POLAND: In Babie Doly

From Warsaw last week came a story of two more curious survivors of World War II. A six-foot Nazi soldier with a beard reaching to his knees, and another who soon dropped dead of a heart attack, turned up in the village of Babie Doly, 20 miles from Gdynia, claiming that they had been trapped for six years in an underground storehouse.

The bearded one, no mean storyteller, gave a detailed account to Poland’s Communist authorities, generally no mean storytellers themselves: during the German retreat in 1945, he and five other German soldiers had been looting the store, when German demolition bombs destroyed its entrance and entombed them. Two of the trapped men committed suicide; another two died. The two remaining buried their comrades in piles of flour, lived on the vast stores of food in the bunker, washed in schnapps to conserve the small supply of water which seeped through cracks in the concrete walls. When Polish workers cleared the rubble from the shelter’s entrance, they crawled out.