Polish Oath

Faced with the certainty that Adolf Hitler would try this summer to steal at least one of their Baltic "windows" and probably the entire Polish coast (see above), the Poles last week showed much the same steadiness and bravery that little Czecho-Slovakia showed last summer before she was forced by her own allies to back down. The Poles' big advantage was that they had lived and learned by the Czechs' experience.

At Gdynia, only 13 miles from Danzig, President Ignacy Moscicki delivered a nine-minute patriotic speech which thrilled his country. "The Baltic seacoast, Pomorze [the Polish Corridor] and our two ports, Gdynia and Danzig, are the air and sun of our national life and the basis of our political and economic independence," said the 72-year-old former professor of electrochemistry who has been Poland's President for the last 13 years. "Through this narrow gate, through a small strip of seacoast, is done three-quarters of our business with foreign nations. This is our free unhindered way to all the other countries in the world and the more they are menaced the stronger is our determination to defend Pomorze and the seacoast."

On the same day, in every Polish city and town as well as Gdynia, Poles massed and took a public oath: "We swear to defend the eternal right of Poland to the Baltic and to protect the maritime future of our country, to maintain an invincible guard in the mouth of the Vistula [Danzig]. ... So help us God."

Chief week-end worry of wily Foreign Minister Josef Beck, returning from his country estate after a brief holiday, was the recruiting of a Danzig Army and the building of fortifications in the Free City. One Nazi stratagem last week seemed to be to take over the city little by little, ousting first one Polish official and then another, eliminating this Polish function and then that, until finally there would be no more Polish officials in Danzig. At some unspecified point in the Nazi eliminations the Poles were prepared to intervene.

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