Without Bloodshed?

Poles saw the news in their Sunday papers this week. With simple relief many said: "It's good he got away. Otherwise they would have hanged him." Short, rumpled Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, Polish Peasant Party leader, had disappeared. With him went the last organized opposition to control of Poland by Moscow-trained Communists.

Mikolajczyk was a Pole who believed in freedom of thought, press, political opinion. He fought, then fled the Nazis in 1939; returned in 1945 when U.S. and British pressure resulted in Stalin ordering the Moscow-created Polish provisional government to make a place for him. A rigged election (TIME, Jan. 27) had reduced Mikolajczyk and his party to a mere political shadow.

Red Walls of Mokotow. The front window of Mikolajczyk's four-room apartment opened on the grim red walls of Warsaw's Mokotow Prison. Behind these walls in recent weeks, Poland's Soviet-style secret cops had grilled Mikolajczyk's party lieutenants in relays. Lately, "confessions" had been bringing Mikolajczyk's own arrest closer. He had said many times: "I will never leave the country." But lately he had also been saying more & more often: "I will be arrested. And when I am, they will do to me what they did to Nikola Petkoff."*

Monday of last week Mikolajczyk packed a small suitcase with papers. Accompanied by his secretary, Mrs. Maria Hulewicz, he walked out of his apartment. On the following Saturday Stanislaw Banczyk, the Polish Peasant Party's deputy chief, reported his absence to the Government. After six hours of scurrying and checking, the Government issued a guarded communique saying merely that the Polish Peasant Party's leader had disappeared, and was believed to have left the country. In Warsaw and Washington, some thought that Mikolajczyk had been clapped into Mokotow Prison.

Schemer and Coup. Since last January's elections, one of Mikolajczyk's erstwhile followers had been scheming to take the Polish Peasant Party into the Government bloc. A few hours after the Government communique the schemer, sandy-haired, wispy-mustached Czeslaw Wycech and a handful of followers fell upon the offices of Mikolajczyk's party newspaper, Gazeta Ludowa. They took over, Wycech boasted, "not by force, but by revolutionary methods." The result was that Mikolajczyk's own paper was the only one in Warsaw to announce flatly that he had "shamelessly and mysteriously" fled the country.

Gloated one of Mikolajczyk's opponents: "We are lucky. We got rid of him without bloodshed."

* Bulgarian Opposition leader, who was framed, tried and executed by Bulgarian Communists.

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