First to Fight

by Roger Moorhouse

  Despite these successes, by midday on 19 September, the sheer numbers of Soviet troops forced the Polish garrison to execute a fighting withdrawal towards the Lithuanian border, 20 kilometres away. ‘I stopped at the hospital to fetch my things,’ Konstanty Peszyński recalled. ‘Soldiers and patients asked me to stay and promised to hide me. I thanked them for their good intentions, but I could not stay behind, for I would be disobeying orders, if for no other reason.’87 Peszyński, who had vowed to defy the ‘Bolshevik scoundrels’, would not escape them, however. Captured by the Soviets, he disappeared and is thought to have been among the Polish officers murdered in the Katyń massacres. Those that remained behind in Wilno faced an uncertain future. One of them recalled waking up ‘in a different world’ on the first morning of the Soviet occupation, with the streets full of Red Army soldiers and armoured vehicles in a determined show of strength. ‘The city itself had changed,’ he wrote, ‘people in normal clothing disappeared. People wore the oldest rags they could find. The shops were shut and all goods were hoarded.’88

  If the garrison at Wilno was guilty of being unprepared for the city’s defence, the same could not be said of Grodno (Hrodna), 120 kilometres to the south-west. After a brief, aborted rising by pro-communist elements – spurred by Soviet leaflets declaring that the Red Army was coming to the aid of the working class – the defence of the town was well organised, using scouts, firemen and civilian volunteers to bolster the numbers to over 2,000 fighting men. The will to fight, one soldier recalled, was strong. When his commanding officer announced, with tears in his eyes, that the Soviet Union had invaded, he ‘declared the situation hopeless, without any chance of victory, and so allowed the men to lay down their arms’. Those that did not want to surrender, ‘but chose to fight for the honour of the city, and the honour of the Polish army, were to step to the right’. The entire platoon, the soldier remembered, stepped to the right.89 Beyond that martial spirit, however, supplies of arms were painfully short. The garrison possessed a total of twenty-four heavy machine guns and two anti-aircraft guns. One cavalry squadron commander noted that his 107 men were armed with only ‘rifles, sabres and lances’.90

  The town resisted the first Soviet assault on the morning of 20 September. A dozen or so Red Army tanks drove into the centre of Grodno, emboldened, it seemed, by their success in overrunning outlying villages. Here, however, they ran into organised resistance. Though their armour could not be pierced by the defenders’ anti-aircraft guns, other ways were soon found to destroy them, firing at their tracks or throwing petrol bombs.91 The town’s defiance was very much a communal effort, including schoolchildren, students, and refugees and soldiers from beyond the region, who had fled the Germans. A schoolteacher recalled:

  A stray police unit is fighting. They are Poznanians, 30 men. They fight as long as they have ammunition in their rucksacks, as long as grenades hang at their belts, as long as the machine gun they had pulled up the barricade spits bullets. The boy runners bring them more ammunition from the barracks and petrol bottles from the people. Women bring them jugs of hot coffee, bread, bigos, soup, and take away the wounded.92

  Boy scouts, too, played a prominent role, darting between the Soviet tanks, armed with petrol bombs. As one of the defenders recalled: ‘The tanks didn’t stand a chance in the narrow streets.’93 But success came at a terrible cost. One of the scouts, thirteen-year-old Tadeusz Jasiński, was caught by Soviet soldiers and, as punishment, was tied to the front of a tank, as a human shield. Mortally wounded, he was taken to his mother, who sought to ease his final moments with news of the Polish success. ‘Tadzik, rejoice!’ she told him. ‘The Polish Army is coming back! Uhlans with banners! They are singing!’ Tadzik died in her arms.94

  When the Soviets returned, later that day, battle was concentrated on the river Niemen, which flows through the town, with Soviet armoured columns attempting to blast their way through Polish strongholds. One of the defenders recalled seeing a Soviet tank drive onto one of the bridges over the river:

  It was soon hit from a gun that was on the first floor of the 81st Infantry Regiment barracks. Bam! It spun round, and that was it. It was stuck. Another tank came, trying to push it aside, but it was hit too. One was on fire and the other soon caught fire too. They must have been clever, those chaps from the barracks.95

  Clever or not, the Polish defence was broken on the night of 21 September, and orders were given for a general evacuation, northward to Lithuania. Those that were unable or unwilling to leave the city disappeared into Soviet captivity or into the nascent Polish underground.

  According to Soviet sources, fifty-seven Red Army personnel were killed in the battle for Grodno; unofficially, the death toll is estimated at some 500. Soviet records also claim that around 600 Poles were killed, but this figure most likely does not include those – students, prisoners of war, scouts and others – who fell victim to mass executions at the hands of the Red Army after the surrender.96 In one instance, some twenty-nine Polish officers were executed after being marched out of town on the pretence that they were going to be set free.97 Another of those killed was the commander of the Grodno garrison, Brigadier-General Józef Olszyna-Wilczyński, who was stopped by a Red Army patrol while heading towards Lithuania in a staff car. Pulled from the vehicle, he was taken to the side of the road along with his adjutant and summarily shot.98 The general’s wife, who had travelled to Grodno to ‘share his fate’, was presented with his briefcase by Soviet soldiers after the execution; it was spattered with his blood.99

  Atrocities such as those that accompanied the fall of Grodno were grimly commonplace during the Soviet invasion. Massacres and maltreatment, of officers in particular, were never far from the surface, especially because, in Soviet eyes, most Polish officers were trebly damned: as Catholics, Poles and noblemen. At Hrubieszów, one officer was shot because he had failed to hand over his pistol when surrendering.100 In another case, a platoon commander of the 45th Red Army Rifle Division took two captured Polish officers into a forest, relieved them of their money and executed them.101 Further examples are legion, but one of the most telling is that of the KOP captain executed by a Red Army man, who told him: ‘This will teach you to be a professional officer.’102

  Naturally, both officers and ordinary soldiers attempted to evade detection by discarding their uniforms or their markers of rank. As a local priest noted, Polish uniforms put soldiers in danger, so they did everything they could to shed them, begging for civilian clothes in return.103 The Soviets had their methods, however. One sinister account reports that fugitive Polish soldiers were rounded up by officers with peculiar accents and odd uniforms, who asked if they wanted to ‘fight the Russians’. Those that volunteered were led away and never seen again.104 Elsewhere, prisoners would be lined up to have their hands checked: those with soft, white palms – ‘beloruchki’ – were clearly not working class, and so could expect to be beaten or shot.105 Any soldier who was well dressed or well equipped was viewed with suspicion by the Soviets. Dariusz Dąbrowski recalled being taken prisoner by the Red Army at Orany (Vare∙na) on the Polish–Lithuanian frontier:

  I took off my distinctions, but I had my whistle, you see. And they said, ‘You are the commanding officer, because you’ve got a whistle.’ A friend of mine took off his distinctions as well, but he had a tailor-made uniform, so he was arrested. And we had a young chap with us who had binoculars, and they thought he must be something special for that reason. So … the three of us were taken for special interrogation.106

  Dąbrowski was subsequently released, after pretending to be a humble tram driver.

  Others tried a similar trick. Henryk Meszczyński had been a battalion commander in the KOP and understood the peril he was in. ‘Everyone wanted to shoot us,’ he recalled. After taking off his insignia and then dumping his uniform entirely, he had donned shabby civilian clothes and a railway worker’s cap, when he was picked up by a passing Soviet convoy. Invited to ride in the cab with the major, he was
offered alcohol, before being told that the back of the truck contained Polish officers en route to an unknown fate.107 While the Germans were unleashing a race war in the west of Poland, the Soviets imported class war to the east, in the Red Army’s baggage train.

  Meszczyński’s ingenuity saved his life, but like those in the back of the truck, thousands of his fellows were not so fortunate and disappeared into the Soviet penal system. Józef Bartoszewicz recalled being taken prisoner near Słonim (Slonim), east of Białystok: ‘They put us in prison. The prison was battered and covered in blood. I don’t know who they’d killed there.’ After a day or so, he and the other Poles were ordered to line up in the yard, and were stripped of everything they had: belts, watches, razors, even shoe-laces. They were then herded to the station and driven into cattle cars at gunpoint. ‘We didn’t know where they were taking us.’108 After a two-week journey, he arrived in the notorious prison camp of Starobelsk (Starobilsk), near Voroshilovgrad (Luhansk). Bartoszewicz was lucky: he was sent from there to a slave labour camp in Ukraine. Those of his fellows that remained in Starobelsk would later be among the 22,000 Poles murdered in the Katyń massacres.109

  For those Poles that remained in eastern Poland, the arrival of the Red Army prefaced a seismic shift as the Soviet occupation soon made itself felt. It was, as one observer recalled, ‘like a gigantic ant-hill, which [had] been violently shaken’.110 Just as the officer class quickly found itself persecuted in the new constellation, so Polishness too became a potentially life-threatening condition. Identified by Soviet propaganda as the oppressors of the Byelorussian and Ukrainian populations of the region, Poles suddenly found themselves living in a hostile environment. The first indication of this sinister new climate was the welcome that some Ukrainians, Byelorussians and Jews extended to the arriving Red Army, in response to the Soviet narrative of ‘liberation’. It could range from groups of villagers greeting the soldiers with bread and salt – the traditional Slavic welcome – to the erection of makeshift triumphal arches bearing the hammer and sickle. One Red Army major-general recalled the greeting that he and his men received when they entered the town of Nowogródek (Navahrudak): ‘A strange sight opened up to us,’ he wrote.

  As soon as they saw the Soviet tanks … a spontaneous demonstration took place. Women and girls began handing out flowers. Initially sparsely, but then more and more frequently, people began cheering. As we went down the street, we were welcomed by ‘Long Live the Red Army!’ and ‘Long Live the Soviet Union!’ shouted from every direction.111

  Soon after the Red Army’s arrival, another novelty was the establishment of local militias, seeking to keep order and speed up the communist transformation of society. In the village of Wiśniowczyk (Vyshnivchyk), near Tarnopol, the local priest noted disapprovingly that ‘local governments are forming spontaneously. The worst scum floats to the surface. All kinds of the lowest vermin, hoodlums, rogues, thieves, drunks, loafers and stinkers take power. They are all over the place, shouting, clamouring, bawling and uttering threats … This kind of thing makes one shudder.’112 Near Brest, another Polish resident recalled that the new authorities were ‘composed of Byelorussian and Jewish volunteers. They wore red armbands on their sleeve … And our people, the Poles, had to sneak around carefully. When the Soviets arrived we became second-class citizens.’113

  In the turmoil that followed, national and social tensions were quick to resurface. Zofia Chomętowska observed the breakdown of society at first hand as she trekked westward through Polesie with countless other Polish refugees in the wake of the Soviet invasion. Everywhere, she recalled, they were eyed with suspicion and often barely concealed hatred by local, non-Polish populations. ‘The Jews are the worst,’ she wrote. ‘They cheerfully shout “Bolsheviki idut!” – “The Bolsheviks are coming!” They have forgotten that the Russians hate them, and they await them impatiently … They look at us with malice and rejoice in our misfortunes.’114 It was not an isolated example. According to a local policeman, some of the Jews of Borysław (Boryslav) organised a symbolic funeral for Poland, with a procession following a coffin draped in the Polish flag.115

  Targeting the property of the local Polish aristocracy, the Red Army urged local Byelorussian and Ukrainian populations to rise up against their class enemies and ‘oppressors’. In the village of Maszów (Mashiv), near Kowel (Kovel’), a Soviet lieutenant made a speech in the main square, in which he called upon the people to go and take away what rightfully belonged to them, to avenge the pain of twenty years of exploitation, proclaiming that they should ‘Kill and take the property of those who filled their pockets and barns with your blood.’116 It was open season on the Poles. Andrzej Ramułt, from an aristocratic family near Stryj (Stryi), saw the local Ukrainian population plunder their estate. ‘People at first just came and looked at everything but wouldn’t go inside,’ he recalled. ‘But eventually they all pounced on it, all of them, even those who had been rather friendly towards us … The manor house was completely stripped of everything.’ Whatever could not be moved was destroyed, such as the bookcases and their contents: ‘Children sat in front of the house and diligently tore out page after page.’117

  Elsewhere, events took a far nastier turn. In the Tarnopol region, where Ukrainian villagers attacked their Polish neighbours, one local landowner was tied to a pole and had strips of flesh torn from his body, before his wounds were dressed with salt. He was then forced to watch the execution of his family. In Pińsk (Pinsk), the president of the district court was attacked by a local militia, who tied his feet to a wagon and drove the horses around the cobbled streets until he breathed his last.118 In one village near Kobryń (Kobryn), a group of Poles were brought out to the fields by a mob and shot. As one eye-witness remembered: ‘They threw them into pits, still alive. My father was alive when they threw him into the pit, and when he stood up and shouted at them “Even if you murder us, Poland will still be here!” they smashed his skull with spades.’119

  In such circumstances, many Poles trying to escape from the eastern territories went to great lengths to avoid their former neighbours. Near Stanisławów, a woman observed young soldiers, still in uniform, sneaking through the woods near her home. ‘They ask if we are Polish,’ she wrote. ‘They are trying to avoid Ukrainian villages. Our “cousins” [the Ukrainians] let them sleep in their barns then take away their guns and murder them in their sleep. It’s hard to believe what’s beginning to happen. Fear and helplessness must be the lot of all Poles.’120

  Panic was a common reaction, particularly among those who remembered the last Soviet invasion, in 1920. ‘Many people started to run away, even though there was nowhere to escape to; they left everything, including children and wives,’ recalled a teacher.121 An infantry major summed up the fatalistic attitude of many to the news of this second invasion. In his diary on 21 September he noted:

  Tonight the news was confirmed: the war declared by the Soviets. In a way, it dispels all doubt … All that is left for us is to die an honourable death. Twenty days ago, we had to get used to the thought of war; now we must get used to the thought of total annihilation.122

  For some, it was too much to bear. Jan Karski recalled a ‘rasping, desperate sobbing’ spreading through his men, as the realisation dawned that they were now the prisoners of the Soviets. The tension was broken by a hysterical voice: ‘Brothers, this is the fourth partition of Poland! May God have mercy on me!’ With that, there was the sound of a revolver shot. The man had taken his own life. ‘No one knew his name,’ Karski wrote, ‘his company, or anything about him.’123

  The writer and philosopher Stanisław Witkiewicz was another of those driven to extremes. Witkiewicz – or ‘Witkacy’, as he was known – understood Soviet communism better than most. He had witnessed the outbreak of the Bolshevik Revolution in Petrograd in 1917, and a decade later wrote the dystopian novel Insatiability, a darkly pessimistic parody of a future Poland overrun by an unscrupulous demagogue with a seductive ideology. In September 19
39, Witkiewicz sought sanctuary at the estate of a friend at Jeziory (Velyki Ozera), near Sarny, east of Brest, but when he heard of the Soviet invasion, and the horrors that it had brought to the region, he committed suicide by taking veronal and slitting his carotid artery. He had no desire to live in the world that he had so accurately foreseen.124

  *

  While Poland was fighting for its life, its allies were pondering their responses. For the British, the Soviet invasion came as an unpleasant surprise, even after the profound shock engendered by the Nazi–Soviet Pact itself. Churchill complained of Moscow’s gross ‘bad faith’, while the civil servant John Colville described the Kremlin’s communiqué justifying its actions as ‘without doubt the most revolting document that modern history has produced’.125 The MP Harold Nicolson was ‘dumbfounded’ by the news, seeing it as a ‘terrific blow’, which made an Allied victory all the more uncertain. ‘Within a few days’, he mused, ‘we shall have Germany, Russia and Japan against us.’ Before long ‘the Axis will rule Europe’ and France would make terms. Even the time-worn British tactic of blockading Germany was out of the question, Nicolson wrote in his diary: rather, ‘it is a question of them encircling and blockading us’. ‘In a few days our whole position might collapse,’ he concluded. ‘Nothing could be more black.’126