Office of the Historian

The Chargé to the Polish Government in Exile (Schoenfeld) to President Roosevelt 39

London, February 17, 1945—3:09 p.m.
[Received February 18—12:50 a.m.]

Under cover of a letter of today’s date, Prime Minister Arciszewski40 requests me to transmit the following message to the President:

“Secret message from the Prime Minister of Poland to His Excellency Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President of the United States of America. Your message41 received yesterday February 16, 1945. I welcome your assurances that Poland’s problems received most careful and sympathetic consideration at the Crimea Conference and that it is your hope that a correct solution of these problems may be found in due time. I consider it my duty to take this opportunity to state that the decisions of the Crimea Conference as made public were received by all Poles as a new partition of Poland leaving her under Soviet protectorate. Nevertheless the Polish nation is deeply convinced that this cannot be the final settlement of the Polish question and retains its implicit faith both in your profoundly sympathetic attitude towards Poland and in your unswerving championship of the high ideals of freedom and justice in the defense of which American and Polish soldiers are so generously giving their lives. London, February 17, 1945.”

  1. Copy of telegram obtained from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N.Y.↩
  2. Tomaz Arciszewski, Prime Minister of the Polish Government in Exile at London.↩
  3. President Roosevelt’s telegram to Prime Minister Arciszewski, dated February 15, Conferences at Malta and Yalta, p. 950, footnote 1.↩