Harvard's Seven Displaced Persons Slip Easily into University Routine

Seven DP students, who came to the United States for the first time last summer, have settled into University life and are quickly becoming Americans.

Dividend among the seven Houses which collected $5,622 dollars for them last year, the students are: John Czernyha '51 of Kirkland, Anton Bajuk '51 of Dunster, Robert Grasselli '52 of Winthrop, Sergei Yermakov '5 2of Lowell, Andrys Grots '52 of Leverett, Peter Danes '52 of Eliot, and Benon Przybielski '51 of Adams.

Czernyha is engaged to a girl in Worcester. Yermakov has played on a House soccer team. Danes has taken two hour exams and received straight A's. Bajuk joined a College group listening to the Harvard-Stanford game and was the only one with a broad smile on his face. It was the first time he had heard of "football."

Their experience, and those of the three others, are surprisingly alike. All from Western Europe, their fear of Russia was stronger than their hatred of Germany.

Each has described the events leading to his arrival in America:

Med Student Dodged Reds

John Czernyha '51 was born in Poland. When the Germans invaded his Russian-occupied country in 1939, Czernyha was studying at the Lwow Medical School. Because he was actively engaged in several anti-communist youth organizations, the German invasion saved him and his family from deportation to Siberia.

It wasn't much of a blessing. Czernyha's popularity and anti-Nazi activities led to his arrest and separation from his family in 1941. He spent the next four years in concentration camps.

He was moved from Auslitz to Mauthausen to Evensee by coal train as the Russians drove dangerously close to each camp.

When he was liberated by American troops in 1945, Czernyha went briefly to Insbrook Medical School and the University of Salzburg. When lack of funds was threatening to cut short his scholastic career, he applied for and received his Harvard scholarship thorough the International Refugees Organization.

Czernyha wants to go to Graduate School next year and would like to land a job with the State Department. With information from his homeland, he is writing a book about Russian concentration camps.

Tito Minion 'Misled'

Born in the province of Slovinia in Poland Anton Bajuk '51 joined Marshall Tito's "front of liberation" in 1943 to strike back at the Germans who were oppressing his homeland.

After two months of taking orders from "higher-ups", Bajuk and many other students were fed up. "Tito's leaders claimed their only interest was fighting Germany," he says, "but it was quite apparent to many of us that they were aiming for complete political power at the end of the war. By the time we saw that our resistance movement was communist-led it was too late to change.

When the war ended in 1945 and Yugoslavia was left to Tito, Bajuk escaped to Austria and joined a small technical school in Graz, under the British military government. In his second year at the school Bajuk sent an application to Harvard.

Chemist's Sister at Wellesley

With Bajuk at Graz was 19-year-old Robert Grasselli '51, also from a small town in Slovinia, Yugoslavia, Grasselli was too young to be actively engaged in the war, but his parents were in business and, when the communist regime was established in 1945, all business went to the state.

He and his family went to Graz, where Grasselli studied Chemical Engineering in the school where Bajuk was a physics major.

Spring of 1949 saw the first separation of the Grasselli family, with Robert and his sister coming to America on scholarships to Harvard and Wellesley.

Grassolli goes often to visit his sister but is "not quite sure" what he thinks of Wellesley girls. He would like to go to graduate school to continue his Chemical Engineering studies, but he's not sure he can afford it.

Czech Escaped Bondage

Peter Danes '52, an Economics major form Prague, Czechoslovakia, calls himself a "political refugee."

Danes's father died in a concentration camp in 1939, and he and his family went through six years of "hiding and waiting for the end." At the end of the war, Danes, thinking his troubles were over, entered the School of Business at Prague.

There he became involved in a typically partisan student political campaign and was elected to an office under the auspices of the Czechoslovakian Socialist Party, Benes' Party. Because of these affiliations, soon after the internal overthrow of the government in February, 1948, Dane's name was put on a list that read:

"According to the decision of the Action Committee of this College, the following students of the School of Business are excluded from study at all Czechoslovakian colleges until the final decision of the honorable law-court of the Union of College Students."

He was threatened with "slavery" in the coal mines and was arrested by the Security Police. "It is the only place in the world," according to Danes, "where you can be proud to be in jail."

Upon release, Danes escaped across the border to Munich. He was studying in the university when he received his acceptance to Harvard.

The best thing about Harvard, as far as Danes is concerned, is the House system. In Europe the students live privately. Danes has six roommates. A brilliant student, Danes wants to go on to the Business School, and is considering writing a book on the Czechoslovakian situation.

Yugoslav Fled Commies

Sergei Yermakov '52, a Yugoslavian of Russian descent, left his homeland in 1944.

His father, a famous Yugoslavian doctor, was taken to Vienna in that year, and soon afterwards Yarmakov and his mother went to join him. Yermakov worked in a factory in Vienna.

Two days before the Russians took the city, the family moved to a farming village near Munich. After the Americans came, Yermakov finished his schooling in Munich from 1945 to 1949, when he received his scholarship. His parents came with him to America and are living in New York City.

Yermakov would like to follow in his father's footsteps with a medical career. He has a stock answer when asked how he likes America, "I like America very much, but I like Harvard the best."

Balt was Forced Laborer

Andrys Grots '52 lived in Riga, Latvia, the small nation that has been buffeted between Germany and Russia for decades.

Early in 1941 the Russians sent Grots's parents to Siberia. Grots escaped, but when the Germans invaded late that year, he was sent to Karlsbad to work in a china-insulation factory.

The Russians returned in 1944, and he escaped to a Displaced Persons camp near Nuremburg in the American zone. Grots applied for and received a job-assurance in New York. When he reached America, he heard of an opening at Harvard left by another DP student who had

not arrived. He applied, and was accepted immediately.

Pole Worked in Berlin Ruins

The seventh of the students is Polish born Benon Przybielski '51, whose father was killed in 1939 and the rest of his family, except one brother, sent to a concentration camp. The brother joined the underground in Warsaw, but Benon was sent to do farm work in Germany.

After a few weeks he escaped to Poland and stayed with relatives north of Danzig.

In 1944 he was captured and again sent to Germany to work in the ruins near Berlin. At the end of the war he returned to Poland but left almost immediately, because the Russians had taken over. He returned to Germany, finished high school, and in 1948 received an IRO scholarship to the University of Hanover.

In 1949 he came to New York patronized by Bishop Gilbert of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Here he learned about an opening at Harvard.

Przybielski's mother is now in England. "When I finish my studies," he says, "I'll have money to brings her over."

All arrangements, including the running of the collection for the seven men, were directed by the Harvard chapter of the National Students Association.

Last year the College group correlated the operations of all of the NSA chapters in the country in bringing 160 displaced persons to American universities. Although no more of the students will be brought to the College in the near future, the Association is working on the placing of displaced persons in other schools that have not yet been approached