"You Cannot Shoot Us All"

In the name of the Polish female youth I take this oath, oh God! . . . We shall move the world, the hearts of nations, of politicians and statesmen even. For this aim we shall offer what we hold dear: womanish traits of goodness and mildness. We shall become soldiers who fight, who pour blood, who kill. God . . . look into our hearts and Thou willst find love, enthusiasm, readiness for sacrifice. . . . Poland, freed from the swastika, has been captured by the hammer and sickle. Dachau and Buchenwald have been replaced by Siberian ice. . . . Poland will rise from the dead, so help us God! Amen.

This oath was being taken by thousands of fanatical Polish Girl Scouts in D.P. camps outside Poland last week. Inside Poland, the Communist-dominated Government's campaign against Stanislaw Mikolajczyk's Polish Peasant Party rose to new heights of terror.

For months, the sturdy Peasant leader had been silent; he was determined, despite Communist pressure, to stay in the Government until the people had a chance to speak at the polls. But last week, his back to the wall, less than a month before the referendum in which Poles would be asked to approve the present regime's policies, Mikolajczyk finally exploded.

Before a general council meeting of his party, he bluntly charged that the Government was trying to break the Polish Peasant Party with secret police and armed thugs. In all but three of Poland's 17 provinces, Polish Peasant Party members had been banned as polling clerks, in spite of the fact that theirs has more adherents than any other party. Furthermore, local headquarters were padlocked by Communist-controlled police, and the Government had armed a "reserve militia" of 30,000. Another particular of the indictment: members of Poland's German minority had been supplied with counterfeit Peasant Party membership cards to brand the party as pro-German. Cried Mikolajczyk: "This is nothing but a political fight, which tries to make our work impossible and perhaps wipe us off the face of the earth."

The Government of which he is still a member suppressed Mikolajczyk's speech in Poland, but foreign reporters sent it out. Last month Miko (as U.S. newsmen call him) gave a U.S. traveler a message for his wife and son in Britain: "You may let them know that I do not have much hope of seeing them again. I do not know what can happen to me. I may be killed. I may be deported."

At the end of his speech last week, Miko added a postscript to the message: "There are those who ask what we, the unarmed, can do, although there are millions of us, when brutal force attacks us. I told [Communist Vice Premier Wladyslaw] Gomulka: 'You cannot shoot us all.'

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