The rails of the troop ship, leased by the American Youth Hostels, were crowded with young people eager to get their first view of
Europe as we glided gently up Oslo Fjord on that brilliant June Sunday in 1947. At every turn in the narrow channel people waved from tiny weekend cottages. Except for bombed out Southampton,
where we landed briefly, the pristine countryside with its picturesque villages and manicured countryside showed no signs of the war-torn Europe we had expected. For first
time-visitors from America it was like stepping into a fairyland, unspoiled by ugly billboards and all the paraphernalia of an unchecked industrial society. It was also cyclist’s paradise with hardly a
car on the roads. My two American friends and I cycled down Oslo Fjord and half way across Sweden until, tempted by the Lilliputian passenger steamer on the Gotha Canal.
The
tiny ship that sails through tunnels and across viaducts was too much to miss. Sailing on it was a good rest for our out of condition muscles. The boat sailed into the picture book city of
Old Stockholm with its hand crafted buildings, clear clean waterways and quaint narrow streets. The other part a very modern city was a real contrast. It was struggling to accommodate the
pressing migration from peaceful farms into urban centers by squeezing thousands of families into tiny apartments.
But this was not to be a tourist trip. I was here to learn. It had taken
less then a year in sociology at Antioch College to convince me that sociology could be better learned from real life than in academia, no matter how good the books or professors. I had promised
myself to get a better education than college could give and I was determined to get it. The course I assigned myself I called social dynamics -- what causes societies to flower? what makes others
disintegrate? what are the root causes of injustice, alienation and prejudices which lead to war?
Above all I wanted to know those movements which had been most successful in
developing a constructive social conscious among its people. On this trip the three movements I intended to study in depth were the Danish folk high schools, the Israeli kibbutzim and the Gandhian
movement in India.
My “scholarship” was sponsored by a wild thumb. My dormitory was a knapsack with sleeping bag, loaf of bread, an apple and cheese.
Though in my late twenties I knew I was still a novice. A few years earlier, as a Gandhian inspired conscientious objector during World War II, the US Government had treated me to a residential, all expenses
paid course in criminology.
For two years in two Federal Correctional Institutions I was given the opportunity to live with and become intimately acquainted with the outcasts
of our society and to understand how our wealthy country can abandon its poor and minorities.
Equally valuable was being together with the creative minds of some of the
leaders of the pacifist movement who were inmates with me. They often made life there a stimulating seminar.
Now, in the wide open spaces of rural Scandinavia, that was almost
a forgotten memory.
The social movements there were an inspiration in many ways.
Their consumer’s cooperatives, which were the leaders in the world, took
justified pride in their quality and in the conditions of their workers. There were also unique youth programs, special adult study programs with a cultural orientation and many others. But it
was the Danish folk high schools that attracted me most.
They had made that country one of the most democratic in the world with an economy based on the products from small family farms.
There was no unemployment nor pockets of poverty in those days.
Outside of Stockholm I visited a work camp for peace. It was here Gertrud Hertling, a German student volunteer
sowed the first seed of Servas. A shapely girl with strong features and a ready smile said in very good English, “You can not imagine how isolated the German youth are. First as a result of
the Nazi regime then during the war our youth have been cut off.
Now the occupation allows us to take no more than $5. out of the country. How can our German youth
locked into occupied Germany learn the meaning of democratic ways?
”The second seed was sown by a young American I chanced to meet. He told me at great length in the strongest reactionary
terms how terrible the Swedish Socialist government was.
At that time there was almost no country in Europe that cared more for its working people. Their medical services were
excellent and mostly free.
Their consumer’s cooperative movement was the envy of thoughtful people around the world. Their educational system, which included folk high
schools, was also outstanding. There were no unemployed nor poor people in the country.
I was shook up by his attitude.
This young man had spent a
summer getting as biased a picture of Europe as he could because he was placed in an a reactionary rich family by a well known international student exchange program. Ouch!
There was
certainly a need for a different hospitality system. The experience of organizing a few peace demonstrations like one where we walked 170 miles from Lancaster, PA to the UN in New York gave me the
foolhardy confidence I could organize a little hospitality network in Europe, even though I was a foreigner.
If committees in various countries could be formed that would gather the
names and addresses of families, settlement houses, coop living groups and children’s villages a hospitality network could be developed with no need for financial support or any other kind of
backing.
It is amusing, looking back from here, on this naïve American, with apparently little more than a sleeping bag and notebooks in his rucksack, who was hitch hiking from
country to country expecting people who had been through a hellish war to then welcome into their homes the former occupying soldiers whom they didn’t even know personally and treat them as respected
guests. I can’t blame my Danish acquaintences at Askov for calling me a “fantast” wild dreamer in otherwords.
What they didn’t know was that I had earlier been given a magic insight
by my Quaker friends a view into the soul of mankind.
They call it in America the Inner Light. The Hindus call it the Atman.
By whatever name it guides one
to see the potential goodness in a stranger even one with the worst of attitudes and motives. If one looks deeply enough everyone has a spark of humanity, a desire to be a wanted part of the human
family. Lighting that spark can bring out wonderful responses. This view point was an ever-present assurance Those people who put Servas on the map were persons who shared my faith in humanity
and the potentialities of peace. They were people who had gone through the terrors of World War II and had their pacifism more sorely tried than mine. Where else could I have found Europeans who had
risen above the hatred of war and the bitterness of its aftermath?
Actually, I did not choose them for those reasons. The leaders of the various anti-war organizations like the War
Resister’s International, the International Voluntary Service for Peace,the Quakers and the Fellowship of Reconciliation were part of my ideological family.
Without them Servas
never could have been started, at least there at that time. I believe I would have found little sympathy in most other circles. My failure would have proven my Askov critics correct, that I
was a wild dreamer living in the clouds. Thanks to those peace leaders this vagabonding sower of seeds was led to the people who would cultivate the seeds until they grew strong and spread over most of the
world.
The real founders of Servas, therefore, were not students in a fictitious group at Askov. I created that fiction because I don’t like personality cults and was determined to
avoid one in Servas. When I visited him years later, Lauge Stetting, in Copenhagen, who was one of my close associates at Askov, said very vehmently he should not be associated with the starting of
Servas. It had nothing to do with him.
So you can rightly call me the seeder of Servas. But call those who cultivated those seeds the true founders for there would be
nothing without them. Although many of them are pacifists Servas never was, from the day it was envisioned, a pacifist organization, either in terms of wanting mostly pacifist hosts or travelers
or desiring to convert anyone to become a conscientious objector. However, everyone who benefits from Servas should thank those dedicated persons who worked for years, and took money out of their
own pockets to make the open door network a world reality. Please brothers and sisters stop arguing about pacifism in Servas. Servas has from the start, however, aimed to build the
foundations of justice which can lead to a peaceful world. A study in depth of the life and teachings of Gandhi can clarify best the ideals which inspired Servas.
On with the history.
In the capitals of each country the offices of the peace oriented organizations were visited. In most countries the work camps for peace
oranizations had different names, so did the anti-war organizations. But they are all in a peace network and I had the lists. In each office they listened sympathetically and then refereed me to
individuals they thought might be interested in serving on a committee to make lists of possible hosts and to approve persons from their country who wanted to travel with the system.
I guess I recited the plan of open doors for peace hundreds of times. Most committees usually melted down to one or two dedicated individuals.
The first to develop good lists were
Denmark, Netherlands and Norway. Sweden and Belgium had a few hosts to start with. After a year I went on to a Quaker work camp in Germany.
Here volunteers from several
countries painted the rooms in an army barracks that was housing German speaking refugees from areas lost to Poland after the war.
The caretaker of the gym we lived in had a
typewriter, something rare in fleeced Germany. He let me borrow it hoping the Party wouldn’t mind. Later he told me it belonged to the Communist Party. Leaving the camp I continued on to
Hamburg and came face to face with a city totally ravished by bombing. A flattened modern city with people living in the rubble is a sight one can never forget.
With a letter of introduction from an American friend to the Socialist mayor of Hamburg I went into the city hall and asked if they would tell me the best way to make copies of the Servas leaflet I had
composed in English in the work camp. They took the material. A half-hour, then an hour I waited. It seemed like a terribly long time to get an answer for such a little question but they had my
only copy. I just had to sit. Then to my amazement it came back with a stack of copies not only duplicated but translated into good German.
On the way to Hamburg I had hitched
rides with many different people and had fascinating discussions with them in my unique made-up German. Because I knew no German when I arrived in Germany I created a special personal German by
gradually replacing Danish words with German words as I heard them. “Where are your from. I thought I knew all the dialects in Germany but I never heard that one before.”
Exclaimed a woman I met in Hamburg when she heard my unique Dano-German. Anyway it was sufficiently intelligible to permit some quite interesting conversations with people of many political colors who
gave me rides.
I spent a few days with Gertraud Hertling’s family.
Her father, a tall dignified long time teacher and youth organizer, was determined
to make Servas work in Germany despite the lack of housing, shortages of food and devastation from the obliteration bombing. My German work camp friends told me the Allies would lay several residential
blocks flat each night, then go on from where they left off the next night--a kind of scorched earth from the air. While I was sowing the seeds for Servas in Europe a little miracle happened in
California.
Some years earlier I had met an extraordinary women in the hills of Berkeley who became my adopted grandmother. She lived by Gandhi’s spirit and philosophy as no
other American I have ever known.
Everywhere I traveled was a letter from her waiting for me. When I wrote her about the open doors for peace plan she set to work never asking
me or any one. Without leaving her rustic humble vine shrouded hillside cottage. She was in her late seventies and had no transportation she collected names and addresses of people all across the
US.
Stories she wrote about the program were printed in all kinds of periodicals, especially peace and socially concerned magazines. Before I returned to the USA
she had gathered the names and addresses of over four thousand US open door hosts. At first she used a typewriter which even then should have been in a museum.
When her hands
got too arthritic to type she wrote in longhand but never told me how she kept the records and I was too preoccupied to ask. Imagine my astonishment when one day I discovered they were carefully filed
on small scraps of paper in little shoe boxes under her bed. I was even more flabbergasted to learn she had no savings nor income but lived only on welfare, squeezing her small income so as to cover
the cost of stamps and stationary to develop the US open door program. No one in early Servas was more adamantly opposed to asking for money under any circumstances although all of us founders agreed
with that policy.
Esther Harlan should be called the saint of Servas for what she did to get us started and for a number of other things she also achieved.
I promise to tell Ester’s story in more detail when I write the chapters on the beginning of Servas.
She deserves much more space than there is room for here. Before leaving Germany
I tried to get some understanding of why many Germans followed Hitler.. I believe if we do not make a better effort to understand the genesis of destructive social movements we will never prevent them
in the future. It was particularly disturbing to learn that the occupying powers, while blaming the Germans for their Nazi points of view were at the same time licensing pro-Nazi businesses
while refusing to license branches of the democratic consumer’s cooperative movement.
Those few months traveling in Germany, because I had burning questions, made it a profound
education. If Ihad traveled without those gnawing questions I would have missed understanding the genesis of Nazism and how one of the best educated, most scientifically advanced countries in the
world fell for Hitler’s totalitarian racism and expansionist philosophy. In the Netherlands I learned about Nazism from a totally different point of view for the Dutch had suffered more than most
people. Despite what they had endured, under the occupation and being in the line of fire, getting the open door network started was not difficult. Belgium was not as easy.
At the
boarder with France a little telephone booth size structure held the single French custom’s official.
But I had no passport to show him. Along the way my passport
had vanished. It could have fallen out of my torn jacket pocket. It could have been lifted by someone who gave me a ride. Here I was on the French boarder
rummaging from top to bottom in my knapsack invain while the man who was giving me a lift waited impatiently because the ferry to England was due to leave Calais shortly.
Finally the
French custom’s said, “You had better go on or you’ll miss the boat.” Arriving in England with no passport was worse. When I flashed my seaman’s card, which I had never used, I was directed into
an interview room. There the long questioning started.
Peace Builders, which was on many of my papers threw up a red flag. Perhaps I was a Communist
spy, he undoubtedly thought. Every inch of my jacket was felt for hidden lists. Then when I told him I had been studying in Denmark he got someone to buy a book for me to translate as proof. No
Danish book was available in the seaman’s bookstore but a Norwegian one was. My easy translation of the passages he chose got me over that hurdle. When I asked him politely if his job was to make
it difficult for people to visit England he said “yes” politely, too. Then he asked what were the purposes of Peace Builders. It was a pleasure telling him my understanding of Gandhian methods of
non-violent social change. Most amazing was his closing the interview by saying, “It was very interesting talking with you. Good luck in your efforts. I will give you a six month’s visit to
stay in the UK.”
From London, where I visited the various peace offices, I was directed to people in Birmingham. There I made my temporary home for several months
sleeping in the attic of the Peace Pledge Union office in the slums.
Those months in Birmingham became one of the high spots of my life. Connie Jones, a jolly youthful
school teacher was the dedicated secretary of the Peace Pledge Union, the English branch of the War Resister’s International. Esma Burrough with a rare bushy beard for those days was the secretary of
the English branch of International Voluntary Service for Peace. Lanky, serious Chris Smith was also a teacher and local secretary for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Lisbet Foliard, the
mother of a vivacious little girl worked for Cadbury’s Chocolate. She represented the Quakers in our group. They received me as though I was a long lost brother. Thanks to the
fates who had stopped me from moving so fast Servas took root there.
Birmingham became the European Servas headquarters if you can call it that. This group of dedicated
people embraced my idea of forming Peace Builders teams and asked me to help them constitute one. We discussed methods and systems.
I wrote the first handbook for national secretaries
with Connie’s tireless editing. The format from this, slightly modified, is still being used in most countries after almost 50 years. We supped together, took trips and went
camping together but mostly we worked out many things which formed the foundation for Servas. When a replacement passport had not come through in six months I was visited by a very polite Home Office
representative. I told him I was determined to go on to India as soon as my passport came through. When he suggested I should return to the US. If he sent me to
prison that would be a good opportunity to study British criminology, one I would not mind. I also explained I was taking nothing from England, neither a job nor a living place. He must
have concluded I was not subversive for I was never put on a black list. Finally, after some fifty people wrote to the US State Department on my behalf, a replacement passport came through. The
problem arose because the American embassy official where I applied for the replacement accused me of either selling or destroying my passport. I was not happy to leave the close knitfellowship we
developed in Birmingham. The group there had grown into a warmer relationship than I had ever experienced in my own home. In France, Austria, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria my efforts to find good
Servas representatives failed. Teachers in the American School in Turkey wanted to be representatives for that country but I felt it should be a Turk. I still wonder if that was a
mistake. In Israel I connected with a gem, a violinist in the Israel symphony orchestra who led Servas there for many years.
Though I spent three months in Pakistan I made no useful
contacts for Servas. India, Gandhi’s country, was very different. Most of the rural development centers Gandhi called ashrams were glad to be listed as open door hosts. Then I met a remarkable
man at the gathering of the Gandhian inspired workers from all over India. Harivalabh invited me to come to his mountain center where he was initiating an extensive rural development program among
isolated and neglected mountain tribes. Unfortunately he so ardently held to his position as Servas secretary for India he left no room for other who wanted to take some initiative.
Then I got a letter from England urging me to return to Europe where they had called the first international Servas conference. So I canceled my proposed trip the rest of the way around the
world and took a ship to Europe. We met at Claus Weiss’ and the Hertling’s house near Hamburg. Only England, Denmark and Germany were officially represented. Besides agreeing on some basic
procedures we decided on a name for our program. Esther liked “open doors”. I liked “Peace Builders” but preferred we choose an inter-cultural name. We finally agreed on “Servas” which is
Esperanto for serve in the present tense.
The thought was that people who traveled would learn from their hosts ways they could more effectively serve in their home communities to
develop programs and human relations that were free of the seeds of war. At no time did anyone suggest that that meant we had discarded peace building as our goal.
There was
no thought of changing our basic purpose or even emphasis. The story that choosing the name Servas meant we wanted to alter the aim of our program is wrong. For many years we
followed Esther’s and my conviction that we should have no charges for anything.
It is amazing how well this worked. Naturally it would not work with Servas being as
extensive as it now is, however, I believe we are pricing out some of the people we most want to serve.
