In 1949, the Student Council at Grinnell decided to participate in a new program aimed at finding collegiate homes for young international students displaced by war, or fleeing repressive regimes behind the rapidly descending iron curtain. This idea had been created by the National Student Association, and the whole initiative appears to have been largely student driven (including raising scholarship funds to pay for tuition for these “displaced persons,” a term used to describe the participants and the program). Pictured here are 2 of the first participants to join Grinnell College: Leon Bildusas, from Lithuania, on the left, and Serafim Romberg, from Czechoslovakia, on the right (along with a student guide showing them the campus). Between the two of them, these new arrivals spoke 7 languages: German, Lithuanian, Russian, Latvian, Ukrainian, Polish, and English.
