Terrible Silence

Two days after the Red Army captured Warsaw, the Lublin Government moved in, too, and became the Warsaw Government.

Warsaw greeted the Red Army with a terrible silence--the silence of death. For Warsaw was one vast black mound of wreckage, above which ravaged buildings still stood like lightning-blasted trees. Two sieges (by the Germans and the Russians) and the fierce uprising of the Polish underground had reduced the city to dust and ashes. A few half-starved people crawled out of the rubble. With bony fingers they pointed the way to huge ditches dug by the Germans in Warsaw's heart--the mass graves that entombed many of the city's inhabitants.

The men from Lublin hoisted Poland's red-&-white flag over Warsaw's debris. They established their Government in hastily constructed barracks. As their first order of business, they dispatched judges and prosecutors to other cities through which the Red Army had crashed to purge traitors and collaborators.

In London the Polish Government, recognized by the U.S. and Britain, denounced the new Warsaw Government as "a gang of little men," cried: "We hold out our hand to Russia." But Russia clearly had more faith in the Warsaw Government's President Boleslaw Bierut, who according to the Polish Telegraph Agency (the official organ of the London Poles), had been in the Soviet service for some 20 years. Under the name Bienkowski he had been head of the Polish section of the Communist International. Under the name Rutkowski he had been head of the Polish section of the GPU (secret police). The name Bierut was a combination of the first syllable of these two noms de guerre. Bierut's real name is Krasnodebski.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.