POLAND: Release

In 1945, only a few weeks after the conference at Yalta, a group of 16 Polish underground leaders was invited to Moscow to discuss Russian-occupied Poland's private problems. Carrying with it a Russian general's "word of honor" that its "personal safety is assured," the group headed for Russia. One of the group's leaders was General Leopold Okulicki, who succeeded General Bor as leader of the home underground army that fought the Nazis and then, in a vain bid to stop the transfer of Poland from Nazi to Red rule, harassed the on-moving Red army. Soon after crossing the border, the 16 were flicked from view.

Six weeks later, Premier Stalin wrote Prime Minister Churchill and President Truman that "the group of Poles . . . was arrested by the military authorities on the Soviet front and is undergoing investigation in Moscow . . . General Okulicki's group, and especially the general himself, are accused of planning and carrying out diversionary tactics in the rear of the Red army which resulted in the loss of over 100 fighters and officers of that army."

Three of the 16 have since come back from the prisons to which they were sentenced for terms ranging up to ten years. Last week, ten years after his arrest, there came the first news of a fourth. The Soviet Red Cross officially notified Mme. Okulicki in London that her husband had died "of natural causes" in a Moscow jail. Date of death: Christmas Eve, 1946.