile, but the refugee is not always able to replant his old roots in a new soil. With many of them, life begins over again, not. only at forty, but also at twenty. Youths trained for professions have been forced to handle hods and dig ditches. A Jewish lady, once a member of the Reichstag, now practises medicine in Connecticut. A former German banker is now a ski-ing instructor. Jews and Arabs One young lady has taken to the United States tho art of stitching Tyrolese jackets, and tho other 18,000 fugitives from Hitler who have crossed the North Atlantic are either transplanting their old techniques or being re-odu-cated to American factory methods. But the problems of a redistribution of population raised by Hitler alone aro far from solved. The Jewish exodus began tho day he became chancellor, on January 30, 1933. In the ensuing live years 100,000 managed to escape concentration camps and the Aryan inquisition. Forty thousand, it is said, went to Palestine, where they hold the plough or spado in ono hand and a rifle in tho other, defending themselves against Arabs.

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Incidentally, while finding a home for themselves, they have added to the world's exiles. The neighbouring Moslem countries, Turkey and Egypt, Iran and Yemen, are full of Arab'fugitives who are fleeing the consequences of their anti-bemitism. It seems that to-day nothing can happen without adding to the world's host of exiles.. In Buenos Aires there are integralist exiles from Rio de Janeiro, and in Rio itself, there are hundreds for whom Peru and Chile, Bolivia and Paraguay and Venezuela are lost lands. And in Mexico there are exiles from Cuba and in Cuba, exiles from Mexico. To France went 25,000 of Hitler's first fugitives and other thousands to Switzerland, the Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries, Poland, England and America, all taxing tho charitable resources of their Hosts. But in Germany there aro still over 300,000 Jews, all possible refugees. Now the problem is hopelessly complicated by union with Austria. On the Danube Fifty-six Jews driven out of Austria by Nazi troopers, after being refused admission to Czechoslovakia and Hungary, were deposited, foodless and shelterless, on a breakwater in tho Danube. Their plight merely epitomised the had lot of the world's millions of unwanted people. _ . The Russian revolution, - it * is well known, occasioned an exodus that was so colossal in its §cale that none at the timo thought that it could ever be equalled. The exiles poured out of Russia to all points ot the compass, to the Baltic and Scandinavian countries, to China and Turkey, to Europe generally, and in fact to all parts of the world. Shanghai and Constantinople were for a time tho great Russian cities of refuge, and then Pari.* received the bulk of the overflow, and is to-day the greatest Russian citv in tho world outmle of Russia One of the dramatic incidents in this Muscovite trek was the arrival in Manila of a fleet of seven ships from Vladivostok. For months it sailed the China Sea and was refused admission to all ports in China and Japan. On board were thousands ot ragged, starving Russians, mostly of the aristocracy. Finally tho Philippines took pity on them. _ That Russian migration has been well publicised, for it was an exodus of the nobility. The whole .world wept over

the tragedy of grand dukes and princesses who were forced to sell their jewels and work at menial tasks. The present exodus from Spain and China, Germany and Austria, is more proletarian and its vast catalogue of humble human misery has not yet had adequate literary treatment. Misfortune's Wheel But everyone knew of the grand dukes who sold their ikons and samovars and their wives' jewels and stood in bread lines. A Russian prince of the Romanoff blood was a street cleaner in Constantinople. Great violinists played at street corners with a tin cup at their feet. A former colonel of cavalry in Paris got a job at housework. The wife of a general supported three nephews and two of their wives by working as a charwoman. Threo daughters of a general who had been wards of Tsar Nicholas had to become shop-girls. Admiral Possokov, at the nge of 76, had to peddle soap from door to door. Another admiral wept tears of joy when he got a job as porter in a Constantinople hospital. A general worked as an upholsterer, and another who had owned four limousines washed cars in a garage. Another general who had been in command on tho French front, borrowed money to buy a taxicab. On the whole, tho taxicab was the main refuge of these stranded Russian aristocrats. It was estimated that there were 40(H) of them driving taxicabs in Paris alone. It was the same in London and New York, Shanghai, and most of the world's large cities. Perhaps the strangest turn in this wheel of human misfortune is the revolution that makes riders of the steppes riders of tho pampas. Recently 90 families of Cossacks settled in Paraguay, following the 2000 Russian Mennonites who went there from Manchuria eight years ago. Seven colonies of Russians are now helping Paraguay to reeover from tlio human losses of the Bolivian war. Exchange of Population The traditional Greek occupations of shining shoes and selling roasted peanuts'were only a straw in a whirlwind when it came to a question of providing a living for the million and a-half Greek refugees from Asia Minor, when the Turks inflicted on them a crushing defeat. There was an exchange of populations on a staggering scale. Not only

were those one million a-half people dumped on a population in Greece proper of a little over 5,000,000, but in addition 500,000 were uprooted from Greece, Macedonia and Bulgaria, and sent back to Asia, It was a colossal problem of human transplanting on which millions were spent and on which Nansen, as representative of the League of Nations, toiled for over eight years. All that time Greece was like a beleaguered city. There was the same distress among the returned Turks. That human suffering finally found an end, but no sooner had that misery been alleviated than the problem of German refugees began. And now there is the problem in Spain and China. This is an age of mankind tragically on the move.