GE PTR aT IE Mn EE

By DAN KEETON

The coverage in the Vancouver Sun was effusive in its
praise.
“Here is an omen of great hope for all the family: The

1 youth of all lands are already laying the foundations for

peace,” the article read.

The year was 1947 and the Sun columnist Elmore Phil-
pott was waxing enthusiastic, in mass-produced print,
about meeting the Canadian delegates just returned form
the first World Youth Festival, in Prague, Czechoslovakia.

“Most of them had also lived in youth camps in Cze-
choslovakia and Yugoslavia. They told their stories with
off-hand simplicity, much wit and good nature,” Philpott
reported.

“But they all added up to the makings — not of
war — but of peace,” the Sun reporter declared.

The article was reprinted in Journey for Peace, a 20-page
booklet recounting the experiences of some 90 young Can-
adians who had spent up to four months travelling to the
festival and neighboring countries, published by the Cana-
dian Committee of the World Federation of Democratic
Youth.

One of those delegates was fisherman Homer Stevens,
then 24, described by the Sun writer as “fit to stand and
speak with competence and sincerity among any one of the
70 national delegations which were there. We could do
with many like him in our parliament and, indeed,
government.”

There have been 10 subsequent festivals since Stevens,
for years the popular and outspoken president of the
militant United Fishermen and Allied Workers’ Union,
With other delegates took a series of trains and ships to
meet youth from around the world following the ravages
of World War Two. ;

The 12th World Festival of Youth and Students, as it is
Now called, happens this summer in Moscow.

“I was selected because I was a trade unionist,” said
Stevens in recalling the contribution of the Canadian
“Beaver Brigade” to the festival and to the rebuilding of
two European nations who were constructing socialism
Out of the ashes of the second world war.

“It was quite a shock for most of us to see the actual
destruction in the countries we passed through. Most
Shocking was Nuremburg (Germany), which had been
Pulverized,” said Stevens of the train journey that took the
brigade through Britain, France and Germany on the way
to Czechoslovakia.

€ scenes of destruction were constant reminders of
the reality of the war, and of the fascism that spawned it,
tevens recalled,

“We visited the village of Lidice, in Czechoslovakia where
Nearly every man, woman and child was slaughtered by the

42is in reprisal for the attempted assassination of Heinrich
€ydrich (the local Nazi official). At that time all that was

eft of Lidice was a large cross surrounded by barbed wire.
_ lat was the common theme of the festival — never
again fascism, never again war.”
omeone else who recalled the ravages of the second
World war was Sylvia Surette, a Richmond civic activist

pe My he world
festival in Poms she journeyed to Moscow for the

ils qi

Surette, whose trip took 17 days to arrive — seven by
van across Canada, and a combination of planes and
trains from there — said the signs of war were still preval-
ent across Western Europe. But in Moscow, they found
constant construction. 5

“We visited an apartment block. There was a gap in ages
of approximately 20 years between the men there. They
were either in their sixties or their teens. We also met a
women who, during the war and the Nazi seige, had lived
in the mud banks of hte Moscow River.

“To her, the fact that she lived in a new apartment was a
matter of pride,” said Surette.

That year more than 200 Canadian youth attended the
festival with the theme, “For Peace and Friendship,” dur-

ing a time when anti-Sovietism still ruled in the Western _

Hemisphere.

Surette recalled that the then head of the University of
B.C. forbade his daughter to attend the festival on the
grounds that she would return to Canada “brainwashed.”
That so angered her father that, in spite of her

Booklet. . .published by the Canadian delegation to the
first worid youth festival. ABOVE: The 11th World
Youth Festival in Havana, Cuba, 1978.

youth — most delegates are at least in their later
teens — he encouraged her to apply for the contingent.

“We came back brainwashed all right, but not in the
way anticipated,” said Surette. “In spite of what we’d
heard on radio and television, the message we received was
peace. On the street the most common phrase we got from
Soviet people was, ‘We don’t want any more war.’ ”

Stevens also recalled the political climate surrounding
the first youth festival. By 1946, then British prime minister
Winston Churchill had made his infamous “iron curtain”
speech in Fulton., Mo., launching more than a decade of
Cold War.

But the anti-Sovietism cooked up by Western leaders
following the era of co-operation and mutual regard that
characterized the Second World War hadn’t yet hit Van-
COUVEI. =. -

“While it was obvious that there had been a majo’
change (in foreign policy) it hadn’t struck home in Canada
among the trade unions and youth groups. There was still
that feeling of the solidarity that had been built up.

A

World Youth Festival:
tradition

‘ _ ~
“NFLY (the National Federation of Labor Youth,
which supplied many Canadian delegates) was a mixed
organization, in a sense,” he said.

It was the return trip home that provided the first real
experience of the Cold War, “like a bucket of cold water at
the end of a sunny day,” said Stevens. When the ship that
transported the delegates back across the Atlantic reached
New York, where delegates were to board buses for
Toronto, several were denied entry into the U.S. (One of
them, Roland Penner, is attorney-general in Manitoba’s
NDP government.)

Stevens, at the time a member of the Labor Progressive
Party, as the Communist Party was then known, was not

_ stopped.

“‘As we returned to our homes, the impact of what was
happening got home to us,” Stevens said in recalling the
anti-Soviet diatribes that were filling the pages of the daily
press. But there were also the supportive writers, such as
Philpott, and good receptions to the delegates who toured
schools and union halls for several months reporting on
the festival’s activities.

(Later that would change. By 1948 “it became harder to

find organizations which would let us address them,” said

Stevens. Even the supportive Vancouver Sun writer
changed his tune, rejecting an offer to interview what he
called “the hard-core Communist youth.”)

As for the festivals themselves, anyone who has
attended during the past four decades agrees: they are
awe-inspiring.

“When we got to the opening day ceremonies, it was
phenomenal — it’s hard to describe. For the next two
hours from the time we arrived our mouths stayed open
the whole time,” said Surette in describing the parade of
delegations from the 120 participating countries and

132,000 voices singing the festival theme song.

“It was really a tremendous experience,” Stevens
related. “There were about 85,000 in attendance, but to me
it might as well have been a million. It seemed like the
whole world was there.”

“Tt was the only time I’ve been with one million people
at the same place, the same time and for the same
purpose — it was exhilarating,” said Libby Davies, a
Vancouver alderman with the Committee of Progressive
Electors.

Davies, a 27-year-old community worker with the Down-
town Eastside Residents Association when she attended
the 11th youth festival in Cuba for two weeks during the
summer of 1978, found the days and nights of seminars,
concerts, tours, street festivals and other events — suchas
the huge gathering she described in Havana’s Square of the
Revolution, — overwhelming. “It’s only now that I rec-
ognize the significance of that festival and the fact that it
only happens once in your lifetime.

“Tt kind of jolts you out of the Canadian context. I think
the best thing about the youth festival is that it just throws
you into the international context.

“Sometimes your own struggles, as important as they
are, seem insignificant when you meet young people
involved in a struggle for their very lives.

“Tt makes you realize that what you’re doing here isn’t in
isolation. Around the world, people are actually building
socialism,” said Davies.

see FESTIVAL page 26

PACIFIC TRIBUNE, MAY 1, 1985 e 25