Visiting Professor Outfoxed Gestapo In Flight From Occupied Homeland

Fleeing from Poland to Italy and then through a war-torn France to Lisbon and the America-bound steamer "Excambion," Waclaw Lednicki, visiting professor of Slavonic literature has managed to keep one precarious step ahead of the Gestapo.

In Cracow, when the German invasion of his country began, Lednicki, who was then a professor at both the Universities of Cracow and Brussels, was stranded by the German victory and occupation. But diplomatic help from a friendly Belgian government, plus the friendship of an Italian princess for Ledniciki's sister, made possible his transit to France and eventually to this country.

Colleagues Imprisoned

Ledniciki's fate in escaping the Nazis was fortunate, for sixty of his colleagues at Cracow were arrested and sent to a concentration camp at Orianenburg, where eighteen of the group perished. The profesor estimates that 80,000 Poles have been killed in a campaign which is aimed at what he calls "total extermination of the Polish nationality."

After escaping the grasping tentacles of the Gestapo in Poland, Lednicki became an aid of the Polish government in exile at Anjou in France and was in Paris when Marshal Potain announced the Armistice in June 1940. Securing a transit visa from a kind French official he journeyed to Lisbon, where he received an American visa and came here to assume a post offered him by Harvard.

In considering the Polish armed defeat, Lednicki stressed that German military and air superiority was insurmountable, despite even the most desperate Polish efforts. He claimed that 70 German divisions, with the support of 12 armored units, took six weeks to subdue 31 Polish divisions, backed by only two Panzer outfits. He added that the fifth-column efforts of the sizable German minority hampered Polish offensive attempts.

Free Poles Active

"At the present time, free Poles the world over are active in the fight against Hitlerism," Professor Lednicki stated. "The garrison of Tobruch is Polish, as is R. A. F. squadron 303, the group of aces that has shot down the greatest number of Axis planes in the entire Allied air forces."

Poland's future, as well as that of the entire continent, lies in a new order that is being developed in opposition to Hitler's order, and under the boot of Hitler's legions, the professor predicted. Poland's immediate post-war aim should be a rapprochement with Russia so that the brother Slavic nations could follow their common destinies, he said.

The possibility of a Central-European confederation was not discounted by the visiting professor. But he did maintain that any political organization that does emerge from the post-war treaties must be based on the democratic order that is quietly surviving in Hitler-dominated Europe.