HELP FOR POLES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 21 November 1939, Page 5

HELP FOR POLES

AMBASSADOR’S MOVING APPEAL DESTITUTE PEOPLE DRIVEN FROM HOMES. MILLIONS IN GREAT NEED. (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY, November 19. The Polish Ambassador. Count Raczynski, tonight broadcast an appeal for the Polish Relief Fund. "You know Poland was attacked and invaded by Germany," he said, "and yet you can hardly realise the degree, of destruction wrought by the invaders. Many provincial cities open and undefended have almost ceased to exist through bombardment from the air. relentless, methodical and senseless otherwise than as an instance ol the method of frightfulness. “The capital city, Warsaw, was laid waste and its inhabitants killed in thousands. Those who survived are over-crowded in the remaining houses, without glass in their windows, coal in their fireplaces, medicine in their hospitals or milk for their children. The factories which provided them with work are reduced to ashes. "And now that the fighting is over, news is still arriving of the eviction from their homes of Poles whose houses and land arc to accommodate Germans imported to that end from the Tyrol and Baltic countries. Millions of Poles,.in purely Polish country in parts comparatively less affected by the war, are to be torn from their homes, leaving behind all their cherished possessions to go—one fears to ask where—and to face what kind of future? "From the eastern border of Poland come more tales of the execution of priests and intellectuals; of confiscations and the deportations of thousands of innocent people into the land of Soviet Russia.

“Large numbers of my compatriots escaped from Poland. It am receiving daily more and more circumstantiated news of the mass of more than 100,000 refugees, men, women and children, who are stranded in foreign countries mainly in Hungary, Rumania and Lithuania.' They are treated with kindness by their hosts, who are not, however, in a position to provide them with warm clothing or blankets for the lastapproaching winter. “It is on behalf of these refugees that I am appealing to you in the first instance, as they can be helped with the least delay and the least difficulty. Help for stricken Poland itself will probably be mainly directed from neutral countries. The fund for which I appeal is to help all alike by means of grants to approved organisations working for Polish relief.”