ABSTRACT
NEAR the mining town of Gleiwitz in Upper Silesia a poor peasant goes to the bottom of his garden, digs a row of potatoes in Poland and takes them back to cook in his kitchen which happens to be in Germany. He has two passports: his slender purse contains a few marks and a few zlottis: he pays taxes to the Reich and to the Polish Government; one of his daughters lives in Germany and works in Poland: a son cycles into Germany to work and cycles back to Poland to sleep. All are Germans: all were brought up in the peasant’s cottage. Even now father and son and daughter all live within a mile of each other. Their strange manner of living was decreed by the boundary commission of 1921 which drew a line through the old man’s garden and left one member of his family on the one side and another on the other.
