EUROPE TO-DAY

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVIII, Issue 42, 18 January 1938, Page 2

EUROPE TO-DAY

THEY COULD NOT FORGET. Here in Warsaw let us pause a minute to think of a lovely thing the Poles did during the Great War. It teaches us something about the character of these people. If any evidence as to the romantic nature of the Poles were needed, we might find it an act of singular devotion which marked the great flight from Warsaw before the invading Germans. The city was being stripped of all properties of military value; factories were being blown up and industries destroyed; men who had counted their wealth in millions of roubles found themselves penniless fugitives. Yet in the agony of this tragic exodus they thought of other things. They carried away with them the heart of Chopin. , Frederic Chopin, thp immortal composer, the son of a poor Pole was born at Warsaw in 1809, and having enriched the world with some of its noblest music, died and was buriod in Paris in 1849. Twenty-one years passed, the hotly was reverently removed from its tomb in the famous cemetery of Pere Lacliaise, and the heart' was taken to Warsaw and buried in a casket in the church of St. Cross. The Poles left behind them much of their wealth, shattered to ruins ; they left to the despoilers one of the finest libraries in the world; but they did not leave this relic of their great countryman. Though the rear of the German guns was drawing hourly nearer, though bombs from aeroplanes were bursting in their streets, they opened the shrine in St. Cross Church, and bore their treasure with them into the wilderness.—(G).