Home for Christmas

In 1947, after seven years of service in the British Royal Air Force, Paul Bernard Grieger decided to visit his parents in Poland for Christmas. It turned out to be a long visit. Two weeks ago Grieger slipped into West Berlin with a hair-raising story of his escape, and a grim account of life in the new Poland.

He had found his homeland in effect a Russian colony. When Soviet Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky was proclaimed the new commander of the Polish army (TIME, Nov. 21), Poles at first could not believe the news, thought it a joke. Later, when Rokossovsky tried to address a crowd of workers in rusty, stumbling Polish, a sarcastic voice cried: "Don't be bashful, speak Russian. We are all Russians here."

When Grieger tried to leave Poland he was arrested, spent three months in the Jauer prison in Lower Silesia, another three in a Breslau jail. The Jauer prison, although jammed with 350 people, looked from the outside like an ordinary house. The prison wardens specialized in subtle forms of torture. All night long guards walked in & out of the cells, switching lights on & off to keep prisoners awake. When prisoners went to bed they had to pile their clothes in the middle of the room. Then guards would deliberately disarrange the pile and announce that everyone must be dressed in five minutes. Any prisoner who did not make the deadline was forced to do 200 deep-knee bends; if he fainted before he finished the 200, he was revived with cold water and forced to set to again.

Most novel instrument of torture was a bed that folded out of a niche in the wall. Guards would solicitously ask a prisoner to lie down, then start to fire questions at him: "Who sent you across the border? . . .Who paid you to do it?" (All of Jauer's inmates had been arrested on suspicion of trying to leave Poland.) When the prisoner refused to answer, the bed was raised and the prisoner pressed against the wall until he cried for mercy.

Grieger was finally released from jail, but got into trouble again. In a Warsaw cafe one day, he stopped to talk to a British visitor who was sitting at a table with three pretty Polish girls and a Communist functionary. When the Briton proposed a toast to "these nice girls here" and the King of England, the Communist shouted: "We won't drink to the -- King. It will be to Stalin." Says ex-R.A.F.-man Grieger: "I don't know what happened, but I slugged him." Before he could be arrested, Grieger ran. At the border, he picked his way through a triple-alarm system, was shot at as he swam across the Neisse River to Germany. When he reached the Soviet sector of Berlin, a friendly German helped him into the Western zone--where it was less risky to toast the King.

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