POST-WAR STUPIDITY

Evening Star, Issue 21505, 1 September 1933, Page 7

POST-WAR STUPIDITY

MAN WHO HAS NO NATIONALITY PRAGUE, August 20. A “living monument” to the stupidities of bureaucracy and post-war nationality laws has been sitting tor twenty-four hours in the middle of a bridge joining Poland to Czechoslovakia. He is J. W. Rosenfeld. Although he had been domiciled for forty-three years in Teschen (which was allotted to Czechoslovakia after the war), the Czechoslovakia Courts decided that he was not a Czech subject Therefore he must be expelled. The Czech police duly thrust him out of the country from their end of the bridge When, however, he got to the Polish end the Polish police refused to pass him. declaring that his nationality was not established. Rosenfeld thereupon took the only logical course. He seated himself midway between Czechoslovakia and Poland, waiting for one or the other to make up their mind. There he stayed for twenty-four hours, to the delight of hundreds of Czechs and Poles, who crowded to either side of the frontier to watch him. . , The crown was set on this farcical tragedy at eleven this morning. The Czech guards marched to the middle of the bridge and arrested Rosenfeld. He has now been put in prison on two charges. The first accuses him of “ insulting behaviour towards officials,” and the second of “ returning to Czechoslovakia without permission after expulsion,”