Evening star., 1950-03-04
Paris Newsman Leads
Fight 10 Expose Red
Use Of Slave Labor
Iron Curtain Refugee
Campaign Heads Sound
Appeal to Humanity
By Dorothy THOMPSON

- ~ O''y Il "of"Poc'
The American Federation of
Labor has presented the Eco
nomic and Social Council of the
United Nations with extensive
documentary evidence to prove
that the whole Soviet economy
is based on millions of slave
laborers, and has asked for a
United Nations investigation.
simultaneously. the Iron Cur
tain Refugee Campaign" headed
by Admiral Byrd, and dis
tinguished committee containing
81 governors, university presi-
dents, and men and women from
conservatives to New Dealers,
have joined the appeal to hu-
manity," launched by the French
journalist, David Rousset, in
Paris.
This committee, while publiciz-
ing the almost unbelievable con-
ditions under which millions of
human beings are sweating and
dying in the Soviet Union, is ask
ing a million Americans to join
the appeal for an investigation
and contribute to aid those who
escape-Whose numbers are not
inconsiderable, and for whom
little is done.
known for Years.
Everything in Rousset'S protest
and revelation has been known,
for years. to impartial students
of the Soviet Union. The first
break through the Iron Curtain
came after Germany attacked
Russia, and Poland became Rus
sian ally. Russian concentration
camps then disgorged more than
100000 Poles. These, for the most
part, kept silence during the war
They held the hope that the world
unity in the war against Nazi
Germany, in which the most pow
erful interest was the ruthless
ness of Nazi prosecutions, and the
Nuremberg trials and convictions
for crimes against humanity
would result in establishing anew
the rights of man.
The second paragraph of the
San Francisco Charter expresses
as the purpose of that body:
ITO reafirm faith in funda-
mental human rights, and in the
dignity and value of the human
person"
But that faith and pledge were
early extinguished. The annexa-
ton of new peoples to the Soviet
empire and the control exercised
over all the East-European Com
munist states by the Russian
Politburo and secret police fed
fresh human fodder into the maws
of the "Gulag" Soviet labor
trust, run by the MVD-which,
with labor housed in camps or
tents behind barbed wire, guard
ed by armed watch towers and
bloodhounds, and worked to ex-
cruciating exhaustion and death,
stats Soviet timber, mining, rail-
road and reconstruction indus
tries from the Baltic to Siberia,
from the outskirts of Leningrad
to Baku.-l1o. .A1.- 40 . u 70 es-s
Spent 2 Years in Camps.
Rousset. who has set out to
mobilize the civilized world to de-
mand that the veil be torn from
this atrocity, spent two years in
Nazi horror camps. From hun
dreds of dispositions he declares
that except for gas chambers
the condition of Soviet slaves is
no better than the worst in Nazi
camps, at the worst stages of
S. S. control, while the number is
greater. He has formed his French
committee from veterans of Nazi
concentration camps-men who
cannot be duped. He will call
hearings in every capital of free
Europe, before which the evi-
dence of escapes will be heard.
To Soviet and Communist de-
malls, he cries: You can prove me
wrong: Open the gates to in
vestigation!"
Called liar" by the Communist
paper, Lettre Litteraire, he has
brought suit for libel and will
marshal a herd of witnesses.
There is only one issue: Do these
camps exist and are the condi-
tions as described?
Rousset is acting in the great
est tradition of French journalism
that of Emile Zola, with
"J'accuse." He is fighting with a
weapon more powerful than the
H-bomb: The conscience of man.
kind. 1t is a weapon that the
Soviets and Communists can de-
mobilize only by demobilizing the
system of slavery they are con-
stantly expanding-or by proving,
by permitting U. N. investigation,
that it does not exist.
(Released by the Bell Syndicate, Inc.).