I Saw the New Poland

Anna Louise Strong

Anna Louise Strong was born in 1885 in Friend, Nebraska. Her father was a Congregationalist minister, and her mother had been one of the early women college graduates. She herself was the youngest woman ever to have received a Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago. In 1908 she turned from academic study to an active career in child welfare work. After a period on the local school board she became in 1918 feature editor of the Seattle Union Record, a trade-union newspaper. In 1921 she went to the Soviet Union as member of a relief mission. Since then she has lived for long periods of time in Russia, acting as correspondent first for Hearst's International Magazine, later for the North American Newspaper Alliance. She started the Moscow Daily News in 1930 and two years later married a Russian, Joel Shubin. She has lectured at Wellesley, Smith, Vassar, Columbia, and Stanford. Her long list of books includes a volume of poems under the title Songs of the City (1906); The Road to the Grey Pamir (1930); an autobiography, I Change Worlds: The Remaking of n American (1935); The Soviets Expected It (194l); a novel, Wild River (1943); and I Saw The New Poland (1946).

The author of this book was the only Western correspondent to enter Poland during the period of the Russian liberation of that country. She gives the first eyewitness account of what has happened and is happening inside Poland – How the people survived both the war and the German policy of extermination, where they stood in the battle for political supremacy between London and Lublin. Miss Strong's report tells a story unknown to Westerners, whose information has usually come from the London regime.

Anna Louise Strong shared for months the discomforts and hopes of the Polish people. She attended peasant congresses and heard from partisan leaders how they organized the People's Army. She talked with Government leaders, Army generals, as well as to the doctor who feared a typhus epidemic, the poet who fought against race hatred, the professor who was organizing a new university around what was in the heads of the instructors.

Finally, Miss Strong went to the Russian front in Warsaw, the only Western correspondent ever to visit a Red Army front-line position. There she learned the true story of General Bor's ill-timed uprising and the subsequent destruction of Warsaw.

The significance of Miss Strong's picture of Poland during the past year is her feeling that "Poland offered the sharpest example of problems facing all Europe. How can new governments be created out of the chaos left by the Nazis? How can they unite their people into democratic states?

Contents

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