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Show BROADWAY AND MAIN STREET Nazis' 'Process of Selectivity7 Outsmarted by Polish Scientist I By BILLY ROSE 1 Whenever I'm in the mood for gargantuan gab, I hie myself over to a Russian tea room near Carnegie hall where refugees of a dozen nations sit around and give out with tall talk about the old days behind be-hind them and the new days coming up. To give you a fitting for-instance, the other midnight I heard a macabre maca-bre yarn from a gent who used to teach science in Warsaw, and while I don't know whether it's history or hokum, it strikes me as being worth my allotment of white space today. ... During the last year of the war, I there was a small concentration camp in east Ger- , , , many which had j"" been set up for ,-f two purposes: f v (a) to build an f ' underground ma- fr chine shop, and i s, t ' p b) to make avail- " able the required PV3 I number of human f , I guinea pigs for fc.-..-i.T Jf certain expert- BjUy ments being conducted con-ducted by distinguished Nazi scientists. scien-tists. By SS STANDARDS, the method of selecting these guinea pigs was scrupulously fair. Each morning before breakfast, the 50 men in each of the wooden barracks would stand at attention until the commandant com-mandant appeared with a list of would be shipped out that Satur day night. In December of 1944, my tearoom tea-room friend the scientist from Warsaw was cattle-carred to this concentration camp and assigned to a barrack occupied almost exclusively ex-clusively by captured Russian soldiers. sol-diers. He was asked the usual questions, ques-tions, and when the Russians found the newcomer was a Pole, they quickly let him know that the fraternity fra-ternity of races as preached by Moscow was confined to Kremlin publicity handouts. And when he further admitted he had never joined the Party not for any big ideological reason, but simply because he was a scientist and had no interest in politics the Red army men decided he was an enemy of the state and began to plot against him. THE POLE, however, was more worried about the disks in the hat their names. He would read off the top name on the list and the prisoner whose name was called would step forward. The commandant would then hand two small leather disks, one marked with a white circle and the other with a black, to the "trustee" of the barrack for examination. ex-amination. Then the commandant would drop the disks into his hat, and the prisoner would draw one of them. he picked the one with the white circle he was safe until his name came up again 50 days later; if he drew the black one, he than the whisperings going on about him. Under the lottery system, sys-tem, it would be almost two months before his name was called, and since news had filtered fil-tered into camp that the Russian forces were only a few weeks away, he kept telling himself that liberation libera-tion might come before the date for the drawing. But as the days turned into weeks, and still no sound of far-away cannon, he resigned re-signed himself to taking his 50-50 chances with the hat. The night before the fateful morning, the scientist was lying awake in his bunk when he felt a tug at his blanket. It was a young Czech who had been badly mistreated mis-treated by the "trustee," and who had often mumbled about getting even. According to the kid, the comrades com-rades had figured out a plot to make certain the Pole would be shipped off to the Nazi experimenters. experi-menters. The "trustee" had cut a leather disk from his shoe' and made a black circle on it, and when the commandant asked him to examine the disk, his plan was to palm the one with the white circle cir-cle and substitute his own, so that either would mean death to the non-Party man. For a long moment, the scientist scien-tist looked up at the slat ceiling of the bunk above him. "Thank you," he finally said to his friend. "I think I'll be able to manage." Next morning when his name was called, he saw the "trustee" palm the white-circled disk and substitute another. But he pretended pre-tended not to notice, and when the commandant held out his hat he smiled and selected a disk. "White or black," he said, "I'm going to have one good meal in this miserable mis-erable camp." And before the officer of-ficer could stop him, he popped the bit of leather into his mouth and swallowed. The SS man frowned. "Crazy Pole," he said, "what good will that do? There is still a disk left in the hat. If it is black, you picked the white; if it is white, you picked the black." "That is quite correct. Sir," said the scientist. |