Feeding the Hungry, P. C. Hiebert, 1929

lities UNSEALING THE CLOSED DOOR 181 for communication with the home base were more satis- factory. When my outgoing visa was being prepared, I experienced a typical annoyance through the sheer con- trariness of a clerk in the passport division, who appeared to find a malicious joy in not returning my document until it was about train time, but an appeal to Kogan of the Foreign Office, as a last resort, was apparently effective. Arriving at Riga, I feasted my eyes once more on a city not overshadowed by the specter of hunger; slept in a hotel room that had been swept and dusted that same day and even the bed had been made up; ate in a real restau- rant where there was a menu card with a large variety of foods from which to select; food tastily prepared and daintily served; sauntered along the streets marveling at the displays in the shop windows; and was surprised at the many linen-collared men. How different the city from those I had seen in Russia. Again visas to be waited for, to be gotten by ener- getic push, or suave politeness, or by wheedling or insistent demands. Some consulates open only an hour or two a day, with all of them selecting about the same hour, thus necessarily congregating a mass of applicants at each place, choking the slow machinery grinding out the red tape. But fortune was with me. Only a few minutes to get my old passport at the American Consulate, then the round of Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish (for the Danzig Corridor) and German Consulates to let each one rubber stamp (usually for a consideration) a space of one to four inches on the supplementary pages that had to be added to my passport to provide room for all the visas. Generally the consulates were very courteous to our Amer- ican relief workers, and usually the ten dollar fee was remitted. In a few days I was again in Berlin, cabling to the Mennonite Central Committee in America and to Brown 182 FEEDING THE HUNGRY in London, European Director of the American Relief Administration. The American return cable directed me to wait in Berlin for a letter of instructions. I was in- formed also that the A.R.A. would permit only myself as A.M.R. worker for the time being. Against this arbitrary decision I wrote, on November 14th, a letter of strong protest to Brown, in London.. The letter analyzed the plan as it would operate under the Russian conditions, making clear that it would be utterly impossible to work efficiently on that method. Meantime, our contracts, originals with Government signatures, were forwarded by insured post to our Com- mittee in America, and the Holland contract delivered in person to their committee at Haarlem. As a precaution- ary measure, photographic facsimiles of the contracts were first made before entrusting them to the mails. A telegram from Brown announced his passing through Berlin where I could see him at the railroad sta- tion during the train stop there. Nothing ve