by Douglas Boyd
The wartime Big Three conferences had accepted Stalin’s plan – it was hardly original, since this had been an aim of the tsars before the October Revolution – to widen the buffer zone against another German invasion of Russia.9 Endorsed by Attlee and Truman at the 1945 Potsdam Conference, Poland’s eastern frontier was moved westwards by about 250 miles to the Bug river – roughly along the Curzon Line, which British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon had proposed as the border after the First World War. The western frontier was also moved westwards to the lines of the Oder and Neisse rivers and Poland was awarded the formerly German province of East Prussia – which roughly compensated them for the territory lost in the east. The Polish city of Lwów became Ukrainian and was renamed Lviv; Brest-Litovsk was inside the expanded Belarus; and Wilno became Vilnius, capital of the Lithuanian SSR.
This redrawing of the map involved a population movement of 1.2 million Polish-speakers expelled from their homes and lands because it was reasoned they could be resettled in the formerly German provinces of the west and north. The new government in Warsaw reciprocated by expelling 482,000 Ukrainians from the province of Galicia.10 According to the statesmen at the conference, these population exchanges were to be conducted in an orderly and humane manner. The reality was very different: in the Volhynia region of southern Galicia, it was common to find Ukrainian villages with Orthodox churches interspersed with Polish villages with Catholic churches. Armed bands of irregulars from the underground Ukraïnska Povstanska Armiya (UPA) looted and burned down many Polish-speaking villages after raping and murdering the inhabitants; in retaliation, Polish guerrillas did the same in Ukrainian-speaking villages.
In East Prussia, ethnic German inhabitants, blamed for the excesses of the Wehrmacht, the Waffen-SS and the Einsatzgruppen, headed desperately westwards, seeking asylum in what was left of the Reich. Before the Polish government got around to organising their expulsion, in the big cities they were herded into ghettoes, partly for their own protection. In the countryside, after the Red Army moved on, Polish gangs robbed and raped them, using violence to drive more than a quarter-million German-speakers across the Oder in the last two weeks of June 1945.11
Tens of thousands of these German refugees had to walk hundreds of miles, transporting some belongings on wheelbarrows or farm carts pulled usually by women – because their menfolk were in Allied or Soviet POW camps – across the vast expanse of war-ravaged territory between their former homes and safety. The railways hardly functioned. People considered themselves lucky if they could find space outside a carriage and cling to a door handle; exhausted by malnutrition, many grew tired and fell off to die beside the tracks. Many roads were unusable due to demolition of bridges in the German retreat. Somehow, around 200,000 Ukrainians got left behind in Polish Galicia after Stalin closed the frontier. Stranded on the wrong side, they were eventually dispersed all over Poland in small groups without neighbours who could or would speak to them, in order to destroy any sense of being Ukrainian. With them went 34,000 Łemkos, a separate ethnic group living on the northern slopes of the Carpathians. Since both these peoples used Cyrillic alphabets and attended Orthodox churches, they were effectively being sent into an alien land. They were permitted to take some domestic animals with them in the cattle trucks, and were told they would find completely equipped new homes abandoned by German-speakers. By the time they arrived at their designated destinations, everything had been looted. People mocked their strange accents, and their children were beaten for using Ukrainian words in school and shunned by their new neighbours’ children.
Few people kept diaries in this cataclysmic summer when people even in a large town such as Łódz were reduced to stealing the furniture from houses of the now empty ghetto and smashing out door and window fittings in order to have fuel for cooking and winter heating. However, Countess Marion Dönhoff did keep a record. As the Red Army advanced far faster than anticipated, she was one of the first Germans to leave, deciding to abandon her family estate near Preussich Holland (modern Pasłek) in East Prussia while most of her German neighbours were obediently waiting for an order to do so from Berlin. She ate a last meal, left everything on the table and headed west on her best horse without bothering to lock the doors, having packed only a saddle-bag with ‘toiletries, bandage material and my old Spanish crucifix’.12 Whether they left their homes of their own accord, like the countess, or were brutally driven out by the Polish incomers, all Germans in the new Polish territory, like those in the Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia, departed in such haste that the Polish refugees who arrived first to take over their homes found books on the shelves, linen on the beds and even food in the larders. The regions they now inhabited, however, were not home and so devoid of infrastructure and so lawless that they were referred to as ‘the Wild West’, where might was right.
Nor was life in the east any easier.
Notes
1. L.H. Nicholas, Cruel World, the Children of Europe in the Nazi Web, New York, Knopf/Vintage 2006, p. 249
2. The Soviet retreat from Poland is treated in greater detail in Boyd, Kremlin, pp. 139–47.
3. Boyd, Kremlin, p. 165
4. Personal communication with the author
5. In addition to all the armaments, trucks, etc., there were thousands of Harley-Davidson motorbikes, on which tommy-gun-toting Red Army infantrymen rode as far as Berlin.
6. Applebaum, Iron Curtain, pp. 100, 104, 111
7. A full account may be found on http://felsztyn.tripod.com/id21.html
8. Applebaum, Iron Curtain, pp. 76–7
9. See at length in Boyd, Kremlin.
10. Lowe, Savage Continent, p. 222
11. Ibid, p. 233
12. Applebaum, Iron Curtain, pp. 127–8, quoting M. Gräfin Dönhoff, Namen die keiner mehr nennt: Ostpreussen – Menschen und Geschichte, Munich, DTV 1964, pp. 16–18
13
BETRAYAL, BEATINGS, ELECTIONS AND EXECUTIONS
The inhabitants of the Kakolewnica Forest near Radzyn Podlaski call their woodland maly Katyn – meaning ‘little Katyn’ – for good reason. After the departure of Rokossovsky’s troops, the area was occupied by 2nd Polish People’s Army, commanded by General Karol Swierczewski, a hard-line Stalinist alumnus of the Frunze military academy in Moscow, who had commanded an International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War using the nom de guerre ‘General Walter’. Under him, detachments of Informacja Wojskowa – Polish Military Intelligence – worked in collaboration with NKVD teams. The forest was turned into an unobserved execution ground by the forcible evacuation of many local residents, who were not allowed to take their belongings with them. People living nearby, however, heard much shooting in the forest at night, and the comings and goings of military trucks at all hours.
Under a PKWN decree in October 1944, whose effect was back-dated to August of that year, membership of all non-Communist Polish anti-German forces was made punishable by death. As one example of many, 18-year-old Czesław Pekala had been a courier taking messages between different AK bands. Arrested by the NKVD and thrown into Radzyn Podlaski jail, his jaw was broken, he suffered head injuries from severe kicking and splinters were driven under his finger nails. At one point he spent four days lying unconscious in several centimetres of water in a cellar. Released after two months, he had lost half his body weight of 68kg, and was too terrified of re-arrest to say what had happened until 1998, long after the collapse of the USSR.
In one dossier alone, courts martial of 2nd People’s Army sentenced sixty-one people to death; forty-three of these were executed. But no one knows how many were killed and thrown into unmarked forest graves, with or without trial, after these areas were cordoned off by security troops and civilians forbidden to enter. When the 2nd Army moved out in early 1945 the area had been levelled and saplings planted. After a few years, heavy rainfall began washing to the surface bones and other human remains. A memorial was erected in 1980. In March of that year the Radzyn Podlaski district prosecutor ordered an investiga
tion of several identified execution pits. The forensic report concluded:
The executed men had their hands and legs tied with wire. Some of the victims had sustained injuries in the form of broken and fractured ribs, arms, legs, etc. Some of the skulls showed signs of severe trauma caused by a blunt, heavy object [like a rifle butt]. The examiners confirmed injuries sustained by a single shot [to the head] with the entry wounds located either in the rear, or on the side of the skull.1
Given the forensic resources of the time, the exhumation failed to identify any individual victim, but established that they had all been wearing winter clothing. Many Soviet-manufactured bullets and cartridge cases were found in the graves. When trees in the area were later being machined in the sawmills, sparks flew all the time, caused by blades hitting the many ricocheting bullets that had become embedded in the trunks.2
After this purging of most Poles who might have resisted the Communist takeover of their country, Moscow finally agreed to ‘free elections’ in January 1947. At the time, the UB had only 228 officers in the provinces, running 8,194 informers, most of whom existed only on paper to justify the officers’ claims to have recruited anyone at all. The problem this in turn produced was that any failure of a factory to reach its imposed output norms was ascribed to ‘sabotage’ and strikes – unthinkable in the satellite states – and had to be immediately and punitively suppressed, which was not possible with the manpower available.3 One curious photograph of the time shows workers marching through the streets of an unidentified Polish town bearing a banner reading: State Wine and Juice Factory – We vote for improvement in the lives of workers, peasants and the working intelligentsia.4
At the Potsdam Conference, before he was replaced by Attlee, Churchill protested that, whereas the Soviet members of the Allied Control Commission had complete liberty to travel where they wanted in Italy, in Soviet-occupied areas the Western members of control commissions were harassed and followed everywhere and Western aircraft were deliberately delayed by Soviet air traffic controllers. Bolesław Bierut, Stalin’s puppet president, claimed to Churchill that Poland had twenty-three political parties, proving that the country was democratic. At the same time, Stanisław Mikołajczk, formerly prime minister of the London Poles, who had returned to his country in order to become one of two deputy prime ministers, told Foreign Secretary Eden that Bierut was setting up a one-party system, with Communist stooges infiltrated into all other parties, both to spy on them and to influence voting. He, meanwhile, had led a revival of his pre-war party Polski Stronnictwo Ludowe (PSL), known as ‘the peasants’ party’, which had formerly enjoyed majority support in Poland. According to Mikołajczk, if elections had been held a few weeks previously, the Communists would have got 20 per cent of the votes. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘they are so hated that they would not get more than 1 per cent in a free election.’5
Mikołajczk was probably exaggerating a little, but while the UB was still small in numbers at this stage, there were in Poland many thousands of NKVD troops who were particularly active in Poznan, Pomerania and especially Lublin against non-Communists. The Lublin government had other, less obvious advantages too. In his memoirs,6 Pavel Sudoplatov, who held a number of important positions in the KGB’s predecessors from 1939 until he fell from power after the death of Beria, alleges that Colonel František Muravec, intelligence chief of the London Poles, was actually an agent of the NKVD, passing on to Moscow all the confidential deliberations of the government-in-exile.7
In the January 1947 elections, many PSL candidates were prevented from campaigning. By the elections in 1948, a total of 32,477 non-Communist political activists had been sentenced by military courts for ‘crimes against the state’. Even then, the UB applied additional pressure by forcibly recruiting an alleged 47 per cent of the remainder as unpaid informers. After massaging of the election results by the Interior Ministry, the Poles had a parliament with 394 seats for the Communists and their allies, but only twenty-eight seats for the PSL – the reverse of what the PSL claimed was the true result. Mikołajczk immediately resigned from the government in protest and fled to Britain in order to avoid arrest. When Churchill met him in London, he is reported to have said, ‘I am surprised you made it out alive.’
In December 1948 the two main leftist parties merged into the Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza (PZPR) or Polish United Workers’ Party, under which label the Communists ruled Poland until 1989. Throughout these four decades, the powers of the MBP and the national and local offices of the UB to carry through the entire pseudo-judicial process, from arrest to trial and execution of sentence, entirely bypassed the legal system. At the height of its power, before the death of Stalin on 5 March 1953, it was calculated that there was one MBP or UB officer for every 800 citizens. The intensity of surveillance is epitomised in the stationing of a UB officer in every factory employing more than a handful of workers, so that unpaid informers could immediately report the slightest indiscretion by a workmate.
As though placing itself even higher above the law, in 1952 the UB established its ultra-high-security Tenth Department, whose duty was to keep under surveillance all PZPR members – including the leadership, with only two exceptions: Rokossowsky and Bierut, a graduate of the Comintern’s Lenin School. Tenth Department also provided any material required for the arrest of a party member or his demotion. To show that no one else was above their reach, in July 1951 Władisław Gomułka, deputy prime minister of the provisional government – who had been particularly active in arresting non-Communists – was himself arrested and imprisoned because he disagreed with the pro-Moscow apparatchiki in the government. His offence was formally designated ‘right-wing reactionary deviation’. The Catholic Church was another especial target of UB, which dedicated an entire department to it – the only one headed by a woman, Julia Brystygier. Her staff framed, arrested and frequently beat up priests and bishops, sometimes killing them. The most famous case internationally was the torture and execution by the UB of Catholic priest Jerzy Popiełuszko in 1984, but the organisation was also widely suspected of killing at least two more priests: Stefan Niedzielak and Roman Kotlarz, who died after a severe beating during interrogation. Even the Primate of Poland, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, was placed under ‘house arrest’ in a monastery.
But Poland had no friends and no international voices to be raised in its defence. In the London Victory Parade on 8 June 1946, not a single Free Polish serviceman was to be seen, lest it upset Stalin, although those who had fought in the RAF were invited. The shameful ruling tarnished the day. The Poles of the RAF honourably refused the invitation as a gesture of solidarity with their thousands of compatriots who had fought in British uniforms with a shoulder flash reading POLAND. Now no longer prime minister, Churchill tried to atone for his discarding of General Anders by telling Parliament how deeply he regretted the prohibition on the Poles’ participation, lamenting the situation in Poland, where the Lublin government dared not have free elections in the presence of international observers.
In January 1947 an allegedly free general election was held after non-Communist candidates and activists of PSL had been subjected to harassment, beatings and a few straightforward murders, to ensure they got the message. In some places, their lists of candidates were declared void. Polling day, 19 January, saw PZPR activists marching long columns of workers to the polling stations to vote for the party. The results were so blatantly falsified that many prominent PSL figures fled the country.8
Many of General Anders’ men who decided to return home after this last betrayal by Britain were arrested on setting foot in their homeland. Some were eventually released with a black mark against them for life that guaranteed they would have only menial jobs in Bierut’s Communist state. Others were murdered after interrogation at Warsaw’s Mokotów prison, and their bodies dumped naked in refuse pits or other unmarked graves.
Official records show that approximately 300,000 Poles were arrested in the immediate post-war years –
and this in a country that counted fewer than 24 million inhabitants in the 1946 census. Of those arrested, at least 5,000 were female. They included pregnant women and mothers of infant children. Mostly accused of spying for the West or plotting to overthrow the provisional government, they were more vulnerable to physical torture than male prisoners, and were also subjected to threats against their unborn or living children. After the women had been sentenced, their children were sometimes released into the care of relatives but were more often sent to state orphanages as part of the punishment; many were never traced after the mothers’ release.
Among the cases documented is that of Władisław Sliwinski, who met his wife, Myra, in Britain while he was serving as a fighter pilot in the RAF and she was in the WAAF. Ignorant of the real conditions there – as were most people in the West – they moved together to Poland in 1947. On 4 June 1948 they and their 6-month-old son, Stefan, were arrested in Warsaw as British spies. Since Myra had British citizenship, Władisław offered to divorce her so that she could return to her homeland but, despite being physically maltreated herself, she refused this in the belief that her presence in Poland might in some way protect him. To prove that it did not, he was executed on 15 June 1951, after which Myra was compelled to give up her 18-month-old son, sent to live with his paternal great-grandmother. When the old lady died, an elderly neighbour gave the child a home.