The southern portion of the country I understand suffers the poverty of southern Italy or Greece--perhaps worse. Not so the North which appears to be at about the same economic level as most of Austria. Buildings are in good repair, people are reasonably well dressed, and cities are quite crowded with automobiles. Strangely enough, the only poverty I noticed was in one of Ljubljana's best visited tourist attractions, the large castle on a bluff in the middle of town from which the city was defended against Turkish invasions from the 13th to the 17th century.

Nazis Ousted

A Museum of the National Liberation apparently graces every major town in Yugoslavia with vast 'You are there' exhibits of political cartoons, marionettes used in cabarets, tanks, rifles, grenades, and other memorabilia celebrating the victory of Tito's Partisans over the Nazis in 1945. Neither tourists nor citizens seem to visit these and the one in Ljubljana was no exception in this respect. Within the long marbled corridors and the impressive exhibit rooms were two people besides myself--the director and his secretary.

"Yes, it was between 1941 and 1945 that the loyal proletariat fought the Revolution," or, "No, we did not fight internal forces so much as the imperialistic Nazi invaders," he replied to my questions, all the time looking not at me but around me at the secretary who had stationed herself at the door and seemed to be giving him signals of some sort. When I asked him whether there hadn't been forces other than the Partisans fighting the Nazis, he appeared rather nervous and hurried off.

Render Unto Caesar ...

One other time I received an equally evasive treatment--from a Catholic priest in Zagreb who allowed me to ask a couple of questions after having shown me his church. After he had explained that the great majority of Crotions embrace the Catholic religion, I remarked, "And you have no trouble with the state?" "That is a subject on which we do not speak," he said rather good naturedly and hustled back to his sacristy.

But, if the Catholic Church is not particularly well treated by the government, other churches (Greek Orthodox and Moslem) are probably far less harassed since they are subject to the control of no external secular power and therefore offer far less competition to the power of the state. Tito himself attends Orthodox services. A museum in Lubjlana carried an exhibit of lithography with work representing most countries. A very large proportion of the prints where non-objective, something that would never be tolerated in Russia expect for purposes of deadnoting foreign artists. One of the major triumphs of the exhibit, however, was its unintended demonstration that the merits of non-objective art are equally elusive in its manifestations throughout the world.

The Russian exemplars were socialist realism and bad. Interestingly enough, the Mexican exhibit consisted mostly of work done in the same style. Prints by artists of the satellite nations were considerably freer in style and some-what more down to earth by subject matter-many were very moving. And in the objective work of all countries there was considerable special comment, much of it favorable to the United States.

Young Doctors Threw Party

In Zagreb, while searching up and down the dingy narrow stairway of one of the better apartment buildings for the girl who had assured me in Vienna that she was a socialist and not a Communist, a young man of about twenty-four of five years stopped me and asked me in fairly good English if he could assist. Having ascertained that the girl was away in the country, I asked the man if he would like to join me that afternoon for coffee and tell me something about Zagreb. After a moment of nervousness he said, "I think maybe it would be better when you will join my friends and me at a little party we are having here."

The little party had been going since ten o'clock the morning before and no small quantity of Hquor had already been consumed. One could see little (all the drapes were pulled); nevertheless, it was quite apparent that the apartment was extremely large and well-appointed--about on the same level as a professional's apartment in New York. And it appeared that one member of the group, a young surgeon owned it himself. He was the product of a French Lycee which in itself would indicate that his family had been quite wealthy before the war. Yet there was no doubt that he too was earning a very adequate income. Another young doctor later explained that professionals were so badly needed now that the state not only paid good salaries but had dropped the tacit requirement of earlier days that professionals be good Communists.

Oppose Communism

These people, all of them in medical profession and all of them recently graduated from Yugoslavian Universities, were anything but good Communists. On the other hand, they were by no means revolutionaries. The political and economic conditions of the state seemed merely to present a subject for jokes--made funnier perhaps by a quantity of alivevitz, the Yugoslavia blum brandy.

a very earnest and quite uninebriated fellow, and engaged him in a discussion on doctors incomes that on the reception given to President Nkrumah Ghana when he paid Tito a visit before the Belgrade Conference. Exercising uncanny ability to sniff out a political discussion--even from the other side a pitch-black room that fairly tremble from the blasts of Satchmo's horn--the others shouted at the host to "cut this Communist propaganda."

What I had seen of Nkrumah's reception looked something like the return of Charles Lindbergh after his Atlantic.