In Warsaw lives a man who, by rights, belongs to the past. Last week TIME Correspondent Sam Welles talked with him, found him at peace with the present.
When I gave him my card and asked his views on Poland, Prince Christopher Radziwill said: "I am the 51st male Radziwill named Christopher. I have belonged to three different Polish elite classes. Before the war I was a landowner and aristocrat. During the war I was again in a Polish privileged class; the Germans kept me for years in Maidanek and Buchenwald, in a group that included our present Socialist Premier, Josef Cyrankiewicz, who became my good friend. Now I am a member of the new Polish privileged class: the intelligentsia. As political editor of Kurier Codzienny (Daily Courier), I get 40,000 zlotys ($400) a month."
Prince Radziwill, a leader of the Democratic Party who collaborates warmly with the Communists, made it clear that he was now known as Mr. Radziwill. "That is more in accord with the new Polish reality. But I am the only man in the present Polish Parliament who also sat in the Senate under Pilsudski. I even sit for the same electoral district I did then—Radom, near Kielce, south of Warsaw."
Hate of the Graves. "What sort of opposition did you have in the January elections?" I asked.
"The same sort as under Pilsudski," he said, "the Mikolajczyk peasants."
"What causes the opposition?" I asked.
"That is our great problem," he said. "The Government bloc just has nothing very much to offer the peasants."
"Surely it has land to offer," I said.
"Not even much of that," continued Radziwill. "Only about 10% of Polish land was in very large estates—a much lower percentage than in Hungary or East Prussia. We have confiscated the property of 7,000 land-owning families* and given it to 400,000 peasants—which still leaves 2,000,000 Polish peasant families with no land.
"Probably the best thing the land reform accomplished was to bring the peasants closer to reality. Take my own estate. The acres under cultivation were divided among landless and smallholding peasants. But most of the farm workers got nothing. Now until my land was actually distributed, these men would not go away to look for work, because they said to themselves, 'Some day somebody will kick Radziwill out, and then we'll have this land for ourselves.' Now they do not have even that hope.
"Polish peasants are very stubborn, religious, conservative people. They despise Communist Russia. When I last toured my electoral district, many peasants came up to me and still tried to offer the toast, 'Death to the Mongol!' They do not understand Russia. And the Russians do not understand them. One of the greatest Soviet mistakes here was the way they made their war graves. None of them has a cross. They are all topped with the Red Star. Every time a religious Pole sees one, he naturally thinks to himself: 'Russia is atheistic and communistic.' To a religious Pole, a grave without a cross is a grave for a dog."