Woodland Scene

Hard spring rains slanted into Poland's Palmiry Forest. The dank woods were full of muted human voices. Under trees that had seen 300 springs, workmen hunched against the weather, moved about looking for young, slender pines. With them went uniformed foresters, guiding, pointing.

During the German occupation these foresters had seen Nazi troops in the woods, had heard the sound of shots, had discovered fresh-turned earth. Carefully they had planted little pines to mark the places, with dates carved into the trunks. Now they pointed here, there. Picks thudded into the sodden soil.

When one pine-marked trench was opened, Red Cross girls descended, pawed over 250 corpses so decomposed that they were no longer horrible. They called to men with notebooks: "One handkerchief marked with a K, one pair of glasses." Then, enthusiastically, "Here is his passport, his name is Piotr Kowalski." In another trench was all that was mortal of Mieczyslaw Niedzialkowski, a Warsaw Socialist editor who had loved strong argument and strong drink and who, in 1939, had organized the workers' brigades that helped defend his city. Last week the workmen built him a little coffin and laid a few flowers on it.

The foresters moved on, pointing to more and still more little pine trees. One forester guessed that 12,000 Polish bodies lay in Palmiry Forest, still unidentified.

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