THE UNDERGROUND PRESS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 185, 8 January 1943, Page 8

THE UNDERGROUND

PRESS

@ A respectable elderly woman with a dumpy umbrella walks into a shop. The Nazi police who patrol the streets of Paris hardly give her a glance. She comes out again a few minutes later. She causes no stir. The officials continue their scrutiny of suspicious-looking persons and let her saunter down the street without hesitation. But had they looked closer they would have seen that perhaps that dumpy umbrella was perhaps a trifle less dumpy-for another few dozen copies of Valmy, the anti-Nazi newspaper, have been distributed. Another little group of French workers are huddled together eagerly reading over each other’s shoulders. Another issue of a forbidden newspaper has eluded the watchful Nazi police. @ A few hundred miles to the north in Germany a woman goes into a chemist’s shop to buy a hair shampoo. When she opens the parcel she finds that as well as the shampoo there is enclosed an anti-Nazi pamphlet. @ A mother picks up a copy of a book on children’s diseases. In the middle of a chapter on diagnosis and treatment she finds that the pages have _ been removed and anti-Nazi propaganda inserted in their place. @ A business man gets an A.R.P. pamphlet* and. works steadily through it. Suddenly the sense changes. The second half of the pamphlet contains part of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. @ A handsome little book on chess stands of a beokstall, but after the first few pages are turned it is clear that most of the book consists of extracts from the works of Lenin. ms Bg % that if you want to keep a fire going, you cover it up. The anti-Nazi fires in Europe are covered up, but they aren’t stamped out. All the time they are smouldering underneath. There is a strike in Norway and another series of arrests, another few hundred men are sent off to concentration camp, but before the authorities can turn round, the fire has burst out somewhere else. It burns in Czechoslovakia; it burns in Holland; in Yugoslavia it is altogether out of hand, on the mountains and in the valleys, in every village and in every little town. Suppress it in the north of France and it will break out in the south. ik fact, the old saying still holds good, But these sporadic outbursts here, there and everywhere would not happen if it weren’t for the careful organisation of tireless workers. And the little stories told above are not fairy-tales. They are based directly on exhibits that were shown recently at an exhibition in London, which was called "Allies Inside Germany", and which was organised by the Free German League of Culture, an organisation of German anti-Nazi refugees in London. In order to keep people alert and informed and above all encouraged, papers, pamphlets and leaflets must be distributed. In all revolutionary movements _of the past this has been a major activity. When Mazzini worked for Italian liberation it was with his secret printing press in France that he kept enthusiasm alive. Bolsheviks published their papers in

% "EUROPE IN CHAINS": The >& programme in this BBC series, to be heard from 2YA at 9.47 p.m. on Wednesday, January 13, contains the story of "Valmy", the French clandestine newspaper which takes its title from the place where the Republicans in France defeated the Prussians in 1792, Geneva and in various parts of Europe for later distribution in Russia. The paper which poured ridicule on Napoleon Ill. was printed in Brussels and smuggled in inside plaster busts to the Emperor himself. To-day in Europe the printing and distributing of anti-Nazi papers continues.. Listen to a story about the Underground Press from 2YA on Wednesday, January 13.