Prayerful Spy

The sort of young woman from a suburban U. S. town who goes to study in Europe and dreams of becoming acquainted with fascinating noblemen and international spies is Miss Isobel Lillian Steele (Mrs. Wallace Gerald Quisenberry). Her case differs from hundreds of others only because in Berlin she actually did become acquainted with that fascinating master spy, the Polish Baron George ("Yurek") Sosnowski, and paid for her acquaintanceship by being locked up in a Nazi prison for four months. Her adventure became the grimmest sort of drama when two aristocratic German women who had lovingly served the Baron were forced to lay their necks on Nazi blocks and have their pretty heads chopped off (TIME, Feb. 25, 1935). Last week came two fresh reminders of this most sensational spy case since Adolf Hitler began dealing with traitorous German women.

In Manhattan opened a naive cinema production in which Miss Steele and an otherwise anonymous cast present the feline, hand-kissing Baron Sosnowski and his German stooges in a spy game of cat & mice. This pipsqueak film, which has annoyed Berlin out of all proportions to its importance, reaches an unconsciously comic climax when Nazi police rush in upon one of the Baron's swank parties and, in effect, announce, "The place is pinched!"

Meanwhile in Warsaw last week the real Baron Sosnowski, who spent more than a year in a Nazi dark cell following his capture, declared distractedly to friends: "I am haunted by the deaths of those women. Until I was released in an exchange of prisoners I had seen no human face for 14 months. My food was lowered to me by guards from a trap door. The tragic deaths of those two--my former associates--haunt me night & day and I can only attempt to gain peace through prayer for their souls."

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