THE CHINA MAIL, MARCH 4, 1940-
EXPEDITION INTO
GERMANY-NO. 5
The Uncensored Truth
4
Women Wear Summer Frocks
In Below-Zero Weather
ALL THEY HAVE
(By A NEUTRAL OBSERVER)
ALMOST THE FIRST THING I did after arriving in Danzig was to go out to look at the harbour. I may say it was quite something to venture out of doors at all, with the temperature below zero. But it was worth it.
The harbour is partially blocked. I saw the masts of ships the Poles had sunk in the fairway sticking out of the
ice.
A channel, kept open by icebreakers, allows craft to steal up to the moorings that are not occupied by submerg- ed and half-submerged steamers and barges.
In one of the pubs by the Danzig waterside I heard some men talking about salvage operations in Gdynia harbour.
Now
✓
"Free City"-from the air
they get
their houses. Well, then shot.".
German peasant leaders have been settling of German immigrants on the sent into the country to organise the
large estates.
NO. 6
Page
In this series of clusive articles by the distinguished
neutrál
observer sent to Ger- many a month ago will be published
TO-MORROW
that they go to see it again and again. I should like to have visited the Westerphatte, but there again I was not allowed to go. Nor was I allowed. visit the Schichau Shipbuilding Company, which I could see was going full blast. They say they are build- ing submarines there.
to
The only sign of the fighting I saw was at a Polish post office in Danzig, where Polish postmen and police had held out against S.S. storm battalions.
The front part of the building had a great hole shot in it; about sixty feet in diameter it was, I should say. I could see through it the wrecked. staircases and debris which had room's behind.
Workmen were cleaning up the in- side while I looked on. The syna- Those Polish aristocrat owners of gogue was also wrecked. But this these estates who hadn't got abroad was only mob work. Not the result before the Germans came have mostly of shelling. Nothing was left of the
synagogue, but a heap of loose bricks:
been shot or imprisoned.
Some took refuge in one of the neutral-legation buildings in Warsaw, which, apparently, have. become asylums for them with the placid permission of the Reichswehr author- - ities.
The Germans have been hard.at "Those two women are Poles. work trying to raise the sunken ves- do you understand?" sels. But they have a tough job of it. "No." I replied. There is not only the ice to hamper "Well," he said, "They are buy- them.
ing from
The German civil servants of the that stall because they regular administration who have been have to walt until the German sent to Poland seem to be having a women have finished buying. They tough time coping with these radical are not allowed to stand in the Nazis. same queue with German women. From a neutral in Danzig I heard They are Poles.
good how a German princess had tele- enough for them.
phoned to an officiul in Lodz to ask "And they are wearing those him whether something could be done .summer clothes because they
are to help a Polish countess who was a and broken clumps of masonry. the only clothes they have. They friend of hers. lost the rest." "How
They said the Poles had filled the block ships with cement, which made them almost immovable, and, in addition, they had put mines on board. These mines had already cost the lives of several divers sent down to work on the ships.
them?"
Offal is
on earth did they
"I'll gladly do all I can, princess," lose said the official, "But I don't know how things stand in the countess's "They lost them, if you must know, district. If there's one of those peasant at the beginning of the war, when leaders running wild there, then I'm their homes and property were seized. afraid the intervention of a German very special pass. And that pass they As a matter of fact, I know those two princess may be the death verdict for
I wasn't able to go into Gdynia. No one is allowed in there without a
wouldn't give me.
All the Poles who had not been evacuated from Gdynia when the war began have been turned out. The Germans have sent them to the in- terior and to concentration camps. Some apparently managed to get away to the Baltic States.
In Danzig, on the other hand, I found there was still a small Polish colony.
If their life. is any indication of what is happening to Poles in Poland proper, I don't wonder at the Ger- mans warning me that any attempt on my part to penetrate into Poland or Czecho-Slovakia would mean my
Gdynia once Poland's, pride.
arrest, expulsion, or perhaps things still. ̈ ̈
women.
Danzig has a two-branched river which joins Vistula
In one way Danzig is better off than other German towns I went to. It is being allowed slightly bet- ter rations. And they have not been compelled to share their stocks of cigarettes made with genuine tobacco with the ersatz tobacco smokers of the rest of the Reich. No doubt this has been done to make the Danzigers feel welcome on Even in the cinemas the Danzigers rejoining the Fatherland. But the can't stop gloating over the Foles. I preferential treatment is coming to an found them still showing the film of end now. By the beginning of next the bombardment and capture of the month Danzigers will be on the same Westerplatte, Gdynia and the Penin- short commons as the rest of Germany. sula of Hel. It had been running
to save her."
They are the wife and the countess. But I'll do what I can daughter of a Polish merchant.
"Their family have been living, in fact, in Danzig for centuries. And
Near the Crane Gate Danzig
that, I fancy, is the only reason why they are being allowed to go on liv- ing here at all. Now don't ask me any more."
But he went on all the same. "There are fur coats going cheap here," he said, with apparent care- lessness, "if you pay for them in foreign currency: They say they used to belong to Poles.”
+
I thought of this remark when I got out of Germany into a neutral country again. For the Arst things worse I saw in the window of the official
bureau of the German State Railways It was in, the market that I saw were furs offered for sale under the them. Two women in flimsy, be-" slogan: "German furs are 'best." draggled summer dresses, cotton. Danzig was full of stories of Poland.. kitchen cloths tied round their But they were not told in sympathy heads, stood shivering by a veget- with the Poles. In Danzig there is able stall. The stall had sold out nothing but hatred and hostility for of all but a frostbitten cabbage, a the Poles. few turnip roots, and six or seven rejected potatoes.
Timidly the two women asked whe ther they might buy them and what the price was.
The Danzigers reckon it is their turn once more to rule the Vistula country, and they mean to do so in such a way that no resurrection of Poland, shall be possible.
"Heavens. Why don't they go to "The Polak, must be Germanised one of the better stalls?" I said to or exterminated, one Nazi said to me, my.companion. "There seems to be and he himself, to judge by his name, better stuff at the other stalls where was, I should say, a. Germanised Pole. those other women are buying. And The priests in the villages, he said, why do they wear those ridiculous were encouraging the peasants to frocks in this freezing weather?".' "stupid demonstrations of resistance: "You ask too many questions, my They are mad enough, some of them, friend," said my guide, sardonically. to go hanging out the Polish fing from
since the end of October.
'You should have heard them cheer- ing. They like it so much, that aim,
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