The Livid Scar

Along the waterfront of Poland's rubble-strewn Szczecin (formerly Stettin) towering cranes on six miles of rebuilt docks load and unload freight at the annual rate of 4,000,000 tons. In Wroclaw (formerly Breslau) bright new arc lights along the main streets have ended years of dim nights in the city's bomb-shattered center. After years of neglect, Poland's "western territories," the lands east of the Oder and Neisse Rivers taken from Germany after the war, are slowly emerging from postwar desolation.

For 600 years the rich lands felt the strong influence of the Germans, first from the Knights of the Teutonic Order, later under imperial Prussia's black eagle, still later under Hitler's hooked cross. Dotted between vast estates of Junker aristocrats were thriving industrial and port cities until Allied bombs and the savage conflict between Nazi and Russian armies wiped them out, leaving half the homes and 60% of the factories gutted. Soviet plunderers took most of what was left--railroad rolling stock, machines and livestock. Under the Potsdam Agreement this barren area (the size of Virginia) went to Poland to compensate her for the Polish lands to the east grabbed by Russia. At Western insistence, Poland's authority was "provisional" until a final peace treaty was signed with Germany.

Population Shifts. It is still provisional, but the Poles are laboring hard to make their possession permanent. Some 5,800,000 Germans were herded out after the war, leaving only 6,000 there today. About 7,500,000 Poles live there now, most of them postwar arrivals from other parts of Poland. Statues of German heroes have been carted away from village squares and replaced by Polish figures. Every German street sign is gone.

Last week TIME Correspondent Dwight Martin traveled south from Szczecin through countryside dotted with ruined villages, reported: "The western territories are the rawest, most livid scar on the face of Europe. During an eight-hour drive to Wroclaw we saw only eight passenger cars on the highways. In Police, amid the monumental shards of one of the Nazis' biggest synthetic-oil centers, the earth still reeks of explosives and soaked oil. Every week children are killed or maimed by unexploded mines or bombs in the rubble."

Chronic Fear. The Poles, without Marshall Plan aid,* had little investment capital to put into the new area; they also had to pay cruel sums to the Russians. But above all, they had a chronic fear that the territories might become German again in some cold war East-West settlement (West Germany has publicly renounced the use of force to recover the area, but has not officially abandoned its designs on it).

But Polish fears have largely faded. "We are not sitting on our suitcases any more," said a Polish scientist in Szczecin. "We are here to stay." Peasants, assured by the government that there will be no forced collectivization, are expanding their holdings under a new government scheme that allows farmers to buy state land at low cost. Obviously with Vatican approval, Cardinal Wyszynski has sent Polish bishops into the area, proclaiming, "Poland has come here, plows and sows here, kneels and prays, believes and loves here."

In Szczecin, 37-year-old Henryk Jendza, chief engineer of a local shipyard, proudly shows visitors his company's latest product, a 6,000-ton freighter. The city's mayor, 35-year-old Jerzy Zielinski, admits that Poland's western territories lag behind East Germany in reconstruction, but points out that "at the end of the war not one of the 56 bridges leading into the city was still standing. Today we have the highest birth rate in Poland. We have built eight schools in the past year and are working on nine more." Like Jendza and Zielinski, most key men in the western territories are astonishingly young; more than half the population is under 35.

A living symbol of the insecurity that has haunted Poles for centuries is to be seen at Legnica, where thousands of Soviet troops are garrisoned. Yet, though unwillingly bound to Moscow, Poles find reason to think that even the West will acknowledge their claims. They noted happily that President Eisenhower, in his recent television broadcast on the Berlin crisis, used a map showing the western territories as part of Poland. They got a bigger lift last week from France's President de Gaulle. That stout friend of Konrad Adenauer insisted that enmity between Germans and French no longer exists, and that France endorses West Germany's drive for reunification of today's two Germanys. But then he added carefully, "provided they do not reopen the question of their present frontiers to the west, the east, the north and the south." These were the strongest words ever used by a Western leader in favor of setting Germany's eastern boundary at the Oder-Neisse.

* In 1947 the Poles, as well as the Czechs and Hungarians, eagerly accepted a U.S. invitation to share Marshall Plan aid, later were pressured into refusing it.

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