GERMAN CRUELTY.

Wanganui Herald, Volume LI, Issue 15196, 17 April 1917, Page 7

GERMAN CRUELTY.

HORRORS IN A POLISH CHURCH. PHILADELPHIA, Peb. 24. Countess Laura de Gozdawa Turczynawicz, who before her marriage to a Polish nobleman was Miss Laura Blackwell, of New York, told here to-day of numberless instances of brutality on the part of the German troops in Poland under Von Hindenburg. “In the city where I was,” said the Countess, “the Germans thrust 2000 Russian prisoners into one church. It was packed so tightly that the men could not lift a hand above their heads. Then they locked the doors. A guard was placed around the church, and for two weeks not a human being was allowed to enter it. No food was given the men inside. Then, when the two weeks were up, they opened the doors. I saw the dead as they were carried out. A few actually survived. But they were very few. And the Germans, looking at the dead, said: 'Good; now there will be just as many less to feed.” “I have seen the weapons the Germans use in the trenches for hand-to-hand fighting—wide knives, two feet long, with a saw edge, which cause a wound which cannot be healed.” At the beginning of the German invasion of Paland in December, 1914, Count Turczynowiez left his home in Snwalki and joined the Russian Sanitary Engineering Corps. His wife has not seen him for two years. “In February, 1915,” she said, “my husband told me to leave Snwalki. In September, 1915, I succeeded iu getting to Berlin. The Spanish Embassy, which represents Russia at Berlin, succeeded in getting passports for me. At the German boundaries I was searched for any communications I might be carrying. My hair was combed out and the soles of my feet scrubbed with acid, in the search for concealed messages. “On the steamer that brought me to New York, a German-American passenger approached me and % warned me to tell nothing about what' I had seen in Poland. He said that if I would only keep silent I wo*«ld be well taken care of by fa- Gorman Government. I hare reported him to the American Secret Service. “My husband’s mother, father, and two of his sisters are prisoners in Germany, and I have been threatened that vengeance will be executed on them if I tell of what I know. But I cannot keep silent.”