by Douglas Boyd
★★★
Scrabbling for any allies who might divert some German forces away from Russia, Stalin subsequently did a deal with General Władisław Sikorski, prime minister of the Polish government-in-exile in London. Under a spurious amnesty – for they had committed no crime – he released tens of thousands of Polish POWs held in Soviet prison camps. Knowing that his brother officer General Władysław Anders was a prisoner undergoing interrogation with torture in the NKVD’s infamous Lubyanka prison, Sikorski named him commander-in-chief of the new Polish force. When he was released, Anders took command on 22 August of several thousand men whose physical condition was understandably poor after being used as disposable slave labour in the camps. By the end of the year, he had 1,000 officers and 24,000 other ranks organised into three infantry divisions. Early in 1942, this small army was transported to Tashkent in Soviet Turkestan, with the addition of another division. If that all sounds straightforward, it was not, for Anders and his staff had constantly to circumvent every kind of administrative and logistical obstacle placed in their way by Soviet military and civil officials.
For complex reasons, the most important of which was Stalin’s determination that these Poles should not complicate his planned occupation of their homeland later in the war – as they had every reason to do – he directed them to British-occupied Iran, designated Polish 2nd Army Corps. At this stage, the corps totalled about 40,000 military personnel and had with it twice that number of civilian dependents, who were permitted to leave with them because the USSR was already short of food. The uncertainty over their exact numbers is because although some were shipped across the Caspian Sea, other released Poles had to find their own way to the Turkestan–Iran border on foot, and many died of malnutrition, hypothermia and disease on the way. The toughest men survived to see service against the Germans in North Africa and the Italian campaign, where their heroism under dire conditions at Monte Cassino is legendary – at the cost to Anders’ army of 7,000 lives in that one battle alone.
Long before then, Winston Churchill had put in writing to Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden that a permanent Soviet occupation of eastern Poland would be contrary to the principles of the Atlantic Charter agreed between Britain and the USA in August 1941, and which had subsequently been endorsed by the United Nations, including the USSR. It also ran contrary to the restoration of national integrity enunciated in US President Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points’ at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. However, the US president at that time, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was so much under Stalin’s influence that Churchill was unable to obtain from him any support for the restoration of Polish national sovereignty after the war. It was this that drove him to tell General Anders in Italy that Britain could no longer defend the territorial integrity of the country for which it had theoretically declared war on Germany. Anders retorted that the Big Three’s carving up of his country was a calamity.
Poland after 1945 frontier adjustment.
Churchill, presumably ridden by guilt, replied angrily, ‘We have enough troops today. We do not need your help. You can take away your divisions. We shall do without them.’3
A Polish friend of the author, when asked how he and his comrades in Italy reacted when they heard this, said, ‘We thought, what the hell are we doing here, fighting in British uniforms? They don’t care about our country, so why should we fight their war? But we carried on because, that way, we were at least killing one lot of enemies.’4
In 1943, thanks in part to supplies of materiel shipped in from the West at considerable cost in lives and shipping losses,5 Stalin’s armies launched the massive offensive that would eventually take them as far as Berlin. Included in the Soviet forces was a 75,000-man Polish Communist army commanded by General Zygmunt Berling, formed under Soviet command. The Polish rank and file had joined as a way of escaping harsh-regime prison camps and were disciplined by rigidly indoctrinated Soviet and Polish Communist commissars. In January 1944, they crossed the pre-war border of Poland with the Red Army.
Once on Polish soil, Stalin recommenced his programme of mass murder and deportation of intellectuals and survivors of the Polish Armia Krajowa (AK) or Home Army – the main Polish armed resistance group fighting the Germans. The AK had 300,000 men and women, loyal to the government-in-exile based in London, which anticipated returning to its homeland when German forces had been driven out. Refusing to accept the existence of this legitimate Polish authority, on 22 July in Chełm, one of the first cities to be recaptured, the Soviet leadership formed Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego (PKWN) or Polish Committee of National Liberation. Packed with pro-Soviet communists who had spent the war so far in the USSR, it was proclaimed by Moscow as the future government of Poland, being popularly referred to as ‘the Lublin government’ because as soon as that city was recaptured, the government moved there from Chełm. Significantly, its thirteen otherwise skeleton departments already included the 200-man-strong Resort Bezpieczenstwa Publicznego (RBP) – or Department of Public Security – which laid the foundation for a nationwide pro-Moscow Polish secret police force before the Germans had been driven out of even 10 per cent of the country.
Occasionally, RBP personnel came under German fire, but most of their activities were against non-communist partisans who were too busy fighting the occupation forces to protect themselves against this new enemy whom they at first welcomed as allies and who spoke the same language they did. Back in Moscow, in July 1944 Lavrenti Beria reported dutifully to Stalin that he had sent 12,000 NKVD troops into Poland behind the Red Army to drive the Home Army out of the forests and punish the civilian population that had been feeding them or providing accommodation. By the end of the year, more than 5,000 AK partisans had been taken prisoner and an unknown number, who could have been fighting the Germans, had been killed by Russian bullets. And so it went on. In the first quarter of 1945, the NKVD itself claimed to have captured or arrested a quarter-million people of many ethnic groups in Poland; 38,000 of these were Poles deported into the USSR, where at least 5,000 died.6
In the German-occupied areas of the country, groups of Armia Krajowa men hid out in the forests. Teenage partisan fighter Bogusław Nowakowski gave the lie to later glorification of the partisan life by recounting how it was extremely harsh, with everyone malnourished, unwashed, stinking and louse-infested. The rare RAF air-drops of weapons to the AK groups brought far too few guns and ammunition, so it was necessary to make raids on German ‘soft targets’ for weapons and on collaborationist businesses to steal money, food and clothing. Enemies were all around. Not only the Germans, but also communist partisans were trying to eliminate the non-communist partisans. Their victims ran into tens of thousands, and Nowakowski’s account is typical.
In mid-April 1944 he and four other AK men were returning from a brief visit to their families near Ostrowiec in south-eastern Poland, an area still occupied by the Germans. The town also hid a clandestine weapons workshop and a resistance printing press. On the way back to their forest hideout they stopped for the night at a small guest house. A group of men from the Communist Armia Ludowa (AL), or People’s Army, arrived later under the command of a man whose nom de guerre was ‘Wasp’. The newcomers, who outnumbered Nowakowski’s group five to one, forcibly disarmed them. They also robbed them of the money they had stolen at gunpoint from a German business. Only then did they announce that the AK men were to be put on trial allegedly for attacking another communist group. Since they had never done this, Nowakowski’s four companions were not too alarmed until they had their hands tied behind them and were roped together in pairs. Being still a teenager, Nowakowski was not tied to another man, but had his hands tied behind his back.
Their captors included several Russians, probably escapees from German POW camps. After marching their prisoners some way into the forest, ‘Wasp’ ordered these Russians to kill the five prisoners. The AK men protested they had never attacked any other Poles, but were gunned down with automatic weapons regardless. Bli
nded by the muzzle flashes and stunned by the noise, Nowakowski fell down in shock, thinking he was dead. As one of the Russians was giving a coup de grâce to the wounded who were groaning, he realised that he was not even hurt. The AK men were stripped and relieved of their boots, to be buried in an unmarked grave. When the rope binding his hands was cut by two of the killers, so that they could remove his coat and jacket, Nowakowski leaped to his feet and ran for his life, barefoot.
Bullets struck trees all around him, but he managed to reach a friendly house a few kilometres from the massacre, where the worst of his cuts and abrasions were cleaned and dressed. The Armia Krajova HQ at Ostrowiec was commanded by a Pole who had parachuted in from Britain. When this man learned what had happened, the young survivor of the massacre was ordered to make a full report identifying the murderers, which could be used as evidence in a post-war trial. There never was a trial. Instead, ‘Wasp’ rose to political power after the retreat of German forces from the area, and continued to hunt down any AK men who could be traced. To save his life, Nowakowski volunteered to go with the retreating Nazi forces, to work as a labourer in Germany. After returning to Poland under a false name at the cessation of hostilities in 1945, he recorded that for years after the ‘liberation’ ‘Wasp’ and his men continued tracking down and arresting former members of AK, who were given show trials ending with sentences ranging from five years’ in prison to death by firing squad.7
So, although Soviet history books refer to this period as ‘the liberation of Poland’, it did not feel like that at the time for most Poles. After the withdrawal of the German administration of Bohemia and Moravia, known as the ‘Gouvernement General’, eventually the whole country was placed under the Lublin government, supported by the several thousand members of Armia Ludowa. While the local Red Army commanders happily accepted the help of Armia Krajowa partisans at places such as Łwów, Vilnius and Nowogródek, once the German forces had been driven out and these areas secured, all AK men were arrested, given summary trials and either sent to Siberia or, as at Łwów, murdered by NKVD troops and buried in mass graves, which the victims were forced to dig themselves. The graves were only reopened and the remains exhumed after the collapse of the USSR in 1989.
On 15 August 1944 the PKWN issued a decree ordering all males in the ‘liberated’ areas to register for military service in Rokossovsky’s Soviet puppet army. About 200,000 men found themselves drafted into labour battalions, some of them for the ‘crime’ of having relatives living abroad. They were put to work with inadequate safety regulations, or none at all, in quarries, coal and uranium mines. There are no official figures for the many who were seriously crippled or killed in accidents. Nine days later, a second decree explicitly outlawed membership of Armia Krajowa, obliging men who had served in it to join other fugitives in the forests or be immediately arrested as ‘enemies of the people’ for their record of actively fighting the Germans.
Politically inactive Poles were also arrested and transported in unheated railway trucks to labour camps, including a former German concentration camp at Zgoda run by ex-AL man Salomon Morel, who was appointed in March 1945. With 5,000 prisoners, nearly all German-speaking Volksdeutsche, crammed into seven lice-ridden barracks, 1,855 detainees died at Zgoda between then and November 1945. Of the deaths, 1,600 were due to a typhus epidemic, during which the dying were neither isolated nor given any medical treatment. Subsequently charged with starving prisoners and creating conditions in which typhus was inevitable, as well as practising physical and mental torture on detainees, Morel was removed and punished with three days of house arrest.
Of others deported to the USSR, many died of exposure, hunger and thirst en route. In those camps food was poor and disease rife. At one, 1,000 Poles died in the first three months; their corpses were thrown naked into garbage pits. The fittest in the camps continued working in coal, copper and graphite mines, or on collective farms, replacing Soviet citizens who had died during the war. By the time the Lublin government managed to reclaim the surviving deportees in autumn 1945, more than half had died.
Three transports of 1,000 men travelled from Białystok to Ostashkov, midway between Moscow and Leningrad. These Poles were farmers, designated kulaki and therefore ‘class enemies’, with some self-employed tradesmen, teachers and even secondary school pupils – all of whom were considered ‘enemies of democracy’. Weakened by torture and malnutrition during their initial imprisonment, many died during the two-week, 600-mile journey in cattle trucks. The harsh conditions in the camp at Ostashkov caused much further mortality until the survivors were repatriated in January 1945. But Poland’s nightmare was not over. In the two following months NKVD troops deported some 20,000 miners from Katowice in Silesia to Kazakhstan in Central Asia. What became of them is unknown. Lists of deportees were clandestinely compiled by neighbours and relatives, but when they later tried to ascertain the fate of their missing friends, fathers, sons and brothers, neither the post-war Polish government nor the Red Cross was able to discover what had happened to them.
The men repatriated in January 1945 were the lucky ones. Some other Polish prisoners were detained for two further years without any contact with their families, who did not know whether they were dead or alive. The war being long over, in desperation some of these men went on hunger strike – which takes some doing when one is already severely malnourished – and refused to work. To outwit the strikers, in June of 1947 the NKVD promised swift repatriation. The prisoners boarded trains for what they thought was the journey home, to find themselves delivered to another camp for an intensive four-month political indoctrination course. Only in the October did they at last get transport to Brest on the Polish border.
They returned to a homeland where the eradication of non-Communist figures of authority was still continuing. The most transparent ploy was the enticement of non-Communist Polish leaders from the provisional government in London to join in the formation of Rzad Tymczasowy Rzeczyoospolitej Polskiej (RTRP) or Provisional Government of Poland. It was at this point that the Ministry of Public Security was renamed Ministerstwo Bezpieczenstwa Publicznego (MBP). This government ministry was eventually to embrace internal security, including nationwide telephone monitoring and mail opening, management of the Milicja Obywatelskaya paramilitary police, also the prison and fire services, the Wojska Ochrony Pogranicza border police and concentration camp guards. After mid-1947 it also took over Polish Military Intelligence, becoming even more powerful within Poland than the KGB was in the USSR.
Arrested by NKVD Major General Ivan Serov, tortured and displayed in the ‘Trial of the Sixteen’, allegedly for anti-Soviet activities in June 1945, the returnees from London who had worked for or been members of the wartime government-in-exile were not immediately executed, due to US President Truman’s personal appeal for leniency to Stalin, but few of them survived long. Their bitterest pill was to learn on 6 July that the Western Allies had withdrawn recognition of the London government-in-exile on the previous day and formally recognised the Soviet puppet government in Warsaw as the legal government of Poland – as a gesture to Stalin.
Outside Soviet-occupied Poland, the existence of the puppet army, eventually renamed Sily Zbrojne Rzeczypospolitej Ludowej – or Armed Forces of the People’s Republic – and the many Polish-speaking Soviet officers embedded in the new Polish administration, led to confusion over the real political situation in the country. The reality was that the Soviet organs of state terror had been replaced by nominally Polish bodies, such as Urzad Bezpieczenstwa (UB) or State Security established by PKWN on 21 July 1944 and the several Armia Ludowa security corps, which included many Soviet officials who had changed their Russian and Jewish names to Polish ones. Their victims had no better than a fifty-fifty chance of avoiding a death sentence, executed in public, after a summary trial with no defence permitted.
Among the returnees in summer 1945 was Czesław Kisczak, who had been a slave labourer in Austria. After getting hold of and producing a
membership card for the Austrian Communist Party, he was sent to UB training schools in Łódz and Warsaw, after which he was posted to Glówny Zarzad Informacji (GZI) – or Chief Intelligence Directorate of the Defence Ministry, meaning Polish military intelligence. His first mission saw him despatched to Britain, to ‘persuade’ the Polish forces there to return home. Kisczak resurfaced internationally as one of the generals who imposed martial law in 1981 in the attempt to crush Solidarnosc and other free trade unions.8 Although the law was rescinded in 1983, many of those arrested stayed in prison for two further years.
Two months after the end of the war in Europe, in July 1945 the Białystok region was selected for a massive clearance by NKVD troops of allegedly anti-communist civilians. Known as the ‘Giby operation’ after the name of a village that suffered particularly harshly, it covered more than 100 small towns and villages. Several thousand people were arrested and interrogated with force by officers of the MBP under NKVD supervision. While the majority were released after a few weeks, an estimated 1,300 of those arrested did not return home. It was assumed they had been deported to the Soviet Union.
However, none was included in the batches of returnees from then until 1956, when Moscow alleged that all Polish detainees had been released, two years after Stalin’s death. Under pressure from families of the missing, the Polish Red Cross in Białystok finally had a confirmed list of 1,136 names. Before this could be taken any further, local pro-Soviet officials terminated the enquiry. With extraordinary courage and persistence, a committee of relatives was formed in August 1987 and appealed for help to both Polish and Soviet governments, to the Catholic Church and the Red Cross. Fifty-six prominent Polish figures signed a formal letter of support addressed to the Sejm, or Polish parliament. All this achieved was to have the committee declared an illegal organisation. Undaunted, the relatives pressed on and submitted detailed reports on 370 of the victims to the Sejm on 19 April 1989, together with a complete list of the missing. This material named specific NKVD and Polish security officers involved in the arrests. It also raised three questions. Why were Soviet troops involved when the war had ended at the time? Had the operation been requested by the Polish authorities? Where are the graves?