Skeleton at the Feast

Viacheslav Molotov's dinner for Ed Stettinius and Anthony Eden had gone off splendidly. The Foreign Commissar had stuffed his guests with food and drink. A trifle reluctantly, they had let him have what he wanted--news pictures, for Soviet consumption, of all three drinking toasts together in San Francisco. The hour was late, all was chummy good will when Molotov remarked that at last he could tell the others what had happened to those Poles.

Stettinius and Eden perked to attention. For five weeks they and their Governments had been vainly asking about 16 Polish underground leaders who had come out of their holes at Soviet invitation--and vanished. Last time Molotov had been queried in San Francisco, he smiled and said that nobody need be concerned about their health. Now he said bluntly that the Poles were under arrest, charged with "diversionist activity" against the Red Army. He did not have to add that the penalty might be death.

The fact and its meaning were slow to sink in. It was as though Stettinius and Eden did not want to look at the skeleton which had invaded the feast. All next day they and Molotov labored away, in a kind of desperate friendliness, at changes in the Dumbarton Oaks draft of their world charter, but the skeleton would not be banished.

At a stormy night session, Eden took the lead in telling off the Commissar. Sullen and embarrassed, Molotov fought back as best he could. Afterward, in a tone of pained restraint, Stettinius and Eden asked the Soviet Government to account immediately and fully for the whereabouts (and safety) of the "prominent Polish democratic leaders" under arrest, and halted the Big Three's negotiations for broadening the Warsaw Government. In effect the Yalta agreement to agree on a new government for Poland was suspended.

Journey to Limbo. In bits & pieces, the story of the Poles' disappearance had already come out. Last March the Russians notified the Poles that they would be glad to talk things over with a select, list of underground leaders. The Yalta agreement was not mentioned; this, ostensibly, was an internal affair between the Russians and the Poles. Among the Poles so honored were Deputy Prime Minister Jan Jankowski, and leaders of the principal parties (Socialist, Peasant, Nationalist, Christian Democrat) opposing Moscow's Warsaw regime. Another was General Leopold Okulicki, who had succeeded Tadeusz Bor, leader of the ill-fated Warsaw August uprising, as commander in chief of the London Government's underground army. Some of the 16 hardly deserved the title of "democratic leaders," but they had what amounted to a Russian pledge of safe conduct.

On March 27 and 28, after checking by radio with the Polish exiled Government in London, they assembled at Pruszkow, a village near Warsaw, to meet the Red Army's General Ivanov. Nothing more was heard of them until Molotov confirmed their arrest last week.

The London Poles' list of vanished leaders had included 70-year-old Wicenty Witos, three times Premier of Poland and most distinguished of all the underground figures. Last week the Russians, elaborating Molotov's account, denied that Witos was under arrest. Apparently he was in Moscow, doing what he could to arrange an honorable agreement. The Russians concentrated their propaganda fire on General Okulicki, probably intending to use his record against the rest.

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