Facts of Life

For "weeks," said Prime Minister Churchill to the House of Commons, he and Foreign Secretary Eden had "labored with the Polish Government in London" to establish a "friendly working agreement" between the Russians and the Poles. It had been labor lost. Winston Churchill made his Government's position plain: in the harsh world of power politics, Britain would cross Russia no further (see above). The position of the U.S. was completely fogbound.

Not since the Blitzkrieg of 1939 had the harried rulers of Poland stood at such a crossroads. Never before in their long resistance to Moscow's pressure for acceptance of the Curzon Line and revamping of their Cabinet had they been publicly rebuked by their British hosts. To Foreign Secretary Eden's Whitehall office went Polish Minister Tadeusz Romer to present the exiled Cabinet's view. Said the semiofficial Dziennik Polski:

"The Polish Government has taken the determined stand of refusing the so-called Curzon Line. . . . The Polish Government will hold fast to this attitude."

Power and Patriots. If this remained the unalterable will of the Polish exiled regime, they had, it seemed, doomed themselves and their colleagues to be leaders of a lost cause. And they may have thrown away their only chance for a truly independent Poland. In Russia, a Soviet-sponsored Polish National Council stood ready to make full-fledged claims to speak for all Poland. For a nation of patriots, for the people whom Winston Churchill had eulogized as "that heroic race whose national spirit centuries of misfortune cannot quench," this was a tragic hour.

Not all exiled Poles are diehards. "Moderates" such as Premier Stanislaw Mikolajczyk fear Russia, but the facts of life have convinced them that "integrated cooperation" with the Soviet Union, is the only way to a future Poland.

Against the moderates stand the diehard and potent ultranationalists. In stormy sessions, men like General Kazimierz Sosnkowski have taken an adamant stand against Russia, have made their will prevail. All Poles have long memories of Poland's repression at foreign hands--Russian as well as Prussian and Austrian. But the Kremlin's long memory has not forgotten that General Sosnkowski and his followers are the remnant of the old anti-Soviet regime. Once led by Marshal Pilsudski, they had dreamt of a Poland reaching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, had refused the Curzon Line in 1920 and snatched Vilna from Lithuania in 1920.

The power politicians of World War II were now face to face with an extreme form of the introverted nationalism that has so long bedeviled Europe. The power politicians of World War II had made no visibly successful efforts to abate the age-old ill.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.