POLAND: Stalin & the Working Girl

Stalin will protect the working girl, vow the Communists. Last week a pretty 21-year-old blonde, who with three men escaped from Poland to Sweden in a rattletrap plane (TIME, Aug. 13), told how he does it.

Christina (second name withheld because her parents are still in Poland) was a clerk in a state food monopoly. Her story: “If you are late for work three times in a month, they take away half your pay. A girl’s average salary is 350 zloty ($90) a month. But a plain dress costs 600 zloty, so pay cuts are tough . . . If you refuse to work overtime, they call you a saboteur and a political enemy. Sometimes they fire you. If you get fired this way twice, you are sent to a labor camp. This is what Polish girls are afraid of more than anything.

“The camps are supposed to be a strict secret, but women who have been sent there manage to smuggle letters out. The girls are guarded by Russians while they work—in mines or stone quarries, or on roads. It’s heavy work that women simply are physically unable to do. None of the girls ever return that I know of.”