Word: pire
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...years, thousands of wretched victims of this century's upheavals have learned to know the heart of Father Pire -"the heart open on the world." In 1938 he set up a nationwide organization to help the poor, during the war ran holiday camps for children who had been evacuated from the cities, and at night served in stealth as a chaplain with the Belgian resistance. Then, one day in 1949. he heard a lecture by a U.S. UNRRA official describing the plight of Europe's D.P.s. "It was such heartbreak," recalls Georges Pire, "such despair that it suddenly...
...consuls and do-gooders from foreign lands seemed willing to help only the young and able-"a miner or a ditchdigger. We have a widow with nine children. No one ever came for her." Pire's idea was to build special "European villages" for the D.P.s-not a separate community, a potential ghetto, but "a neighborhood glued onto a city." Often he ran into ugly resistance: one Swiss village refused to allow him to start a home for aged refugees because it did not want to enlarge its cemetery; a German burgomaster got a letter threatening dire consequences should...
...Pire bring his "gypsies" around; an Austrian village wanted to erect a high wall around the D.P.s to keep them from stealing the farmers' apples. But one by one, Pire's five villages were begun. (One is named after Albert Schweitzer; he wants to name his next after Anne Frank...
Toit, Terre, Travail. The D.P.s came to them from as far away as Siberia-a Czech who once taught Latin, an elderly seamstress, a family who lived 14 years in refugee camps. But for Pire. they were never "beggars living off our crumbs." They got "toit, terre, travail" (roof, land, work): "We help them, but only halfway, the other half coming from them." He thought it essential for women to find pride in keeping a clean house with curtains at the windows, and men in earning their own wages, before the "weight of the odor and the noise...
...nine years Dominican Pire thinks he may have traveled 250,000 miles telling the story of the D.P.s. "My subject is not exciting," he warns his listeners. "My subject is misery." But that very misery, he feels, may "serve to unite us," to establish, at least as a beginning, a "Europe of the heart . . . Two ideas are dear to me. The first is that for us each refugee is a man, a being of infinite worth, who deserves all our attention, all our love, whatever his nationality, his religion, his learning, his poverty, his moral misery. The other idea...