POLISH THEATRE: Divide and Rule

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Swapped Siege. Before the Military Division line was drawn, the German Army held advance positions in Poland many miles beyond it and was besieging LwÓw. This siege they proceeded to hand over to the Russians, since they were now to get LwÓw. German officers ordered their troops out of entrenched positions surrounding the city, and into the same trenches grimly went Red Army soldiers, while the business of shelling LwÓw was taken over by Soviet artillery. In the week's only show of cross-purposes between Berlin and Moscow, Nazi newsorgans claimed that LwÓw actually fell before the besiegers withdrew, but there seemed little doubt that Communist papers were right in reporting that Russians captured LwÓw. On its whole broad drive into Poland, the Red Army reported taking 120,000 Polish prisoners, capturing 380 pieces of artillery, 120 airplanes.

Job for Radek? "The population of [Polish] villages and towns . . . enthusiastically meets the Red Army. The mighty Red Army and the high cultural level of its rank and file evoke general admiration. The population tears down Polish flags and replaces them with Soviet flags. . . . Peasants offered the Red Army the traditional bread and 'salt [tokens of brotherhood] on embroidered towels and invited Red Army men into their houses." So said Tass, the official Soviet news agency. As the week advanced, Communist cohorts from Moscow poured in after the advancing Red Army, brought 100,000 portraits of Stalin, Lenin and Marx, tons of "educational leaflets." In each town and village, soviet municipal rule was set up under councils of men and women of the proletariat. Thus at Barszczewo the new town soviet is made up of peasants owning no land, factory workers and an impecunious carpenter. Most of the new Soviets in what is now Russian Poland promptly dispatched "greetings to Our Liberator, Joseph Stalin."

Polish policemen, identified in Soviet minds with Capitalism, were hunted from house to house, new Soviet police were described as "Workers' Guards." The Moscow radio announced that battalions of peasants were tracking down former Polish landlords who were hiding in the marshes and forests, clapping them into jail, added: "All their lands, livestock and personal belongings are being divided among the peasantry." Reported seized near Krzemieniec was one of Poland's greatest landlords, Prince Janusz Radziwill, president of the Polish Red Cross and head of one of the four most ancient and historic families in Poland. Captured near Lublin was a remote cousin of the former King of Spain, Prince Gabriel de Bourbon-Siciles. Meanwhile, his brother-in-law, Prince Andrzej Lubomirski, son of the first Polish Minister to the U. S., managed to escape to Rumania, as did scores of other landed bigwigs. Said he:

"I rode out of my estate just as Soviet cavalry rode in at the back gate. I reached the frontier after seven hours of hard riding."