MANKIND ON THE MOVE

Southland Times, Issue 23646, 22 October 1938, Page 13

MANKIND ON THE MOVE

By

ROBERT WILSON

MANKIND today is tragically on the move. Long lines of old and young, clutching a few 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. ' ' Everywhere in this world there are uprooted men, people .who have fled from the White Terror or 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. Hie panic-stricken multitudes that, driven headlong by barbarian hordes clamoured at the gates of Roman walls, find a counterpart today. In London and Paris, Amsterdam and Alexandria, Shanghai. and Hong Kong there are cities of exiles. German and Yiddish vie with the indigenous cockney in the speech of London’s docks. The fur trade of Leipsig, as the result of Hitler’s purge of non-Aryans, has been transferred to England. Franco’s fugitives have made the south of .France half Spanish. Elsewhere Slavonic tongues mingle with Arabic and even Amharic. Ethiopia, as well as Italy, Germany, China and Russia,- Armenia and Mesopotamia, has its exiles. Gone are the days when gipsies and hoboes, the riders of the Russian' steppes, Arabs wandering and Mongolians with their flocks, sailors roaming from port to port, were a nomad anomaly in a world that was largely sedentary. This is an age of exodus and exiles. The great dispersals of history, the flight of the Israelites from Egpyt, the scattering of the peoples of Europe and Asia before the hordes of Genghis Khan or Attila, the explusion of the Moors from Spain or the Acadians from Nova Scotia, the driving of the Huguenots from France, all have found more than their parallel in the refugee movements of today and the last 20 years. There never was a period in the world when so many human beings have fled from the sack of towns, invading armies and massacre and persecution. Countries that have, barred their doors to immigrants for economic reasons are from humanitarian motives forced to relax their regulations. The details of the great Chinese hegira are too recent to be fully recorded, but it needs little imagination . to comprehend its horrors. The catastrophes when the Yangtze Kiang and the Yellow river overflow their banks are minor compared to the uprooting of millions of Chinese who flow into Shanghai 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. One photograph recently received from China shows a young man and woman with the filial piety of which Chinese are famous, toting their bedridden 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 them 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 Bilbao was harassed by German aeroplanes which at Guernica scored their most notable triumph over rfefugees. 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-hearted-ness in 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. Poor Circumstances Forty-five of the vivacious visiting Spaniards, after they secured the rouge and lipstick, were so devastating that the French authorities hastily repatriated them to Barcelona. Some of the men who had poached the former King 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 rags and huni ger. A barber from Seville is lucky if . he can be a barber in exile. There is I many a Spanish grandee today who is ; glad to be a doorkeeper in Paris. Even ; the most illustrious of Spanish exiles, i the former King Alfonso, has been seen : travelling in street cars. Sixty thousand refugees from Hitler

have found shelter in the 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 settlers have founded 100 new industrial enterprises in the Netherlands. _ Hitler’s anti-semitism has done England the kind of service that France 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 Leipsig fur trade. He 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 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. It is now possible in London to get real Munich beer without sending to Germany for it. Exiled German sausage 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 Elizabeth Bergner, Richard Tauber, Peter Lorre and Conrad Veidt 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. Dr Fritz Haber, who invented, the first poison gas used in the war, is in England, as well as Erwin Schroedinger, a physicist who won a Nobel prize. Michael Polanze, 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 and that exiled dictator, Trotsky. : There are, today, in the University of Istanbul, 56 of Hitler’s discarded : scholars. i These are bright spots in the dark ; cloud of exile, but the refugee is not i always able to replant his old roots in , a new soil. With ■ many of them, life i begins over again, not only at forty, but also at twenty. Youths trained for • liberal 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. One young lady has brought to the United States the art of stitching Tyrolese jackets, and the other 18,000 fugitives from Hitler who have crossed the North Atlantic are either transplanting their old techniques or being re-educated to American factory methods. , . Unwanted People But the problems of a redistribution of population raised by Hitler alone are far from solved. The Jewish exodus began the day he became chancellor, on January 30, 1933. In the ensuing five 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 spade in one hand and a rifle in the other, defending themselves against Arabs as Canada’s first settlers defended themselves against Iroquois raids. Incidentally, while finding a home for themselves, they have added to the world’s exiles. The neighbouring Muslim countries, Turkey and Egypt, Iran and Yemen, are full of Arab fugitives who are fleeing the consequences of their anti-semitism. It seems that today 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 the charitable resources of their hosts. But in Germany there are still more than 300,000 Jews, all possible refugees. Now the problem is hopelessly complicated by rmion with Austria. 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 the Danube. Their plight merely epitomized the sad lot of the world’s millions of unwanted people. The most tragic of all the refugees the world has known in the last 20 years were undoubtedly the Armenians in Turkey at the outbreak of the Great War. The figures given are those of Nansen who, until his death, was in charge of the League of Nations’ great enterprise of repatriation in the Near East.

There were roughly 1,800,000 Armenians in Turkey at the outbreak of the war. Of these only 800,000 succeeded j in escaping. One million were butch- , ered. The Turks organized refugee columns and in many cases directed them into waterless deserts. Of one caravan of 19,000 people, there • were only 11 survivors. Upheavals of this magnitude—picture , the millions of people today who are seeking new homes in strange lands—• are not equalled at any one time in all history. Genghis Khan and his more bloodthirsty follower Tamerlane caused vast movements of people but. not on the same gigantic scale. Genghis Khan was out to build an empire, not to bury one. His conquests are told in quick victory and years of tax-collecting rather than mass slaughter or the shifting of whole populations. He and his followers considered seriously—but decided against—putting the entire population of China to the sword and burning their towns to give their cattle adequate pasture. But they found it more pleasant to be masters of a subject population. The Russian revolution, it is well, known, occasioned an exodus that was so colossal in its scale that none at the time thought that it could ever be equalled. The exiles poured out of Russia to all points of 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 the great Russian cities of refuge, and then Paris received the bulk of the overflow and is today the greatest Russian city in the world outside 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 of ragged, . starving Russians, mostly of the aristocracy. Finally the Philippines took pity on them. Strange Turns of Wheel That Russian migration has been well publicized, 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. But everyone knew of the grand dukes who sold their ikons and somovars 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 p. 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.

The Grand Duke Dimitri, first cousin of the Tsar, arrived in Paris with only 100 francs. After a period of starvation, he started an embroidery factory in which his wife and the Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna plied needles. The Dowager Princess Ponatiatiiie was forewoman in a whitewear manufacturing plant. The Baroness Wrangel, sister-in-law of the white General Baron Wrangel, gave music lessons. Some of the younger women of this fallen Russian aristocracy became manequins and even danced at tbe Folies Bergeres. Three daughters of a general who had been wards of Tsar Nicholas had to become shop-girls. Admiral Possokov, at the age 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 the French front, borrowed money to buy a taxicab. Some of the younger officers became gigolos. On the whole the taxi-cab was the main refuge of these stranded Russian aristocrats. It was estimated that there were 4000 of them driving , taxi-cabs in Paris alone. It was the same in London and New York, Shanghai, and most of the world’s big cities. And it was generally believed that every Russian taxi driver had been a grand duke. Perhaps the strangest turn in this wheel of human misfortune is the revolution that makes riders of the steppes riders of the 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 recover from the human losses of the Bolivian war.' ■ ’'VThe 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 ahalf 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 and a-half people dumped on a population in Greece proper of a little more than 5,000,000, but in addition 500,000 Turks were uprooted from Greece, Macedonia, and Bulgaria, and sent back to Asia. It was a Colossal problem of human transplanting on which hundreds of millions of dollars was spent and on which Nansen; as 1 representative of the League of Nations, toiled for over eight years. All that time Greece was like a beleagured city. People lived in holes in the earth and ate bark and acorns. 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.