"Union and Defense"

With the fall of Warsaw ancient and historic "Holy Poland" was again without a capital (see p. 32). However, through five centuries, half-a-dozen major wars and three partitions until Hitler & Stalin made the fourth, Poland has endured often as a burning ideal in the hearts of the Polish people rather than as a political fact. It was therefore no surprise last week when a brand new Polish Government popped up in Paris. At the Polish Embassy there it was announced that just before President Ignacy Moscicki fled from Poland to Rumania (TIME, Oct. 2) he secretly resigned and invoked a clause of the Constitution which permits the President to name his successor, naming the former Governor of Pomorze Province, a politically neutral lawyer, Wladislaw Raczkiewicz. At the Embassy the oath of office was solemnly administered to President Raczkiewicz, provoking the Nazi press to scream, "All this is a Polish farce!"

It was a maneuver technically necessitated by the fact that Poland's erstwhile "Strong Man" Marshal Smigly-Rydz and other members of the former Polish Cabinet had not only been interned but held strictly incommunicado in Rumania, as a result of joint pressure applied by Berlin and Moscow to King Carol.

Practically, also, a change of Polish leadership was due, with even British Elder Statesman David Lloyd George fuming at the former Government's flight and previous oppressions. Ignace Paderewski was offered the job of President, but the old pianist, in exile since 1920 from the State he helped found, turned the job down.

The change was approved by U. S. Secretary-of State Cordell Hull, who officially announced: "Mere seizure of territory . . . does not extinguish the legal existence of a government. . . . For the present at least Mr. [Ambassador to Poland Anthony J. Drexel] Biddle will remain near the government to which he has been accredited.

Mr. Moscicki, now a "private citizen," was permitted to leave Rumania for Italy this week. New President Raczkiewicz said his government will be one of "union and national defense," including minority representatives who for many years have had no place in Polish cabinets. He picked as his Premier the resourceful Pole who recently has been busy recruiting in France an army composed of Polish emigres, General Wladislaw Sikorski.

Only soil still held by Polish armed forces this week was a tiny strip of the Hel peninsula opposite Danzig. Its Polish garrison, considered too insignificant by the Germans for further waste of shot and shell, was completely surrounded, got hungry and surrendered.

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