"Whether the place is Afghanistan, El Salvador, Zimbabwe or the Great Wall of China." Says World Senior Editor John Elson, "there are staff people here in New York with special background, training and knowledge on just about any subject that can come up, who can be called on to give a story extra depth and insight."

Two such people are Reporter-Researchers Ursula Nadasdy de Gallo and John Kohan. This week their cover subject was Poland, where the remarkable spectacle of a Communist government negotiating with its own workers was unfolding.

Gallo has been World's senior researcher since 1973. She came to the U.S. from Hungary as an eighth-grader in 1957, but she still speaks Hungarian and follows events in Eastern Europe avidly. "Having lived through the Hungarian revolution," she says, "and handled our stories on the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, I've naturally been haunted by this situation, its parallels with the past, as well as its differences." For the cover she culled through stacks of files in TIME'S library, helping to round out the story's political and historical background. Kohan normally covers Religion for TIME. But he speaks Polish (and Russian) and has visited both countries three times in the past five years. For a month in 1979 he studied Polish language and culture at Jagiellonian University in Cracow. This year he spent five weeks reporting from Moscow for our special edition on the Soviet Union. For this week's story Kohan worked his Polish contacts in the U.S., including some who are in touch with members of the Polish opposition, and combed his own personal files for pertinent facts, anecdotes and conversations. Kohan's notebooks provided a good deal of the material for our box on the frustrating life of an average Polish worker. The main cover story was written by Thomas A. Sancton. A Rhodes scholar, Sancton lived and worked in

Europe for several years before joining TIME as a staff writer.

Says Gallo: "Even after all this time, doing news covers still amazes me. So many people pulling together. The adrenaline gets going. You almost don't get tired."

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