Martyrdom

Since Adolf Hitler's victory inspection of bomb-shattered Warsaw last October, German-occupied Poland has been verboten to neutral correspondents. Only the meagerest details of how 19,000,000 people were faring at the hands of their new Nazi masters filtered through the news blackout to the outside world. The woeful experiences of escaped refugees, occasional off-the-record reportings of neutral consular agents, revelations of the Nazis themselves, have generally added up to the same thing:

The Germans have methodically looted the land of grain, foodstuffs, cattle, butter, swine, horses. Jewish and Polish property has been confiscated indiscriminately. Vast concentration camps have been set up and at least 300,000 young Poles, many of them former soldiers in the Polish Army, have been conscripted for labor in the Reich. Jews have been forced to wear identifying clothing (generally yellow arm bands), are largely confined to ghettos. Thousands of Jews, not only from former Polish provinces but also from Bohemia, Germany, Austria, have been dumped unceremoniously, with little food, clothing or money, into a small, not yet defined enclave around Lublin, southeast of Warsaw. Famine, disease and epidemic threatens the territory.

The job of policing the conquered country belongs to the Elite Guard's Death's Head Brigade, S. S. men whose main job heretofore has been to run concentration camps in Germany. The obituary notices of the S. S. newsorgan Das Schwarze Korps bear mute testimony that hundreds of these Germans have been picked off by Polish snipers. Reprisals have taken the form of wholesale executions of Poles.

>A "hard but just fate" is the way Gauleiter Arthur Greiser of Posen described the treatment meted out to the "subhuman Slavs."

The agency best able to gather information on Nazi treatment of Poland is the Catholic Church. Last week the Vatican radio let go for three days running on this subject, later released a bloodcurdling, stomach-turning report on treatment of Poles prepared by Augustus Cardinal Hlond, Primate of Poland, Archbishop of Gnesen and Posen, who escaped to Rome.

Large, powerfully built Cardinal Hlond, friend of Polish farmers and laborers, an educator with a liberal, modern tinge, had long worked to heal the age-old enmity of Germany and Poland. Excerpts from His Eminence's report to Pope Pius XII and the radio digest of it:

>"The new year, with its frail but refreshing promise of peace, brings us almost daily from Warsaw and Cracow, from Pomerania, Posen and Silesia, a tale of destitution, destruction and infamy of every description. . . . These are not confined to the sections of the country under Russian occupation, heart-rending as news from that quarter has been. Even more violent and persistent is the assault upon elementary justice and decency in that part of prostrate Poland that has fallen to German administration. . . ."

>"The richest part of Western Poland is being unceremoniously stolen from the Poles and deeded over to the Germans as the real proprietors are packed off in foul-smelling trains to the war-torn region of Warsaw. . . ."

>"A system of interior deportations and zonings is being organized in the depths of one of Europe's severest winters on principles and by methods that can be described only as brutal. And stark hunger stares 70% of Poland's population in the face as their reserves of foodstuffs and tools are shipped to Germany. . . ." >"No Pole may leave his home between 7 :30 p. m. and 6 a. m. During these hours the Gestapo sweeps down without warning on the unfortunate people. . .. The population do not sleep and spend the night dressed because the time limit allowed was recently curtailed and those not ready must leave with the clothes they wear. Individual groups are herded in the streets, covered by Gestapo guns, and wait for the bus to transport them. This wait sometimes lasts several hours."

>"At Bydgoszcz in September about 5,000 men were locked in a stable where there was not even room to sit down. There was fixed for their natural needs a corner of the stable, and a priest, Casimir Stepczynski, parish priest of Bydgoszcz, was forced together with a Jew to carry away with his hands human excrement--work which was fatiguing due to the great number of prisoners. The vicar, Adam Musial, who wanted to aid the venerable priest, was brutally beaten with a rifle butt."

>At the town of Cerewice women refugees underwent "very indecent gynecological examinations under pretext of finding hidden money."

>At Glowna a group was put in a camp with no heat and a cement floor, with only used straw for mattresses. "No lavatories or hot water were available. The children born in the frozen barn were washed with lukewarm coffee as no warm water was available."

>A priest was arrested at Znin while giving extreme unction to a dying person. "His clothing was torn from his body and the Holy Sacrament profaned."

>"The most Catholic diocese of Poland, with more than 7,000,000 Catholics, will soon become a land of infidels. . . . This extermination is continuing without interruption and takes the shape of perverse sadism. ... It is a real extermination, conceived with diabolic evil and executed with unequalled cruelty. . . . We cannot help but refer to this as one of the most serious enormities of all history."

In Paris last week, in a reception room of the Polish Embassy, 17 prominent Poles met as a newly formed National Council of the Polish Government-in-Exile. Council members sat in two rows facing each other, just as in the 16th-Century Polish Senate. President Wladyslaw Raczkiewicz appeared in formal morning dress. Premier General Wladyslaw Sikorski in full uniform with decorations. No member of the old Polish Parliament or the old Polish Government which in September fled in haste and disgrace from Warsaw was present.

Seated at a small table, dressed in white tie and waistcoat, was a frail, white-haired old man as familiar to the U. S. as to Poland. He was the first Premier of 20th-century Poland--Pianist Ignace Paderewski. At the age of 79 he had again closed his piano--to take the presidency of the new Council. He rose and in a firm voice gave his ideas on how a new democratic Poland would again rise. Then he expressed hope and determination: " 'Poland has not perished as long as we live.' Let us hurl at the enemy these proud words of our national anthem. . . . We incarnate the majesty of Poland's martyrdom. . . . Poland is immortal. We shall deliver her from captivity and restore her from ruins.''

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