THE HOMING INSTINCT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 204, 21 May 1943, Page 3

THE HOMING INSTINCT

Sir.-The interesting article "The Homing Instinct" in your issue of May 7 rightly points out that "something must be done if peace is not to bring one vast, chaotic trek." Re "J.J.’s" description of the magnitude of the tasks facing the Bermuda Conference, I would like to touch upon some omissions, especially with reference to my country. Although he admits that Russia and Poland are, in particular, represented amongst "the dispossessed," there is a substantial difference in the problems facing these two countries, especially as regards post-war rehabilitation problems. Even during the last year of the German offensive, a very substantial part of European Russia was still unoccupied, and provided means of shelter for millions of Russians who fled from German-occupied Russian territory. Poland, who was the first country to repel the German aggression, had to pay the heaviest price ever paid by a nation for putting up a stubborn resistance. Apart from massacres and mass executions, these unexcelled deportations of Polish people have been going on for nearly four years. Of the six million people in forced labour at present in Germany, about two million male and female Poles were forcibly conscripted and sent there. More than one and a-half million Poles in the Western part of Poland annexed to the Reich, where Poles had been living for hundreds of years, were deported to the General Government (Central Poland); their farms, factories, workshops, and homes have been handed to the 300,000 Germans who arrived there, not as "J.J." says, before the present war commenced, but from late in 1939 onwards. Thus forcible expulsion is still going on into the already over-populated ai-. of Central Poland, an artificiallycreated economic unit without any of its natural outlets, While stressing the plight wf the Jewish people, "J.J." did not mention that besides 1,200,000 Polish Jews already killed since the outbreak of the war, the majority of Western European Jews and the remainder of nearly 2,000,000 Polish Jews, after having been transferred to the ghettos of the Polish cities, were recently removed to Russian territories under the harshest of conditions. Last and not least, there are more than one and a-half million Poles who were deported from Russian-occupied Poland in 1940 and 1941 to Siberia and Central Asia. "Therefore, much depends on the present Bermuda Conference" as to whether the proposals of the Atlantic Charter will be kept, in giving to all these people the first freedom of all — the possibility and means to return to their

countries to begin afresh-DR

K. A.

WODZICKI

(Consul-General for Poland).