FIGHEING: for elementary jus-

tice and freedom for her hus- band, Morton Sobell, the story Mrs. Helen Sobell told to a Van- couver audience during her recent visit to this city is like a nightmare of horror, all the more so because it happened next door to every Canadian citizen,

~ When Hitler’s regime had par-

aded its corps of “witnesses”’ into a Leipzig court in 1933, in- eluding top “ministers” like Her- mann Goering and Joseph Goeb- bels, in an effort to deliver the Bulgarian Communist lead- er Georgi Dimitrov over to the executioner, Dimitrov. quietly observed that “. .. it is unfortun- ate for the government that most of its witneses are per- jurers, ex-convicts, degenerates and drug addicts.”

Dimitrov, by his courage at that trial, inspired a whole world. The truth he spoke emerged victorious over false- hood and brute force, and he lived to see Hitler’s mon- strous regime buried in the ruin it brought to Germany.

There have been many such cases to show that just so soon as any state violates ,all the canons of justice, truth and decency in the judicial treat-

ment of its citizens, the event -

is no longer the private con- cern of that state, but of the whole world.

*

The Morton Sobell story is one of those cases. It opened with a savage brutality remin-

mh

‘Confession’ of a crime he did not commit would free Morton Sobell - but he affirms his innocence while his wife campaigns to clear him

iscent of Hitler’s Germany, only this time the Pentagon instead of the Wilhelmstrasse set the stage.

Mrs. Sobell told of her little tamily holidaying in Mexico, being “visited” after midnight by five armed police thugs and of her husband being clubbed down by a rifle butt because he protested: the invasion of his home.

Insisting on seeing and being with her husband, Helen Sobel, her arms pinioned behind her back, is thrown into a police room marked “homicide” and there she sees her husband, father of their two small child- ren, covered with bruises and blood. He speaks a word to en- courage his brave little wife, and is clubbed down again be- fore her eyes, then tossed into a car heading for the U.S. border, with his escort instructed to “shoot . . . if he makes one move.”

Then the scene changes to the Federal Bureau of Investi- gation in the “enlightened” United States of America. The FBI wants to add Helen Sobell’s name to its list of perjurers. In reply to her repeated protests that she and her husband have committed no crime, the FBI men tell her, “You will be sur- prised how much you'll remem- ber when you work with us.”

Then the “trial’’ before the

notorious Judge Irving Kauf-

man, who sent Ethel and Julius Rosenberg to the electric chair, the judge who said he could “not be moved by hysteria” but “whose shameful sentences upon

the Rosenbergs and upon Morton Sobell were and are the very essence of. mob hysteria and cold war mania. Again the par- rade of professional stool pigeons, well rehearsed by the FBI, Elizabeth Bentley, Harry Gold, Max Elixer, each weav- ing parts of a net of perjury to enmesh another victim for the altar of Pentagon atomania.

Kaufman, in passing sentence, tells Sobell that “there is no evidence of atom bomb espion- age in your case... but I must do my duty ... 30 years im- prisonment.”

Courageously Helen Sobell tells the story of this nightmare. In prison they offer Morton Sobell his “freedom” in ex- change for a “confession” of something the court didn’t even prove he did. Sobell refuses to engage in such perjury, so all his “privileges” are taken away Anonymous Him, slandering his wife, his family, his friends, letters of innuendo and invective, written by FBI stooges to destroy the spirit of a brave American.

As in the Rosenberg case, such a “confession” is sorely needed by the U.S. Department of Jus- tice and its FBI to exonerate

By TOM McEWEN-

letters are sent:

the U.S. government in the eyes

_ of outraged world opinion. And

as in the Rosenberg case, the hope is vain. Not even his re- moval to the “Devil’s Island” of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay,

can break the spirit of Morton.

Sobell, nor of his brave wife, Helen.

“We are proud” she told her °

audience, “because we have neither betrayed our friends nor our country ... proud because our anger sustains us against this tyranny. which threatens every citizen.”

> 4 \

: Two great books recently pub- lished in the U.S., John Wexley’s The Judgement of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and William Reuben’s The Atom Spy Hoax, together with the ex-FBI stooge Harvey Matusow’s False Wit- ness, tells the whole story of an American people. Helen Sobell’s heart rending story brings it down to family level—and grips the heart of a nation seeking justice for a citizen.

At a recent meeting in Car- negie Hall, New York, Senator Langer declared to Helen Sobell, “T will do all in my power as a member of the Senate Judici- ary Committee to bring your husband back to you,” and War- ren K. Billings, imprisoned for 20 years in the Tom Mooney “Preparedness Day” frameup declared from the same plat-

A woman cries for justice

form, “I was the Morton Sobell in the Tom Mooney case.” The people of the United States, says Helen Sobell, “are tired of being afraid, are tired of being silent.”

The meeting in Vancouver en- dorsed the following resolution which will be sent to the U.S. government and U.S. Consulates in this country:

“There is a new spirit of peace and friendship in the world to- day which is welcomed by all people.

“We feel that to keep Morton Sobell in prison is to continue the feat and hysteria which has characterized a recent period of world history.

“To release Morton Sobell would be an act of humanity and goodwill which would be in keeping with the new spirit abroad in the world.

“In the meantime, to trans- fer him from Alcatraz to a prison on the east coast of the United States, where he would be able to consult with his attorneys and have visits from his family, would seeme to be the least that could be done.

“A new trial to resolve the many and grave doubts that justice has been done in this case is a pressing necessity.”

A nation-wide campaign 1s now under way to bring the Sobell case into the courts again, this time on a motion that “the kncwn use of perjury was part of Sobell persecution.” Helen Sobell concluded her dramatic appeal to all lovers of democra- cy and justice by asking “in the name of humanity and jus- tice help us, and we will repay your helo with our faith and love all the days of our lives.”

Eighty years ago they used oxen on Granville Street

fisuty years ago, when this

Picture was taken, cedar and’

fir still grew on ‘what is now Granville Street south of Rob-

Son ‘and pioneer loggers used ©Xen to haul out their logs.

Granville Street itself began 8S a small creek winding

through the forest and tumbling into Burrard Inlet through the ravine it had cut for itself in the bluff overlooking what are now the CPR yards. In a sense, the creek determined the loca-

tion of Vancouver’s most fam- ous street, renowned through- out the world for its neon lights.

CPR surveyors, looking for a site that offered space for a railway station and deep water for ship docks, chose the spot where the stream had cut the bluffs.

In 1875, pioneer residents of the infant city. crossed the swamp around Granville and

‘walk mounted on stilts.

Dunsmuir on a wooden side- The edge of the forest then was never far away.

Beyond Robson, loggers slow- ly pushed the forest back to the shores of False Creek, then a pleasant place indeed, its wat- ers teeming with fish and wild-

fowl. In those days the water came almost up to what is now Pender Street, reached far up into Grandview over the flats where the Canadian National and Great Northern now run and provided the early resi- : dents of Mount Pleasant with a vista worthy of thy name they bestowed upon it.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE — DECEMBER 9, 1955 — PAGE §