Russian, French, Moslem Students Make Congress Colorful Gathering

This is the second of a series of articles by Harvard's delegate to the International Students Congress in Prague, Czechoslovakia last August --Ed. note

"By damn, we don't have to look under the table any longer--there's a real live Red standing up!" In fact, there were twenty-four of them, straight from the Soviet Union. They had flown into Prague just two days before the opening of the Student's Congress--dark, semimongoloid Usbeke from Tashkent, tall Latvians from Rigs, and a dazzling blonde from the Ukraine.

Tanya was her name. She spoke not a word of English and my store-bought Russian was far too skimpy to convey all that I would have said to her. One beautiful August day, I haltingly invited her to flee with me to the United States. She returned the jest, pleading in mock-seriousness that it was I should flee with her.

Then we talked of other things.

The American delegation was first to arrive in Prague. For more than a week we had the indescribable thrill of watching more than three hundred delegates from thirty-eight countries gather at the Congress; of awaking one morning to find Moslems bowed down toward Mecca on the lawn outside; of brushing past kilted Scots in the packed dining hall; of looking on while Yugoslavs chanted defiant Partisan songs and would slowly about in their locked-step snake dance.

Out beyond the crooked little streets of Prague's Male Strana, past the tiny shops of the alchemists in Hrachany, and the towering St. Vitus Cathedral, stands a bleak dormitory, the Massarykovo Kolej. It was here on the 17th of November, 1939, that the Nazis began their bloody massacre of Czech students which resulted in all universities being closed for the remaining six years of occupation.

Greeted by PM

Sunday, the 17th of August, 1946, tricolored Congressus flags were flying over the Kolej. Prime Minister Gottwald and top cabinet officials turned out to pay tribute to the occasion. After a colorful opening ceremony in the ornate House of Arts and Music, the Congress moved to the more businesslike conference rooms of the Kolej. Within its confines, we were to work and eat, and occasionally sleep for the next two weeks.

The irrepressible optimism of European students came as a surprise to most of the Americans. Perhaps we had expected a sort of gloomy pessimism from British students whose country for the first time was being forced on the bread rationing over a year after the war's end.

Certainly we had not hoped for such boundless energy from Joseph Roger, the small, ugly delegate from France. During the war his job with the Maquis had been to steal Nazi files about the French underground. Caught, shot without trial, and left for dead, he was found two days later by a gravedigger and nursed slowly back to life. Today, still carrying the bullet somewhere in his head, he is back at the Sorbonne, leading in the French student movement.

Students Undernourished

One did not have to look far to find the pale, undernourished look of an ex-occupant of the German concentration camp. Two Czech students bore with them the unmistakable back of the tubercular victim. In a country where 40% of the former members of concentration camps suffer from serious lung disease, they have only added their names to the waiting lists of the overcrowded sanitariums.

But little mention was made of past suffering. During the opening days of the Congress, all attention was concentrated on the job ahead. There seemed to be an almost fanatic determination that it should not fail