Word: polishers
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Eleven stirring, martial notes, the opening phrase of one of Composer Frederic null Chopin's Polonaises, sounded every 30 seconds from the Warsaw radio station all last week to let the world know that Poland's capital was still Polish. Hour after hour, day after day, the notes came like hope rising from an inferno. For the world also knew what other sounds filled Warsaw-the bellow of bombing planes in power dives, the scream of fighting planes on the attack, the sharp whanging of anti-aircraft guns, the mighty thump, boom and roar of half-ton bombs...
Before then the German strategy had become apparent even to Warsaw. Sweeping past the capital, an East Prussian Army had struck southeastward to Brest-Litovsk, chief railroad centre between Warsaw and Russia. In the South, three separate drives penetrated deep into the Polish Ukraine. Lwow, the Ukrainian capital, was bombed, strafed, set afire, its water supply cut off, but the invaders did not stop to occupy it. On they plunged, passing to the north and south of Lwow, to the very remotest corner of Poland, where it meets Rumania...
Soviet Russia. Foreign envoys crossed the Dniester into Rumania; the Polish Government, which had holed up in Zaleszczyki on the frontier, hesitated, then fled into Rumania. Cut off from retreat on all sides, the Polish Army was disintegrating into guerrilla bands. While the Poles defended their capital, their country was overrun...
...north fell the forest town of Bialystok, where Polish bigwigs and their guests (often Hermann Goring) used to hunt the stag and wild boar. The fortress at Brest-Litovsk was captured, 600 prisoners taken. The retreat into Rumania became a mad stampede. Two beg red fire engines and a hook-&-ladder from Cracow roared through, clustered with refugees. Polish officers & men swam the Dniester to elude customs officers, escape internment. Polish planes, nearly 200 of them, piled into the little Rumanian airport at Cernauti, one landing on three others, wrecking all four...
...waited for the infantry. Swift columns of tanks and armored trucks had plunged through Poland while bombs raining from the sky heralded their coming. They had sawed off communications, destroyed stores, scattered civilians, spread terror. Working sometimes 30 miles ahead of infantry and artillery, they had broken down the Polish defenses before they had time to organize. Then, while the infantry mopped up, they had moved on, to strike again far behind what had been called the front. By week's end it mattered very little whether Warsaw stood or fell. The Republic of Poland, aged 20, was lost...