PEOPLE IN THE POLISH COMMITTEE OF LIBERATION

The so-called " Polish Committee of National Liberation," established in Chelm on July 22, is
composed of people, the majority of whom are completely unknown in Poland. Politically, nine members out of fifteen are Communists, while the remaining six do not belong to that party. Ten out of fifteen arc members of the Union of Polish Patriots, a Soviet controlled body formed in Moscow two years ago.
The President and Director of Foreign Affairs, Edward Osbbka, who is acting under the assumed name of Morawski, is about 40 years old, Before the war hc was a member of the Polish Socialist Party in the provincial town of Wielun and later was employed in Warsaw in a Co-operative Building Society. During this war he tried to create a split in the Socialist Party and to subordinate his group to the Communist Party. When hc failed in this attempt, he and some of his followers joined the Communist Parry. Osdbka is unknown in Poland, and the few details available about his activities have been given by a member of the Polish Socialist Party who was in Warsaw during the German occupation and is now in London.
The first Vice-President and Director of Agrarian Reform is Andrzej Witos, brother of the famous Polish Peasant Leader and former Prime Minister, Wincenty Witos. He was expelled from the Peasant Party and collaborated with the pre-war Polish regime since 1928.
The second Vice-President is Wanda Wasilewska, wife of Korneichuk, who is Commissar of Arts of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. She accepted Soviet citizenship in 1939 and became a member of the Supreme Soviet in Moscow.
General Michel Zymierski, another member of the Polish Committee of National Liberation, began his military career in Pilsudski's Legions. He held the post of a Director of the Armaments Department in the Polish Ministry of Military Affairs. In 1926 he was involved in a trial in connection with army supplies, sentenced to five years'
imprisonment and cashiered. Eventually he left for France where he became engaged on armament business, dealing with supplies for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. Later he approached Marshal Rydz-Smigly and obtained a promise for his trial to be revised.
The Directorate of Culture and Art is held by Wincenty Rzymowski, a wellknown Polish writer, a Socialist in the past and then an ardent supporter of the Polish regime after Pilsudski's coup d'cltat. He lost a libel action against a fellow writer, who accused him of plagiarising the works of Bertrand Russell. He was then forced to resign from the Polish Academy of Literature. The best-known name is that of Dr. Emil Somerstein, a lawyer and Zionist leader, who held for many years a seat in the Polish Parliament. After the Soviet occupation of Lwow in 1939, he was deported to Russia and imprisoned for three years.
Other members of the Committee known to the Poles are Boleslaw Drobner, a Socialist leader from Cracow who belonged to the left wing of that party, and then turned openly Communist, and Stefan Jedrychowski, in charge of Propaganda of the Committee. who is an agile young journalist from Wilno. Jedrychowski began his political career as a radical Catholic, but then switched to the militant organisation of the pre-war Polish regime and finally to the Communists. He can be regarded as the moving spirit of the Committee.