All Quiet in Poland

World War I was waged on three fronts: land, sea, air. World War II has a fourth: short-wave radio. Last week a German salvo (in Spanish) shelled Catholic Latin America with assurances that Catholicism still fared well in the Reich and in the silence that was Poland.

The broadcast pictured German Catholics as part of Germany's happy, self-disciplined family, painted an idyllic picture of Poland. "The Catholics here do not listen to those Catholics who do nothing but spread political propaganda, the way a great part of the Polish clergy did. . . . The stories spread by enemy propaganda referring to the treatment of Polish Catholics by the Germans are nothing but inventions. . . . Not one single church in occupied Poland has been closed. Everything connected with the religious life of the Polish Catholics is absolutely normal."

This barrage was a counterbombardment. For the best-informed agency on Nazi treatment of German-occupied Poland (a land verboten to foreign correspondents) is the Catholic Church itself. And the Vatican's short-wave station had already broadcast penetrating reports of German persecution, compiled by Augustus Cardinal Hlond, Primate of Poland, who had escaped to Rome 17 days after the invasion.

Said Cardinal Hlond, who in 1935 voluntarily renounced the State-levied taxes which had supported the Polish Church and who for years worked to heal German-Polish enmity: "In my archdiocese alone I have verified the fact that 18 priests were shot . . . without counting those who died in prison. . . . The churches are all closed with very few exceptions. . . . In the district of Znin for two months no Masses have been allowed to be celebrated. All the priests have been arrested and it is forbidden to administer any sacrament. . . . The Gestapo is the owner of the Church. . . . But the people have faith and they are bearing their trial with real spirit. They are not yielding and they can never be destroyed."

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