Much to her surprise, Mrs. Lawrence Copley Thaw, whose involvement with good causes had been pretty much restricted to Manhattan and the sedate role of benefit hostess and fund‐raiser for the International Rescue Commit tee, ended up in Calcutta this summer doing relief work in an area where a disaster had actually struck.

What made Mrs. Thaw drop her plans last spring for a vacation in England was what she calls“ the greatest human catastrophe since World War II.” So instead of taking a jaunt to visit her stepchildren and grandchildren, she spent six weeks helping with the difficult spade work needed to get an I.R.C. relief project under way in West Bengal.

Few would argue with Mrs. Thaw's, description of the catastrophe. More than 200,000 Bengalis have been slaughtered in the civil war and a wave of terror unleashed by the Pakistani Army in East Pakistan on March 25; some 8 million homeless Bengalis have fled into already overburdened India, and thousands of these have died.

The hunger, disease and death that accompanied the refugees into India is of such magnitude, relief experts say, that the best effort of private agencies is like a drop in a bottomless bucket. But the I.R.C., a relatively small agency that has been helping refugees since Hitler's takeover of Germany in 1933, decided quickly to do what it could.

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To determine what aspects of the relief effort it should tackle, the I.R.C. held a board meeting last May in the spacious living room of Mrs. Thaw's 11‐ room Park Avenue maisonette.

Mrs. Thaw had been an I.R.C. director for many years and her home had become a favorite meeting spot for the board, whose members enjoy the wealth of French antiques assembled by her late husband.

At the meeting, the board voted to send a five‐man team to get things started in Calcutta and began casting around for someone to stay on there for a while to keep the wheels turning. The eyes came to rest on the slender figure of Lee Thaw.

“I thought I was dreaming,” she recalled the other day, “when I heard a voice say, ‘Lee, you wouldn't mind going back to India, would you?’ ”

“What could I say? I mean, it was the most marvelous opportunity to do something worth doing,” she said.

Mrs. Thaw is no stranger to India, but her three previous trips were made under vastly different circumstances.

Her first trip, some years ago, was made because her husband, an explorer, film maker and friend of maharajas, wanted to show her “all that grandeur” before it disappeared. She saw it and squalor, too, and was enchanted with India's people, beauty and philosophy.

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But not until last December did she return there for a “divine,” all‐too‐ brief stay. And soon thereafter she made another visit, accepting a surprise invitation from her friend, Ambassador Kenneth B. Keating, to be his houseguest at the American Embassy in Delhi.

That type of life Mrs. Thaw has long been familiar with. The daughter of the late George Francis, a Congressman who represented Manhattan's Silk Stocking District in the age of silk stockings, Mrs. Thaw admits to being part of the privileged world of “servants, travel and all the rest.” (Schooling in Italy, then Radcliffe, stateside service with military intelligence during World War II, a brief marriage to Marquis Lottieri Lotteringhi della Stufa, a stint on the staff of Vogue before her second marriage to Mr. Thaw.)

The type of life—or rather, disaster— that Mrs. Thaw had little familiarity with is that being lived in and around Calcutta today.

When the I.R.C.'s five‐man team, headed by Angier Biddle Duke, a one time I.R.C. president, former United States Chief of Protocol and Former Ambassador to Madrid and Copenhagen, arrived there, they settled in the air‐conditioned Grand Hotel. (“A blessing,” said Mrs. Thaw, the only woman in the group.) But while the hotel provided dehumidified air, it was no insulation to the horrors of the city.

But it was precisely to this black hole of rampant poverty, unemployment and despair that the millions of refugees streaming into West Bengal began to gravitate, adding tragedy to disaster.

Thousands upon thousands have been jammed into ill‐equipped Government camps, but others have no shelter at all.

“A camp can be two or three people dripping wet under a tree, with practically nothing on, no sign of a tent or a hut,” Mrs. Thaw said, adding that a bare survival ration of rice must be cooked in a rain‐drenched land where fuel is a precious commodity. “And gastrointestinal diseases are all over the place, and everybody has pneumonia or bronchitis.”

When death comes—as it has to thousands of the refugees—the survivors are often too weak or sick to bury the dead, and when graves are dug, they are frequently so shallow that vultures rip them open.

It was in this setting of “colossal, unbelievable disaster,” that the I.R.C. volunteers began to put to work emergency funds allocated by the agency. (The I.R.C., with headquarters at 386 Park Avenue South, began a fund drive in June and has so far raised more than $160,000 toward its million‐dollar goal.)

Compared with the estimated $400‐ million that poverty‐stricken India will have spent in the first six months of its refugee program and the $73 million the United States has pledged to help, the I.R.C. program appears minuscule, but it is filling a gap left by other relief efforts.

I.R.C. money is subsidizing refugee doctors, nurses and other medical personnel so that they can provide care in the monsoon‐flooded camps and is subsidizing refugee teachers in order to organize makeshift schools. The agency is also giving survival money to writers, artists, intellectuals and other professionals, who, Mrs. Thaw said, “were the chief targets of the Pakistani terror.”

Mrs. Thaw is aware of the connotation that could be attached to the I.R.C. decision to focus aid on what it calls “the most valuable people.” But this evaluation, she said, is based on the individual's responsibility and usefulness in a time when up to 50,000 Bengali refugees are pouring into India every day and the end is nowhere in sight.

Using their contacts in Calcutta, the I.R.C. volunteers managed to get Government clearances for their projects and organized their programs. Then, as the four men prepared to leave Mrs. Thaw in charge to finish up the details, the West Bengal government was dissolved, presidential rule declared, and Mrs. Thaw had a whole new group of faces to deal with.

But she managed, and after six weeks was able to leave the programs in the hands of a newly arrived I.R.C. volunteer, Prof. Aaron Levenstein of Baruch College, and his wife.

Right now, Mrs. Thaw has no plans to go back to Calcutta. “The Bengalis are very bright, and there's no lack of qualified staff people,” she said, noting that the I.R.C. will now concentrate on fund‐raising.

A report on the refugee problem by Angier Biddle Duke, honorary chairman of the. I.R.C., declared that “the response of the people of the United States has fallen short by far of the traditional response our country has been capable of in similar emergencies —none of which in recent times has been of similar scope, in suffering and disruptive impact.”

When so many Americans are shut ting their eyes and pocket books to one of the worst human disasters of the century, what prompted the per sonal involvement of this woman who became interested in the I.R.C. some years back only because she chanced to be seated next to Nicholas D. Biddle, then the agency's chairman, at a benefit luncheon on the St. Regis Roof?

“Look,” she said, “this is not just some little old thing happening in a far corner. It's a world tragedy, and we can do something about it.

“I feel very lucky to be able to work to help people. It's an enormous privilege. These are the things that make you happy.”