100 Million Souls
BARBER, WILLARD
100 Million Souls THE FORGOTTEN PEOPLE By Seymour Freidin Scribner's. 336 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by WILLARD BARBER Lecturer, International Affairs, University of Maryland; former U.S. Foreign...
...Negotiation leading towards self-determination is always the objective...
...We also must be prepared to stake our resources and nationhood, not to cold-bloodedly abandon those who revolt...
...In the cases of the equivalent takeovers in coalition governments in Hungary and Poland, he spares us the repetitions of the treachery and deceit practiced in Prague...
...This is a lesson which Freidin spells out in terrifying detail...
...if we mean to genuinely encourage the human factor in Soviet Europe . . . then we must take chances...
...But the political bankruptcy of the local Kremlin-puppet regimes, as well as the anguish involved in the many personal tragedies that occurred in the Poznan bread-andfreedom riots and in the Hungarian uprising of 1956, are recounted at length...
...And sympathy was reciprocated when the news of the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising reached the Poles who, impoverished though they were, proffered food, clothing and shelter for Hungarian orphans...
...Moreover, is it likely that a vote to "stake our resources and nationhood" would be cast by Congress...
...For Freidin's fact-filled volume reads like a novel of suspense...
...What Americans never seem to have grasped," the author writes, "is that we have been locked in warfare with the Soviet Union...
...The author also accurately traces the effects Poznan had upon the Hungarians...
...Mikolacjczyk, the Polish exile...
...Cardinal Stepinac, the Croatian...
...And the headlong rush and formlessness of the book puts an unnecessary burden upon the reader, who is otherwise stirred by a deep emotional response...
...The stories of workers, intellectuals or party members sharing alike in the ignominy, imprisonment and executions that marked the Stalinist regimes in the several satellite countries are vignettes of the merciless system which has caught them all up...
...The same reaction was echoed at the time of the Khrushchev-Gomulka showdown in Warsaw in October 1956, when sympathetic demonstrations took place in Budapest before the monument to General Bejm (a Polish leader of Hungary's national struggle of an earlier century...
...It is deadly, no-quarter and based on the principle, in the long run, of total victory and total defeat...
...If the names of some of the local leaders —Pal Meleter, the Hungarian general...
...The corruption of the regimes and the cynicism of party functionaries made the recklessness of the crowds and the foolhardy courage of young men and women palpably real...
...But his eyewitness account of the Russian entry into Berlin in 1945 is a reportorial classic...
...This, in turn, was but a prelude to the Hungarian revolt of the same month...
...Written at typical journalistic fever pitch, this torrent of breathless pages bursts out of its banks, unconfined by such orthodox restraints as a table of contents, chapter headings or ordered presentation...
...Nor is Freidin afraid to advance his own recommendations: "The people of Eastern Europe must be promised ultimate self-determination...
...Milovan Djilas, the Yugoslav—are still alive in the American mind, Freidin does not want the others, the millions, to become "forgotten people...
...Justice is not properly done to the author's broad background, human understanding and observant eye...
...Foreign Service Officer Making good use of on-the-spot notes reaching back to his experiences in Eastern Europe since 1945, Seymour Freidin here tells of the tragedies and lost hopes of millions living behind the Iron Curtain...
...And if so, should such a decision be made, unilaterally, by President Kennedy...
...The biggest, riskiest of these is guerrilla warfare...
...Is it not asking too much, though, to expect the East Europeans, who suffered so much from Nazi concentration camps, wartime destruction and, most recently, Communist police states, to take the initiative...
...Freidin makes only brief mention of the Berlin Wall...
...One can assume Freidin means not merely that self-determination should be promised, but that it should be attained...
...He has thrown his net wider than the boundaries of any single satellite country...
...Many chapters end with sharply etched characterizations, questions or forebodings which impel the reader to move onward...
...To speed it up and provide it with soul and meaning calls for counter-subversion...
...The Forgotten People provides abundant reminders of the danger which a Communist minority, inclined to intrigue and acting with vigor, presents to democratic governments that follow political practices within constitutional norms...
...In 1948, with direct action squads utilizing non-democratic procedures, totalitarian party leaders submerged Jan Masaryk and President Eduard Benes, and after them the Czeckoslovak people...
...by supporting guerrilla activity by East Europeans we may well halt the slide towards war rather than provoke it...
...The author, who is now an executive editor of the New York Herald-Tribune, was immersed in the satellite scene for a dozen years, and he has created a vivid picture of the misery in which a hundred million souls exist...
...Reading Freidin's perceptive and sensitive accounts of these events, one can better appreciate how the cumulative misery of the people erupted on the city streets in barehanded confrontation with Russian tanks...
Vol. 46 • March 1963 • No. 6
