TERROR IN POLAND

Grey River Argus, 13 March 1940, Page 10

TERROR IN POLAND

GERMAN BRUTALITY. LONDON, February 7. Krom the Vatican Radio Station on Monday, January 22, came the most damming indictment yet uttered of German brutality in Poland. Adding to the importance of the broadcast was the speaker’s association of the Holy Father with the denunciation. Reference was made to “the horror and inexcusable excesses committed upon a helpless and homeless people (as peaceful and unpretentious as any in Europe) by the Nazis, and it was emphasised that they were attested to by “the unimpeachable testimony of eye-wit-nesses.”

“The new year,” said the broadcaster, “brings us from Warsaw, Cracow, Pomerania Poznan and Silesia an almost daily tale of destitution, destruction and infamy of all kinds,”: a'nd '.he went on to declare that the atrocities in the German-occupied regions were greater even than those perpetrated by the Soviet. “Even more violent and persistent (than the Soviet terror),” he-said, “was the assault upon elementary justice and decency in that part of prostrate Poland which has fallen to German administration.”

After listing the major acts of German terrorism, the speaker "arraigned them as “one more grievous affront to the moral conscience of mankind, one more contemptuous insult to the law of nations, one more open thrust at the heart of the Father Of the Christian family, who grieves with his dear Poland and begs/fot peace with decency and jus-

tice from the throne of grace." THE TERROR. Describing the terror, the broadcaster said: — “The richest part of Western Poland is being unceremoniously stolen from the Poles and- deeded to the Germans, while the real proprietors are packed off in evil-smelling trains to the wartorn regions of Warsaw, which the Holy Father only last week described as ‘a desert where once the smiling harvest waved.’ “A system of interior deportation and zoning is being organised, in the depths of one of Europe’s severest winters, on principles and by methods which can only be described as brutal Stark hunger stares 70 per cent of Poland’s population in the face, as its reserves of foodstuffs and implements are shipped to Germany to replenish granaries there. Jews and Poles are being herded into separate ghettos, hermetically sealed and pitifully inadequate for the economic sustenance of the millions destined to live there. “But the crowning iniquity in an administration that has never ceased to allege that it has no claims against religion lies in the cynical suppression of all but the merest suggestion of religious worship in the lives of one of the most pious and devotional of the peoples of Europe. An administrative decree now restricts public religious services to a bare two hours on Sunday. The thousands of churches in Poland are deserted and closed for six and a half days a week, separating an afflicted people from the altar of its hopes and sacrifices.” A hint of the close identity of the Holy Father’s sentiments with those in the broadcast was conveyed by the statement, at the outset of the "address, that “it was no longer a secret that the Pope had been profoundly pained by reports lately received at the Vatican and all too completely confirmed, of the martyr’s fate reserved once more for his dear Poland, on whose inevitable resurrection he continues to count with such confidence.”

Reports reaching London this week indicate that the savagery of the Nazi regime is intensifying. An agency message records the account given to Cardinal Hlond by a Polish priest who escaped from imprisonment. According to this, Polish boys and girls are being sterilised in an effort to destroy the Polish race; 5000 priests are herded in the barracks at Gdonska under conditions which are "unprintable”; churches in Posnania are closed, and Warsaw prison is crowded with hundreds of clergy; Confession has been proscribed in Gniezno, and monks and nuns evicted from their houses at ten minutes’ notice.

individual acts of atrocity are recorded, too. A priest at Znin on his way with the Blessed Sacrament to a dying man had his clothes torn off him and the Sacred Host was trodden underfoot. Another priest at Bydgoszcz was beaten with rifle butts and then shot foi’ cursing the Germans during a series of twenty mass executions in the public square. A new enactment against the Church is announced by the Polish Press Bureau, which states that all works of art in Poland, including Church vessels and pictures, are being confiscated under decree. Only

those appurtenances absolutely necessary for Mass are exempt. The Bureau points out that this “sheer robbery” hits the Polish people very badly, as the churches are exceptionally rich in art treasures, which, in many cases, date back to the Gothic and Renaissance periods.

The persecution of the clergy, according to the Bureau, is being justified on the grounds that priests took an active part in the defence of Poland and that they continue to incite the population against the Germans. All the Franciscans in Warsaw, it adds, are now in prison, and in other towns religious have heen. evicted from their monasteries, which have been seized by the Nazis. A similar fate has befallen the Catholic university in Lublin after the _ whole professorial staff had been interned in concentration camps. RUSSIA ABUSES VATICAN. As the Vatican was condemning Poland’s martyrdom, Germany’s partner in icrime, Soviet Russia, . was pouring abuse, through the editorial columns of “Izvestia,” on the Holy See Attacking Italian policy, the Moscow paper referred to its indifference to what it described as the frequent violations by the Vatican of the clause in the Lateran Treaty protecting Italian foreign policy from interference from this source. The Vatican’s policy was stated to have followed that of the Anglo-French bloc since the election of the present Holy Father, and to be backed by “reactionary forces in Great Britain and France.” The “Izvestia” declared: “The Vatican, this corpse, this relic of the Middle Ages, shows signs of awakening, as if the blood of those killed in the war had filled its veins with life.” It is interesting to note, while on the subject of Russian Communvent champion of Russian Communism, Mr Victor Gollancz, is not at all abashed by recent events. The Ger-man-Soviet Pact, he admits in a letter to the press, was a grave shock to him, but he maintains that “every action of Russia, including the invasion of Finland has been inspired by the motive of self-preservation.” British foreign policy he considers to have been the determining factor in Finland’s downfall. Further on in his letter he concedes that Stalin’s penchant for power politics has robbed the Soviet Union “for the time being” of becoming the leader of all decent opinion throughout the world, but he still holds that, “as our judgments are fallible,” history may yet justify the Soviet self-preservation motive.