GLIMPSES of how Canada worked: a writer's memoir.

13. An international festival

Having grown up contributing to the many different ways in which my parents regularly sent food, clothing and medicines to Mom's family (Dad lost all of his during WWII), I knew that in 1959 Poland Russia and all of its satellites lacked all necessities of life. Everything they produced was exported to earn U.S. dollars needed to prop up the failed central economy. My companions, listening in Polish only, found the lecture so uninformative that they left before it ended. I said I found it so interesting that I must stay. The lies continued to the end.

I met more than a dozen other members of Poland's delegation, real students my age or younger, but they were afraid to talk about anything except Vienna and the weather. They didn't dare express interest in Canada or Switzerland. I bought cigarets and food for them, too.

Ed Kirchner of ICMICA had come from New York determined to persuade the festival's organizing committee to insert some sort of religious content into the program. A couple of days before the end, a "Believers' Day" was planned in a large movie theatre, with three keynote speakers presenting the core beliefs of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Those three men were far from being the brightest lights in town.

The French speaker about Christianity used the word "element" instead of Christ or God. The three were suspicious of each other, even hostile. When questions from the floor were invited after all had spoken, they interrupted each other to argue, triggering arguments in the very large audience. Shouting matches began.

Festival security guards hurried down the aisles. City police arrived because fights were breaking out outside the hall. I ran to one of them and showed my ID. He pointed in a direction, saying it was safe to run that way.

I fled in tears because religions had been manipulated. Three clowns had been chosen to speak for them. The ever-cheerful Ed shrugged off the disaster as "a loss for our side". He was preoccupied with very bad press reports about the official U.S. delegation. Its 600 members included communists and anti-communists, and their nasty infighting was being reported all over the world.

Americans in both camps threw an incredible amount of money at that WFDY. Those who communicated good news about capitalism and democracy used every lure available, from first-run Hollywood films to an Ella Fitzgerald concert.

Unfortunately, one very significant detail escaped them. Since the first WFDY in 1947 (and for a few years after Vienna), festival slogans contained the core term "peace and friendship", translated into all host languages. In German-speaking Austria in '59 those key words were Frieden und Freundschaft. But the term had been mis-translated in the U.S. In printed matter prepared there, "Frieden" became "freedom" so the festival's English slogan became "Freedom and friendship".

The German for "freedom" is Freiheit".

The error appeared everywhere, in all languages because the U.S. originals were copied elsewhere. Our team suspected that that error in translation was the result of sabotage. Just a few persons in exactly the right place(s) in the U.S. could do easily it. My Dad had made that clear to me years before.

During the festival, communism abused freedoms in Vienna as it pleased. Delegations from countries from which large numbers of people fled, or had tried to flee, to the West during the Cold War, had armed guards with them at all times. Delegations from Russia's most volatile satellites were housed on ships moored on the Danube.

In Canada, Phyl Griffiths at the Tely had kept track of me and asked for a detailed report about the Festival, for her eyes only, not for publication. After I returned to Carleton in October, the student newspaper asked for as many words as I could produce, and published all 13,000 of them. I closed that piece with a Polish delegate's remark that the West should hold a festival in New York City or Ottawa. Mr. Needham's grapevine somehow picked that up and he asked me for an article proposing a festival here, which he ran on the editorial page.