The Lincoln Times

GIRL, GRIPSHOLM ARRIVAL. TELLS OF POLISH FIANCE'S DEATH. FLIGHT FROM NAZIS

Jersey City, N. J., March 16. Repatriates left the Swedish exchange liner Gripsholm in a slow trickle today, and with these came accounts of Nazi inquisition, of dreadful food and of German morale bolstered only by frightened desperation.

Among the first of the non-official civilians to leave the white ship was a young Polish-American girl who told of losing her fiance in the invasion of Poland, and of her flight through the countryside.

Marie Tomezak, 26, daughter of John and Agnes Tomezak, of Pittsburgh, Pa., disembarked wearing a shabby coat, an ersatz material dress and sweater--all she brought with her after almost five years of internment in Poland, and said she was headed straight for Pittsburgh--to get a job in a war plant.

She had been in Poland in 1938, met and fell in love with a young man, returned to America for her trousseau and returned to Poland in 1939, just two weeks before the German invasion. Her fiance, called to the colors, was killed. Because she had come to Poland such a short time before, she was placed under strict surveillance by the Gestapo.

One day, she said, German soldiers approached her and said they would take her to a hotel. She said she fled and told of hiding out in cowbarns, taking her food wherever she could find it, from March until August, 1942, when she thought it might be safe to return to her relatives. She was picked up and sent to the internment camp at Liebenau.

Taylor Henry, Associated Press bureau chief at Vichy, who was interned at Baden-Baden, reported that German morale was good "because there is desperation behind it--the Germans are scared to quit."

"We have to break them down by force of arms," Henry said. "We can't possibly hope for a repetition of 1918, when Germany collapsed."