[Tale of a City]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

It is our intention that just and sure punishment shall be meted out to the ringleaders responsible for the organized murder of thousands of innocent persons and the commission of atrocities which have violated every tenet of the Christian faith.
Franklin D. Roosevelt.
OFFICE OF WAR INFORMATION
Washington, D. C.
TALE of a CITY
A city falls to the Nazis. Conquering troops goose-step through the streets, swastikas fly from public buildings. Bands play merry German waltzes in the park. “The grateful populace,” reads the official lie from Berlin, “welcomed their German liberators with open arms!” Then silence, the silence of the tomb.
Behind that wall of silence the “New Order” begins its deadly work. Men become slaves, a slice of bread becomes a precious jewel. Into the city stream the
executioners of the “New Order”—the economic advisers with their charts of strangulation, the Gestapo with their blueprints of death. Many of their moves are bloodless, many bloody, but each is a deliberate step toward the Nazi goal: the enslavement of the human race.
Warsaw’s fate is the ultimate fate of Paris, Oslo, and Rotterdam, of Belgrade and Brussels, of every village, city, and nation that falls to the Nazis. Poland has been the testing ground for the Nazi
4 "Each scene was being carefully recorded by newsreel cameras."
plans of world domination. Every nation occupied by the Nazis has been subject to an inexorable pattern: no matter how mild the occupation seemed at the start, conditions slowly and surely have approached those prevailing in Warsaw. On the day the Nazis seized Oslo, in Norway, posters announced that the occupation was merely “protective” and “temporary.” In those days the Nazis said the Norwegians were blood-brothers of the same racial strain. Today the mask has been dropped. Blood runs in the streets of Oslo. The people are without adequate clothing or food, their every7 liberty has been destroyed, their property stolen. Only by degrees does Oslo differ from Warsaw.
When Nazi soldiers entered Paris, they smiled at the people, behaved with perfect manners, patted the children, and helped elderly ladies across streets. “Abandoned families!” said the posters, “put your trust in the German soldiers.” Frenchmen were told that only the Germans could restore them to greatness as a nation. Taris today is a silent city. The propaganda posters are gone. In their place are grim black-bordered lists of executed Frenchmen. The Nazis have plundered Paris, paying for what they took in worthless promissory notes. All of France staggers under an “occupation costs” load of $7,500,000 each day. The people of Paris are on the verge of starvation. Daily men are hunted, shot as hostages, or shipped into the Reich to manufacture weapons of war.
But Warsaw reveals best the cold, calculated design of life and death under the Nazis. From Warsaw have come the most detailed accounts of the “New Order” in all its planned fury. Warsaw, too, like every city and village under the lash of the Nazis, resists the tyranny with all its strength.
The story of Warsaw is the story of Poland, Norway, and France, of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Greece, of Holland, Belgium, Denmark, and Luxembourg. It is a deadly warning to all men still blessed with freedom.
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Warsaw resisted the heavy artillery guns and dive bombers of the Nazis for twenty-one days. On the twenty-second day—its water supply gone, its dead still lying in the streets—the city surrendered. There was food for three more days, munitions for one. Their spirit unbroken, men and women emerged from cellars and the ruins of bombed buildings, from behind barricades and antitank traps hastily erected in the streets. During the siege some fifty thousand persons had been killed, one hundred thousand wounded. Half the city’s buildings had been either completely demolished or severely damaged. Only the bare walls of the Royal Castle still stood. Gone was the Ministry of War, the Lutheran Church, the Stock Exchange. Damaged almost beyond recognition were the Opera House, Warsaw University, the Church of St. Mary Blessed Virgin. Strafing the city from tree-top level, Nazi planes had concentrated (when not
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machine-gunning unarmed civilians) on destroying these monuments to Polish culture. Carcasses of horses were piled high against the curbs. Homeless thousands wandered the streets. Desolation flowed through the city in colors of blood. Less than a month before, on the morning the first bomb had been dropped on Warsaw, Hitler had screamed to the Reichstag: “I have no desire to wage war against women and children.”
Residents of Warsaw were given three days to clear the streets of rubble and bodies, and on October 1, 1939, German troops marched into the city. As reward for their victory, General von Brauchitsch granted twenty-four hours of freedom in which to loot suburban houses. Told to loot, they looted. Otherwise, they maintained complete discipline. German Army trucks, loaded with loaves of bread, were stationed at several prominent intersections. Poles who stood in line to receive the bread noticed that each scene was being carefully recorded by newsreel cameras. “A more pleading expression,” urged the cameramen. Disgusted, many Poles turned away. Pictures of this dole were later shown in German theatres, captioned: “German soldiers sharing food with their erstwhile enemies.” In other parts of the city during the first three days 300,000 helpings of thin soup and black bread were passed out to the accompaniment of German bands playing waltzes.
The music soon ended. The pattern of occupation became clear. The city was billed 300,000 zlotys ($60,000) for
the soup and bread of the first three days. Lazienki Park, oldest and largest in Warsaw, was closed to Poles. Blasted from its pedestal, Chopin’s monument was melted down and sent to Hitler as a gift from his troops. Scientific laboratories that had escaped destruction during the siege were dismantled, and their equipment shipped to Germany. More than 100,000 books in the Central Military Library were burned, as the invaders honeycombed every library in the city, removing all books by “non-Aryan” authors and all volumes dealing with Polish-German relations. Warsaw museums were scientifically robbed of their treasures, lists having been drawn up in advance by Nazi tourists who had noted the choicest collections. Poles were forbidden to travel by train in first- or second-class cars. Jews were barred entirely from trains. Front sections of streetcars were reserved for Germans. The Polish press was suspended. Hotels in Warsaw were closed to Poles, as were the waiting rooms of railroad stations. Pilsudski Square was rechristened Adolf Hitler Platz. One hundred and nineteen members of the Warsaw Bar Association were thrown into jail, including the Association’s eighty-year-old President. None but Germans were permitted on the streets from 8 p. m. to 5 a. m. Violators of the curfew were shot on sight.
Warsaw belongs to what is known as the Government General, presided over by Governor General Hans Frank, a Nazi for many years, who has said: “The Gov-
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"Blasted from its pedestal, Chopin’s monument was melted down ...”
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3 "Every cow, chicken, and hog is registered. ”
ernment General represents the best example of the system that will be introduced in the countries of New Europe controlled by Greater Germany.” At the beginning of the occupation, the Germans spoke of the Government General as being merely under German influence, distinct from areas to the west of Warsaw, which were made part of Germany itself and where the policy of extermination has been even more ruthless than in Warsaw. Dropping all pretense after the fall of France, Frank declared: “Henceforth the Government General will not be looked upon as occupied territory, but as an integral part of the Greater German power space.” Warsaw is really ruled by the Gestapo, a law unto itself. Fully equipped with the tools of its trade—rifles, steel helmets, whips, machine guns, tanks, and antitank guns— the Gestapo set up shop in a former ministry on Szucha Avenue. The street itself was renamed Polizei (Police) Street. Once the Gestapo became settled in Warsaw, with some one thousand officers and five thousand troops, no man’s life could be called his own. The invaders passed a series of legal decrees authorizing themselves to steal all Polish property. For weeks on end the covered trucks of the Gestapo rumbled out of Warsaw, headed for Germany and laden with furniture, rugs, jewels, furs, paintings, household equipment, all manner and description of Polish personal property, all seized without payment.
All universities and high schools were closed. Some primary schools now stay
open a few hours daily, their classrooms unheated unless the children can find scraps of wood or coal. They rarely can. No history, geography, or Polish literature may be taught; teaching of German is prohibited, too, as the Master Race does not consider the Poles qualified to speak its language. The curriculum consists simply of elementary arithmetic, writing, and reading. No new textbooks may be published and most old ones have been confiscated. Nonetheless, the flame of Polish culture is being kept alive in darkened rooms all over Warsaw, where groups of children are being secretly taught the language and traditions of their country. Germans do not object to their Polish slaves becoming carpenters or locksmiths, and some elementary trade schools are still open. Systematically destroying the intellectual classes, the Germans forbid teachers, writers, artists, musicians, and actors to practice their professions. Many have taken to waiting on tables, repairing broken windows, clearing away debris, or operating rickshas—tricycles with seats in front of the handlebars, the common method of travel in Warsaw today. Others sell their books and furniture on the streets or perform in the numerous coffee shops that have sprung up throughout the city. Although these shops sell little food, they have become the last refuge of the Poles, the only places where they can meet, stay warm, and talk.
“In stilling the pangs of hunger,” Reichsmarshal Goering has said, “the
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"Eighty percent have been without sufficient light or heat.
Germans come first.” Poles in Warsaw are barely being kept alive, alive just enough, in some cases, to turn out goods for the German war machine. Bread is about the only thing the Poles can count upon eating; they have been permitted less than five slices a day. This winter there may be no bread for Poles in Warsaw. Forty percent sawdust, the bread is dark and indigestible. Many families are subsisting on a thin potato soup, without meat and containing a few cabbage leaves and beets. Food cards theoretically entitle the Poles each week to slightly more than three ounces of meat (the equivalent in the United States, say, of one thin chop); each month to three and a half ounces of flour and sugar, four and a half ounces of marmalade, and one egg. They rarely receive these. Meat, when sold, is malodorous and mostly bone. No provision is made on the food cards for butter, cheese, or green vegetables. Adults may not receive milk, an adult being anybody older than six months.
There is food enough in and around Warsaw, but it either goes to Germans on the spot, is shipped into the Reich, or sent to feed German troops on the war fronts. “We are today in a fortunate situation,” Goering told the German people on October 4, 1942, “where the entire German Wehrmacht, no matter on what front it stands, is supplied solely from the conquered territories.” Food production of farmers in the Government General is strictly regulated. Every cow, chicken, and hog is registered. Villages are held
collectively responsible for each farmer producing the amount required by the Germans. Using food as a weapon to demoralize the population, the Germans periodically create artificial shortages, particularly after some outbreak against the Nazis. At such times, no food whatever reaches the city. Guards stand at all entrances and search all travelers. Milk cans are wastefully punctured and eggs smashed, presumably as a sign of German power. Even if they received all the food allowed under rationing, Poles would not subsist for long. The Nazis have planned it that way. In the first half of 1941, 8,000 persons were bom in Warsaw, but 21,800 died. In the first half of 1939, before the “New Order,” there had been 10,800 births, compared with 7,300 deaths. Warsaw' today is dying out. Deprived of the necessary fats and vitamins, the population falls easy prey to disease. Hunger has made the people of Warsaw' feel tired all the time. The slightest exertion—mental or physical— causes extreme fatigue. Children are malformed and ghostlike, suffering from anemia and softening of the bones. Adults lose weight; the functioning of their vital organs is impaired by malnutrition. Exhaustion, hunger, and cold have forced many people to stay permanently in bed. In 1941, 9,000 persons died of tuberculosis in the city, compared with less than 3,000 in 1938. In the first eight months of 1941, typhus took a toll of 5,592 persons, compared to 23 in 1938.
In order to live, residents of Warsaw' must seek food on the Black Markets,
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which exist everywhere. There is little doubt that the Germans, at a fat profit, have a hand in operating them. But few persons can afford Black Market prices. An egg costs 60 cents, a pound of pork around $4, a pound of butter between $9 and $11; coffee, rarely obtainable, costs anywhere from $48 to $80 a pound. Thousands of “meals” are served daily to the needy by mutual aid societies, one member of a family standing in line for the rest and taking soup home in a pail. Every Polish family in Warsaw today shares its food with others.
“I am not interested in heating the homes of these swine—the Poles,” said the German Coal Commission in August 1941. “Let them die.” Warsaw in winter has an average temperature of five below zero (F); it sometimes drops to twenty below. During the winter of 1940~41 Germans allowed the Poles one bucketful of coal every six or eight weeks. Coal this winter will be available only on the Black Market, where a half ton costs in the neighborhood of $160. At the beginning of the occupation, Nazis seized all apartment houses and offices in Warsaw with steam heat. Into these buildings, and these buildings alone, now goes the coal from the abundant mines of Upper Silesia. For firewood, Poles have cut down small trees and destroyed fences on the outskirts of Warsaw; most of the larger trees in the parks have been stripped of bark.
Gas pressure is so low that it takes several hours to warm a quart of water. Without warning, sections of the city
are completely deprived of electricity, often for two or three months at a time. On certain days, all electric current is cut off except from 8 to 10 p. m. Even without these restrictions, Warsaw would be in darkness when the sun is down, since the vast majority of persons cannot pay the enormous electricity charges. Eighty percent of the people have been without sufficient light or heat since the occupation.
Germans seized all war industries in Warsaw, putting the larger ones to work without delay, and taking a little time to fit the smaller ones into their war machine. Nazis have a passion for legalizing their robberies. While stealing a business, they carry on a vast amount of complicated paper work: changes in ownership, sale transactions, trusteeships, and many other “legal” forms. At the end of this abracadabra the former Polish owner—no matter how many sealed documents he may possess—has been robbed of his business. German Treuhänder (trustees) are installed. Sticking their noses into every nook and cranny of the business, bossing the former boss and his workers, the Treuhänder have complete control, plus a fancy salary. Many small plants of no use to the war machine have been closed, either forcibly or from lack of raw materials and funds. Others keep open as long as possible, to spare their workers from being registered as unemployed and subject to deportation to Germany.
Warsaw’s working class is poverty-stricken. The cost of living has risen
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Despite the Nazi tyranny, Warsaw’s churches are filled to bursting ...
more than 1,100 percent, while wages (with the exception of those paid some unskilled laborers) have dropped below the minimums set by pre-war contracts. Building-trades workers are unemployed, as there is no new construction in this city of ruins. White-collar earnings have been decreased; regardless of previous earnings, office workers can receive no more than $15 weekly. The average stenographer earns $7.50 weekly, the average waitress $3. Inasmuch as one room and a kitchen rent for at least $30 a month, residents of Warsaw are living six and eight to a room.
Thousands of Poles in Warsaw have been expelled from their homes on three days’ notice, and been moved to other parts of the city. Today Germans completely occupy the best residential sections. Polish Jews were given three to six hours to pack and get into the Ghetto, taking along only such bedding and clothing as they could carry. Warsaw’s housing problem is desperate, not only as a result of the property destruction but because a half million of those Poles driven from their homes in the Western part of the country have been sent into the overcrowded city, to await shipment info Germany as slave labor. To the Nazis, Polish manpower swims in a large and nameless lake, the private property of the Reich. Whenever they move Germans from bombed areas into stolen lands, or need men to make more weapons or to work German farms (while the German farmer is off using the weapons), the planners of the Reich
cast a large net into the nameless lake and pull out a few thousand or hundred thousand or million Poles. From all of Poland, nearly half a million prisoners of war are now bending their backs in Germany; another million Poles have been uprooted from their homes in the West and shipped like cattle to the East; another million have been sent to labor camps in occupied Russian territory'; another million and a half have been dragged into the Reich as farm and industrial slaves.
A typical cast of the Nazi net took place in Kercelak market place, Warsaw, one morning in May 1942. In the old days, before the Nazis, Kercelak market place had been a flamboyant and colorful bazaar, its food booths piled high with meats, cheese, fruits, and vegetables from the countryside. On this May morning a heavy sadness hung over the market. Most of the booths were closed. A few rickety ones were still open, their sallow proprietors offering wooden shoes for sale, or a pair of pants. Several thousand men and women milled about, carrying old and tattered bits of clothing over their arms, hoping to exchange them for scraps of food. Into the square goose-stepped a detachment of German soldiers, lustily singing. People paid scant attention to them; the Germans are forever marching and, besides, these soldiers were singing. When the detachment reached the center of the square it suddenly broke ranks, small groups making for every exit. From nowhere appeared the vans and lorries of the Ges-
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"Carts went through the streets to pick up the dead left lying there . . .
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tapo. Machine guns were trained on the crowd. “Achtung!” came the shouted command through a megaphone. “Stand where you are or be shot.” The thousands in Kercelak market place froze in their tracks. Soon the square had been emptied, the thousands poured into the Gestapo vans and driven to a house on Skaryszewska Street for questioning. Heavy labor was separated from light and farm labor, young women from old. Some of the young girls were reserved for the exclusive use of the German army. Country girls were assigned to the troops, daughters of once-wealthy city folk were turned over to officers. By evening the catch was on its way into the darkness of the Reich, locked in freight cars. In all, the catch had netted 3,000 persons. Their families were not notified.
Persecuting the Catholic Church, the Nazis have forbidden Poles to celebrate the festivals of the Assumption and the Immaculate Conception. Large numbers of prominent priests are in concentration camps, or have been tortured and put to death. Catholic organizations have been forced to close their doors and end their activities. In a typical church raid, the Nazis swooped down upon the Capuchin Cloister on Miodowa Street, confiscated the property, and arrested the monks. In villages on the outskirts of Warsaw, priests are held as hostages when peasants fail to meet the grain quota demanded by the Nazis. Both Lutheran colleges in Warsaw have been seized and converted into military hospitals. Polish Protestant publications are
forbidden, as are religious rites in Polish in the Protestant churches. No church was left undamaged in Warsaw during the siege. Many have since managed to patch their roofs, but services are held today in churches with wrecked altars and shattered walls. Despite the Nazi tyranny—or, rather, because of it—Warsaw’s churches are filled to bursting at every service.
In December 1942 the State Department, issuing a joint declaration by eleven of the United Nations, announced that reports from Europe indicated that German authorities “are now carrying into effect Hitler’s oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe ... In Poland, which has been made the principal Nazi slaughterhouse, the ghettos established by the German invader are being systematically emptied of all Jews except a few highly skilled workers required for war industries. None of those taken away are .ever heard of again. The able-bodied are slowly worked to death in labor camps. The infirm are left to die of exposure and starvation or are deliberately massacred in mass executions.”
Before the policy of total extermination went into effect, more than half a million Jewrs were packed into the Ghetto, a dismal section of 100 blocks in the northern part of Warsaw, surrounded by an 8-foot wzall topped by broken glass. No one could enter or leave without a pass. No streetcars ran between the Ghetto and other parts of the city. Inside the Ghetto, the Germans systemati
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cally created an escalator of death: when 500 Jews died, 500 others immediately took their places, shipped into the Ghetto from various parts of Poland and Europe. During April, May, and June, 1941,
10,232 Jews died in the Ghetto; only 1,208 were bom. The annual death rate in the Ghetto in 1941 was roughly 83 per thousand; the highest annual death rate of any modem city is less than 30 per
* 'Returned to his parents with a small card pinned to his suit. .
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thousand. Death from starvation was common, rations being little over half those allotted Poles outside the Ghetto. Furthermore, Ghetto rations were the first to be reduced. The Jewish Community Council, operating within the Ghetto, did its best to feed thousands of persons each day. Former warehouses and loft buildings, without adequate sanitary facilities, were turned into dwelling places, 30 to 40 persons living in one office “room.” There was only one hospital in the Ghetto, without linen and with few drugs. Carts went through the Ghetto streets at night to pick up the dead left lying there.
Seeking food outside the Ghetto, bands of boys crept through holes in bombed buildings and emerged from cellars and excavations. They roamed the streets of Warsaw, begging. Jewish police within the Ghetto and Polish police outside its walls turned their backs on this activity. Germans maintained a bicycle guard around the Ghetto wall, constantly circling in search of persons who had left without permission. Some months ago Nazi soldiers caught a small boy who was returning to the Ghetto with a bag of food. Lifting a manhole cover, they dropped the boy into a sewer. The Nazis were proud of the conditions they had created in the Ghetto ; regular tours passed through its twisted, somber streets, the sightseers being Germans who had settled in Poland or been brought there from bombed areas in the Reich. Poles were often forced to take these tours, too, but they utilized them to make mental
note of persons suffering worse than others. Later they threw small packages of food over the Ghetto wall near those spots. Mutual suffering bred bonds of brotherhood.
There is no way of telling at this time exactly how many Poles have been murdered by the Nazis in Warsaw. At the beginning of the occupation, executions took place at 2 a. m. and 3:30 p. m. in the Sejm (lower House of the Polish Parliament) Gardens. More recently, the execution spot has been Palmiry, not far from Warsaw in the Kampinos Forest, where the shootings occur either at dawn or during the night, by the light of auto headlamps. Trenches — twenty yards long, two yards wide, two yards deep—are dug in advance by Jewish labor battalions, forced to perform this work. Twenty persons at a time are lined up along the trench edge and shot in the back of the head by firing squads. Isolated executions in Warsaw reveal the continuous pattern: on September 14, 1940, two Poles, sought by three German policemen, escaped from a house in Lwowska Street amidst gunplay. A large force of German police soon arrived, arrested all inhabitants living in the house in question, and a number of men from neighboring buildings. In all, 200 persons (180 men and 20 women) were taken to prison and later shot. The body of a sixteen-year-old boy who broke the 8 p. m. curfew was returned to his parents with a small card pinned to his suit. The card simply said: “8:15.” Often the Germans torture their intended
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"Nazis dare not travel alone in the streets . .
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victims by delaying the execution—as in the case of 31 persons, during January 1940, who were led from their prison for two successive nights, told to dig graves, and then returned to prison. On the third night they were shot.
Poland resists. Guerrilla bands representing all classes of the Polish people have been operating since the occupation. Working singly and in groups, well-organized, receiving aid and shelter from their fellow-Poles, they have given the Nazis a bloody taste of their own medicine.' They dynamite troop and supply trains, set fire to war plants, blow up ammunition dumps. No mercy is shown the invader, and in the controlled press regularly appear long lists of Nazis who have died under “mysterious” circumstances or been killed “suddenly in the night.” Nazis dare not travel alone either in the country or in the streets of Warsaw. Warsaw’s Gestapo chief has referred to assaults upon his men as “bandit raids.” Regardless of what he wants to call them, he has admitted that hundreds of such raids have taken place.
In factories making goods for the German war machine the work of sabotage never ceases. If a man is caught in a Warsaw building with a radio, all persons in that building are shot. Nevertheless, twenty-four hours a day somewhere in Poland men are listening to the shortwave voices of freedom from overseas. Taking notes, they swiftly pass the news to hidden spots where some 120 underground newspapers are prepared. These newspapers fall like snow about the baf
fled Nazis. They appear everywhere— folded so small they are passed on during handshakes, slipped under doors, shoved into Nazi newspapers—and are read by hundreds of thousands. Underground newspapers keep their readers well in formed with up-to-the-minute war news from all fronts, tell of mounting power of the United Nations, point out traitors and spies, and maintain faith in the fight for freedom.
In the first months of the occupation, thousands of copies of a Manifesto of Freedom passed from hand to hand. “From the chaos of war there must arise a New Europe organized on the principles of political freedom . . .” it said. “Such a Europe is the -desire of millions of workers, peasants, and intellectuals, as well as of soldiers who fight on all fronts. Poland, in spite of military defeat, continues to fight. On Polish lands the people carry on a daily heroic struggle against the occupants, preparing themselves for the moment in which the final battle will take place.” Underground leaflets instruct the people “to harm the oppressor in executing his orders, in industrial production, everywhere and always.” Into thousands of homes has gone a calendar, printed by the underground and containing anti-Nazi sentiments for every month. “Have you sown your fields?” reads one caption. “When you think of the harvest, think also of what you owe Poland—not remnants, nor shreds, nor alms, but everything you have: your possessions, your children, your blood.” Showing the solidarity of
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"The Nazis planned it that way."
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the people of Warsaw, one underground paper is headed “All Men Are Brothers,” its cover picturing two hands firmly clasped through a gap in the Ghetto wall.
Instructions from the underground spread through Warsaw like wildfire. When Goebbels announced to occupied lands a few days before Christmas 1941 that they must turn over all warm clothing, wools, and furs for the use of German soldiers on the Russian front, the underground in Warsaw immediately issued a leaflet. “Bum your woolen clothing, even if you need it, for the enemy will take it anyway,” it read. “Let the German soldiers freeze to death. We shall survive.” On Christmas Eve Warsaw was heavy with smoke and with the odor of burning wool and fur;. Little warm clothing was collected.
The underground has its own means of keeping in touch with train movements ; of receiving paper, ink, and presses for the never-ending work of the secret newspapers; and of obtaining caches of arms and ammunition for the day of liberation. Arms are not only seized from the Germans, but often bought directly from the Gestapo itself, which has its price, like all organizations rotten at the core.
Joined with the United Nations and his comrades from other occupied lands, the Polish soldier fights on. The Polish Army of 150,000 troops has armored,
motorized, and parachute units in Scotland; it fights in the Near and Middle East and in North Africa. It has seen action in France, at Narvik and Tobruk. One thousand bojnber and fighter pilots, of the 12,000-man Polish Air Force based in Great Britain, drop avenging bombs upon the land of the Nazis.
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As in Warsaw, the Nazis have failed in the rest of Europe. Having nothing but contempt for humanity, they based their hopes of success upon a fundamental error: the belief that men will cower and surrender when they have been tortured and robbed, deprived of their birthright and treated like so many specks of dirt. Coldly plotting their conquests, the Nazis took into consideration everything except the limitless strength of the human spirit. And today in Warsaw and throughout Europe the Nazis are at war with the human spirit—the spirit of decent men crying out for release from tyranny and demanding for themselves and their children a world of justice and of hope.
On the day Warsaw suffered the heaviest bombing of the siege, more people were united in marriage than ever before in the city’s history. This is the answer of Man to the Nazi blueprints of extermination. And Man will survive in freedom long after the Nazi madness has crumbled in the dust.
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This is a publication about the war. When you have finished reading it, please pass it on to a neighbor or a friend for further circulation.
Text and illustrations of Tale of a City may be reproduced without permission. The pamphlet mas illustrated by a former officer of the Polish Army, an eyewitness of the early days of the occupation.
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TALE of a CITY
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