Free Keeper Of The Mountains by Bernadette McDonald

was one of the few men she ever considered marrying.
    After working for 11 years at Fortune , Elizabeth, at age thirty-four, was a little bored. By 1956 it was clear she wouldn’t advance any higher than a researcher, even though her work was appreciated and admired. Unsure what to do next with her life, and with no strong emotional ties, she decided the best thing was to get out of New York and really see the world. She took her profit-sharing funds from Time Inc., Fortune ’s publisher, and set off for as long as the money would hold out. It was the beginning of a new life for Elizabeth Hawley, but one for which she was well prepared.
    And so in 1957 she embarked on an around-the-world journey, master of her own schedule, seeing what she wanted, going where she wished and when it suited her – no more assignments and deadlines as she had known them in New York. In order to be assured of meeting interesting people along the way, she collected numerous letters of introduction before departing. For the next two years she explored: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in 1957; the Middle East, Turkey, Israel, Iran and a number of Arab countries in 1958; and South and Southeast Asia, including Nepal and Japan, and finally back to the United States in 1959.
    She travelled with panache. In each new city, she would stroll into the office of the Time Inc. correspondent as though she were of a different stature – a higher one. She assumed a certain “presence” to pull it off time and time again. As a clever, curious woman travelling alone, she stood out and she met fascinating people wherever she went.
    She launched her journey on the SS Statendam , leaving New York on April 16. Using Paris as her initial base of operations, she caughta train for Warsaw, a lengthy journey that revealed a countryside and architecture in transition as she moved from the Western traditions of France and Germany into Czechoslovakia and Poland. Throughout her travels, trains were her preferred mode of transport in order to see and absorb the country at a civilized pace. Arriving in Warsaw, she was delighted to run into Judy Friedberg, her former travelling companion from Yugoslavia. Working on articles for American magazines, Judy already knew the lay of the land, so she introduced Elizabeth to several American, British and German journalists.
    Elizabeth’s first impression of Warsaw was one of shock – so much destruction, so many gaping empty spaces in the centre of the city where buildings once stood. But rebuilding had begun, and she walked the entire city, exploring the churches, the Palace of Culture and the old section that had been rebuilt in its original baroque style. The locals joked with her about the Palace of Culture – a gift from Stalin to Warsaw, and truly ugly. They told her that the best view in town was from the palace’s 30th-floor observation deck – because it was the only place in the city where it couldn’t be seen.
    Together with her new journalist friends, she attended the May Day parade, where there was enthusiastic response to the new party secretary, Gomulka. That was nothing compared to the frenzied response to the cardinal of Poland when he led a parade of half a million Poles in the town of Częstochowa for the annual dedication of Poland to the Virgin Mary. Recently released from three years’ imprisonment, Cardinal Wyszyński would soon appear on the cover of Time , courtesy of Judy Friedberg.
    In Łódź Elizabeth interviewed the chairman of a Jewish civic group in Poland whose family was in the process of emigrating to Israel, along with most of Poland’s seventy thousand other remaining Jews. He explained to her that anti-Semitism persisted in Poland and there was no future for them there. The family story was astonishing. The parents and one of the daughters had spent the last nine months of World War II hidden behind