The Redefectors

One of the many human rights that Communism does not recognize is the right to leave one's country and go elsewhere. Since World War II, well over a million escapees and refugees have fled west to escape the secret police, forced labor or other aspects of life in an Orwellian 1984. For the old, the ill, or the unemployable the journey was, in Communist eyes, good riddance. But the departure of the young and the skilled was a loss, as well as bad propaganda. In recent months a concerted serenade has sounded from behind the Iron Curtain: come home and all will be forgiven.

So far. U.S. officials estimate, only about 100 defectors have redefected in response to the appeals, which have been made by personal letter, by radio and in new magazines, e.g., Czechoslovakia's For Return to the Homeland. Most have been Czechs, who have the shortest distance to travel, and most have been refugees cooled off by the two-year D.P. camp detention which is all but automatic for escapees from the East. Last week on Poland's Radio Homeland, one Stefan Michalsky." onetime Voice of America announcer, took to the air to say the Vistula never looked lovelier, and to urge "engineers working with a spade, and starving teachers living on scanty benefits in Western Germany" to join him "at home, where work awaits."

For Radio Free Europe, an important center of the West's counter-effort, the post-Geneva atmosphere has been hard to handle: the smiling handclasps on high could not easily be reconciled with the basic RFE message to the satellites: keep up your hopes, stay on job, and press your satellite masters to come through with the freedoms they have promised farmers, workers and churchgoers. But last week, when President Eisenhower said in Philadelphia that "the domination of captive countries cannot longer be justified by any claim that this is needed for purposes of security," RFE broadcast the speech every hour on the hour for 20 hours.

Out of this pulling and tugging for the loyalty of Eastern Europe has come a new category: the re-redefector. A Pole showed up at West Berlin last week and said that, after sampling his homeland again, he decided that he likes the West better.

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