Word: sikorsky
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...speak out against Nazi persecution of the Jews. Hochhuth's second play, Soldiers, which had its world premiere in Berlin last week, casts an accusing glance at Sir Winston Churchill. In essence, Soldiers contends that Churchill was responsible for the mysterious death, in July 1943, of General Wladyslavv Sikorski, leader of Poland's exile government...
...save Europe from Communism. The Churchill of Soldiers seems to be an equally callous caricature. According to the play, Britain's wartime Prime Minister (played by Otto Hasse) was a tragic figure who authorized immoral acts in hopes of saving his nation. Among them was the murder of Sikorski, a stiff-necked patriot who infuriated Stalin first by demanding the postwar return of Polish territories annexed by Russia, then by calling for an investigation of the Katyn massacre of 4,253 Polish military prisoners. Fearful that Stalin was ready to break off relations with Britain, Churchill, alleges Hochhuth, authorized...
Although a number of World War II historians have been suspicious of Sikorski's death,* Hochhuth could only claim that the bulk of the "evidence" is on file in a Swiss bank vault and cannot be revealed for 50 years. But what disappointed the opening-night audience in Berlin was a lack not of historical evidence but of dramatic talent. Soldiers came across as a static bore, filled with ponderous moralisms and unwitty aphorisms ("Marriage," says Churchill, "is love without longing") and totally lacking in tension...
...renowned teacher Carl Flesch, five years later entered the Sorbonne. The day after Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, Szeryng volunteered for the Polish Army. Fluent in seven languages, he was assigned to the Polish government-in-exile in Great Britain as a translator. In 1942, accompanying Polish Premier Wladyslaw Sikorski to Latin America in search of a home for 4,000 people displaced by the war, he was "stunned at the generosity of the Mexican people in receiving the refugees," and after the war returned to Mexico to teach. In 1946 he became a Mexican citizen...
...When Sikorski died in an airplane crash at Gibraltar, Mikolajczyk, at 42, became Prime Minister of the exile government. When Moscow created the rival puppet Polish government, which is still the hard core of the provisional regime in Warsaw, Mikolajczyk shuttled across half the globe -from London to Washington to Moscow-to see on what terms the Poles of London and the Poles of Lublin could get together. He talked and chain-smoked with Joseph Stalin in the Kremlin, parleyed with the Lublin left-wingers, worked out a compromise disowned by the right-wingers in London. He resigned in November...