Displaced Persons

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 329, 12 October 1945, Page 5

Displaced Persons

NE of the difficulties encountered by New Zealanders who try to see the world as a whole is the fact that so many world problems come to us in words only. We read of shattered cities and displaced populations, but if we have not ourselves been out of New Zealand our imaginations do not bring those reports to life. No one is dull enough to read of such things with indifference, but it is one thing to feel vague melancholy over long processions of houseless persons crossing a bridge both ways and another thing altogether to see those persons as fathers and mothers and growing boys and girls and misery-dulled little children; to see‘\them before the war uprooted them; and then to see them coming to strange villages and lonely countrysides where there is neither warmth nor welcome for them. It is happening all. over Europe to-day, where anything between two and ten millions of people are adrift, homeless and jobless and in most cases friendless, and walking into a continental winter. Those of us who saw the Polish children arrive here, who have visited them in their camp and talked with those who have worked among them, have had one vivid glimpse of the tragedy; but 700 goes into 7,000,000 ten thousand times, and we are none of us capable of the imaginative effort required to see tragedy on that scale. What we can do, however, we should do: try a little harder to understand; wait a little longer for peace; give a little more generously to relief funds; sacrifice ourselves a little more actively to prevent the calamity from snowballing. "Little" is written deliberately. Our contribution must be small in relation to a problem of ‘such dimensions; but if it is noth-' ing at all we are cumberers of the earth and not world citizens.