Anniversary of Bondage

To a calendar already bulging with red-letter days, Germany added a particularly sanguinary one last fortnight. The Reich commemorated the first anniversary of its stewardship in Poland by executing "Stefan the Stubborn" Starzynski, last mayor of Warsaw, outstanding hero of World War II.

When German dive bombers sent Poland's Government scurrying to safety in Rumania, Starzynski directed the defense of the capital. Over the radio, to the accompaniment of Chopin Polonaises, he gave the world a day-by-day account of the destruction of his city. To German demands for surrender, he defiantly announced: "We are fighting to death." When the Nazis entered the battered city, they found him at his desk, still defiant. He disappeared and Berlin hinted that he had committed suicide. Like many another suicide, he turned up in Dachau Concentration Camp. The Nazis reported that Starzynski's crime was "misappropriation" of Warsaw's funds. A year of Gestapo urging failed to uncover them.

Last week the British press reported the second end of Stefan the Stubborn. On the anniversary of Hitler's invasion of Poland that small, sturdy, bullet-headed figure, in striped prison garb, was marched between long rows of wooden barracks to the treeless, grassless Ubungsplatz of the camp to face a firing squad. Berlin did not bother to deny the story.

Record of Stewardship. In Poland, forbidden ground to foreign journalists since September 1939, the first year of Nazi stewardship resulted in two balance sheets. One, a glowing account of pacification and reconstruction, originated in Cracow, headquarters of the German Gouvernement General. It announced that:

> Adolf Hitler had observed the first anniversary by incorporating all of German-occupied Poland in the Reich. "The swastika will fly over this land forever," proclaimed Governor General Hans Frank. The name Poland was ordered purged from the German vocabulary.

> The Jewish problem was solved through the simple arrangement of ghettos, the idea of a Jewish reservation, along with a semi-autonomous Polish State, having been abandoned. Jews over 10 were required to wear a white arm band four inches wide bearing a blue Star of David. Two years of labor service were obligatory for all male Jews.

> Business was on three distinct levels, German, Polish and Jewish, each establishment designating its race and nationality. Germans received priority in stores and hotels, right of way in streets.*

> Pestilence had been brought under control by segregation of infected areas.

> Three times as many farm tractors were in operation as before the invasion.

> Warsaw was governed by 70 German administrators under whom worked 24,000 Poles.

> On the site once occupied by the main Warsaw railway station had arisen a German restaurant.

The Polish balance sheet could be put together only from fragments of news that slipped across the tightly guarded frontier. It revealed a grisly record of brutality, pestilence and starvation:

> Disease, hunger and the Gestapo had reduced Poland's population by five million since last September.

> The common Nazi practice of simply segregating communities in which epidemics broke out and leaving the inhabitants to die had resulted in entire villages being wiped out by typhoid fever.

> All factories, farms and forest land had been confiscated outright.

> Poles and Jews were forbidden to marry, allegedly because of an acute housing shortage, actually to prevent population increase.

> All Polish universities and schools were closed, the teachers arrested or deported.

> Coal cost $120 a ton, butter $3 a pound.

> Peasant organizations and the Polish Socialist Party were doing undercover work and making pan-Slavic overtures to Russia, regarded as a lesser evil than Germany.

Some of these reports were doubtless Polish exaggerations (it was even reported that many of the 1,700,000 Poles sent to Germany to do forced labor were sterilized), but the fact that the Germans failed to let observers from other nations visit Poland indicated that conditions there were gruesome.

*In an anniversary address to the Hitler Youth, Arthur Greiser, one of the four Nazi Regional Governors in Poland, declared: "The Pole is the servant of the German and will remain it forever."

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