Slave
Sirs:
. . . my father, writing to me from Southwestern China, has in custody a white girl, unable to speak a word of English but aware that she is the daughter of an American father and a Russian mother. For nearly 20 years she has been a slave, bought and sold among various Chinese families as necessity dictated. From Mukden, her presumable birthplace, where she was first placed in an orphanage, she has been carried over North and Central China to her present haven near the Burmese border. Undoubtedly, along with my own parents and all the population of unconquered China, she has endured the horrors of Japanese bombing raids. Ahead of her, even if China should win, is only anonymous drudgery; if taken by the Japanese she will fare no better than the other human loot of captured cities. . . .
It all adds up to this, TIME: somewhere in America are the family and friends of a young man who died in Manchuria; they may know of his Russian wife, and of his daughter. They are probably readers of TIME—what student of world affairs is not? and through its medium they may release the girl from her life of tragedy. Any correspondence on this subject may be forwarded to me in Portales, New Mexico, or directly to the C. I. M. Hospital at Anshuen, Kweichow, South China.
ALFRED CROFTS Eastern New Mexico Junior College Portales, N. Mex.
New Mosses v. Krivitslcy
Sirs:
Your Press editor seems to take quite seriously the New Masses' recent "exposure" of General Krivitsky. I should have expected TIME to be sophisticated enough to have looked into the following points: i) Why does the New Masses charge merely that Krivitsky-Ginsberg can't shoot a rifle and has never seen Stalin (two charges that by their nature can't be proved or disproved and anyway don't mean anything) while avoiding any attack on his main claim, which is that he was for some years chief of the Russian Military Intelligence Service for Western Europe?
2) What's all the shooting for about Krivitsky's name being really Ginsberg when the letter he wrote to the French Minister of the Interior at the time of his break with Stalin (reprinted in the Socialist Appeal of Dec. n, 1937) begins: "The undersigned, Samuel Ginsberg, bearing in the U. S. S. R. as a Soviet citizen the name of Walter Krivitsky, and the political pseudonym Walter, born June 28, 1899, at Podwoloczyska, Poland, has been a member of the C. P. S. U. since 1919."
Considering all this, just what "guns" is the
New Masses still sticking to, according to your Press editor?
DWIGHT MACDONALD
New York City
> Says the New Masses: Krivitsky-Ginsberg never was in Russia, never was a Soviet official, is a fake. To these guns it sticks. TIME sticks to no guns but its own.—ED.
Disgusted
Sirs:
As an Englishman I am obviously pleased to see on the front of your recent issue [May 15] that very excellent and natural picture of King George VI, but when I turn to the editorial under the heading Great Britain .and find on p. 25 such words ". . . for which the British public, almost forgetting that Edward VIII ever happened ..." I am singularly disgusted.