Can Such Things Be?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 281, 10 November 1944, Page 7

Can Such Things Be?

HEY can be, and thousands of us have seen them with eyes long prepared for them. Otherwise we might not have believed our eyes. How could anyone have believed in 1939 that aship would come to Wellington in 1944 filled with boys and’girls who had been on the run for five years and been chased half way round the earth? It has happened. The children are here, more than seven hundred of them, most of them without fathers or mothers. They will have sanctuary kere till the world recovers its sanity and its decency, and then perhaps it will be safe, and possible, and kind to let them go home again. But home for most of them will be a place they have never seen before -a new country, a strange landscape, unknown villages and towns. Mercifully many of them will not understand what that means. They were too young when they were driven out to be deeply rooted, and their experiences since will have cured them of homesickness in its ordinary forms. It may even have happened in some cases that homelessness has been its own reward. Being uprooted \in body may have meant being uprooted in spirit too, and beyond the power of change to hurt them further. .It is to be hoped that it has- proved so. But no such influence is at work on the people of New Zealand. As the temporary hosts of these children we ought to find it difficult to keep our hands out of our pockets. If we accept their presence here, and the manner of their coming, as an ordinary incident of war, we insult every father and every mother from the beginning of time. But if we regard it as a challenge to our decency as well as to our charity, something too abominable and too piteous to be thought of without shame, we shall not ask whether we are doing enough to heal their wounds but whether anything ' could be done that would leave them with more than they should have and ourselves with less. And in the meantime the.question none of. us dare shirk is what we are doing to bring it about that such things shall never be again.