Those who carried out the massacres that summer had absorbed both Nazi and Soviet lessons, as one Polish teenager’s description of a mass execution in her village well illustrates. She, her sister, her two brothers, and her neighbors had been herded into a forest outside their Volhynian village and told not to move. What followed was tragically similar to many other mass executions that had taken place in the same region only a few months earlier:
I lay down as if to sleep. I had a large scarf, and I covered my head with it, in order to see nothing. The firing came closer, I waited for death. But then I heard that the firing is growing more distant again, and I haven’t been touched … [my sister and I] stood up, and looked at our brothers, aged 9 and 13, they had bullet wounds to the head. To this day I feel a weight on my conscience because I told them to take off their hats, maybe if they’d had their hats on they would have survived … [But then] where to go? We walked through the underbrush in the direction of Lubomal. We met an old Ukrainian lady with a girl. My sister started to ask if she would take us home with her, but she didn’t want to … Luckily the nearest house was locked and empty, we drank water from the trough and kept going. My life as a wanderer had begun.38
The Poles took revenge. A Polish partisan, Waldemar Lotnik, recalled one of the return attacks that took place that same summer: “They had killed seven men two nights previously; that night we killed sixteen of theirs, including an eight-year-old schoolboy … there were 300 of us in all and we met with no resistance and suffered no casualties. Most of us knew many of the people in Modryn, so we knew who was a Nazi supporter and who was a Ukrainian nationalist. We picked them out.” A week later, the Ukrainians retaliated, burned a village, raped all the women, and killed anyone unable to escape. The Poles retaliated again, this time in the company of men “so filled with hatred after losing whole generations of their family in the Ukrainian attacks that they swore that they would take an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and they were as good as their word.”39
Given this recent history, and given that it took time for the reality of the border changes to sink in, it isn’t surprising that both Poles and Ukrainians resisted deportation. Initially the Soviet and Polish sides both agreed that the population exchange would be strictly voluntary, and some on both sides willingly boarded trains to cross the border in the autumn of 1944. But winter came, the bulk of the Red Army moved west for the final battle for Berlin, and volunteers began to dry up. Polish Home Army partisans, believing that the USSR would soon be forced to hand back former Polish territories to Poland—surely another world war was about to break out—continued to conspire in western Ukraine through 1945. “The territory of Western Ukraine will not be kept by the Soviet Union, it was and will be Polish territory,” one Polish inhabitant told an NKVD informer. “America will never let the Soviet Union do that, because at the beginning of the war she declared that Poland would be the same as it was until 1939. And therefore it’s not worth moving [to Poland].”40
Faced with this refusal and aware of the continuing ethnic conflict, Stalin made his policy toward ethnic Poles in the formerly Polish districts of what was now the Soviet Republic of Ukraine harsher. Nikita Khrushchev, then the Ukrainian communist party secretary, wrote to Stalin in September 1944, proposing to close down all Polish schools and universities in western Ukraine, to ban all Polish textbooks, and to start rounding up Poles to work on industrial projects elsewhere in the USSR.41 As a result of these policies (as well as of America’s failure to come to the rescue, and the failure of the Third World War to break out) Poles finally did begin to board the transports heading west. Although the NKVD was still finding and arresting members of “White Polish” organizations on Soviet territory as late as February 1946, those seem to have been the last cells of open resistance.42 By October 1946, according to Soviet documents, 812,668 Poles had left Soviet Ukraine for Poland.43 In total, 1,496,000 Poles would leave the USSR for Poland, moving from Lithuania and Belarus as well as Ukraine.44
This was a major cultural shift: the Poles leaving Lithuania, western Belarus, and western Ukraine were abandoning towns and cities that had been Polish-speaking for centuries. Many were moving to towns and cities that had been German-speaking for centuries. The ancient Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów, now called L’viv, left behind its buildings and moved what remained of its books and professors to Breslau, now Wrocław, where it took up residence in what remained of that city’s equally ancient university. Peasants who had farmed the famously fertile “black earth” of Ukraine found themselves relocated to the much sandier soil of Silesia, which required complex machinery and different farming methods. Sometimes resettled Poles walked into German houses where the tea kettles were still sitting on the stoves or where the previous owners, like Countess Dönhoff, had not bothered to do the dishes after eating a final meal.
In due course the Polish government would develop an elaborate mythology about this “recovered land” (ziemie odzyskane, a phrase that sounds, in Polish, very much like “promised land,” ziemia obiecana) and about the Slavic kings who had ruled there in the Middle Ages. But in truth many of those who arrived in the “recovered land” felt like trespassers. Their first harvests failed, as they were unused to the new conditions. They resisted making investments, as they feared the Germans would return. The fact that Poles from all over Poland journeyed to the former German cities in 1945 and 1946 to steal whatever the Germans had left is indicative: it isn’t the way people treat a place that feels like home.
Ukrainians who found themselves on the western, Polish side of the new border were if anything even angrier and more resistant to moving. Having heard stories of the 1932–33 Ukrainian famine, engineered by Stalin in part to quell Ukrainian nationalism, most had no illusions about the Soviet regime. They didn’t want to go to Soviet Ukraine and some who did go there soon tried to return. Throughout 1945 and 1946, partisans from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, as well as the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (Orhanizatsiya Ukrayins’kykh Natsionalistiv, or OUN), attacked the repatriation offices, damaged the roads and train tracks meant to carry deportees, and even burned down villages where repatriated Poles had come from Poland to live.45
Polish communists fought back. In April 1945, the Rzeszów special operational group, including members from the militia, the police, the secret police, and the Polish army, embarked upon a plan of forced deportation, intending to “clean out” the Ukrainians from five Polish counties. Their efforts were embarrassingly unsuccessful. Local support for the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists was so strong that at one point Rzeszów’s leaders asked their secret police bosses for “extra reconnaissance planes.” Since they couldn’t catch Ukrainians on the ground, they thought they might do better spotting them from the air.46
By 1947, the Polish government was no longer interested in simple ethnic cleansing of the region. They faced a much more fundamental crisis: they had to preserve their own power in southeast Poland. Local administration was impossible, and in a few places the Ukrainian partisans had actually joined forces with the remnants of WiN, the Polish independence movement.47 In March, Ukrainian partisans provoked a crisis by murdering the Polish deputy defense minister, General Karol Świerczewski, following a battle with some 150 partisans who had been armed with artillery and machine guns. After that, the Polish communist newspapers practically boiled over with distinctly non-internationalist ethnic outrage, speaking of Ukrainian “hangmen,” “bandits,” “butchers,” and “foreign mercenaries,” accusing them of having murdered a gallant son of the Polish nation with “fascist bullets”48 (though Świerczewski was a long-standing Red Army officer, and one of the internal communiques about his death speaks of “informing his family in Moscow”).49
In the wake of that murder, the Polish regime finally mobilized itself to deport the Ukrainians, not to the Soviet Union—they might cause trouble there too—but to the formerly German lands in northern and western Pol
and. Trumpeting their intention to bring “security” to the eastern part of the country—a goal the majority of Poles surely approved of—at the end of April they launched Akcja Wisła, Operation Vistula, a major military operation involving five infantry divisions, 17,000 soldiers, 500 militia, sappers, pilots, and Interior Ministry troops. Militarized Soviet NKVD divisions and the Czechoslovak army provided support along the borders.50 By the end of July, this enormous force had finally succeeded in evicting some 140,000 Ukrainians from their homes, placing them in filthy boxcars, and resettling them in the north and the west of Poland. It was a bloody, angry process, every bit as bloody and angry as the killings in Volhynia three years earlier. One Ukrainian, a child at the time, remembers Polish soldiers breaking up his cousin’s wedding:
Suddenly the soldiers surrounded the house where the celebration was taking place, and set it alight with burning bombs. They killed the groom and several guests who couldn’t escape; they threw the bloodied corpses onto a cart which already held those they’d got in Zagrod. When they were about to leave, the bride suddenly appeared, in a white dress, with a veil. She begged for them to leave the body of her husband, Ivan. The soldiers laughed, tied her hands together with rope, tied her to the wagon and set off. The girl first ran, then fell, and was dragged through the dirt. The soldiers shot at her, and finally cut the rope and left her dead in the road.51
Without their support network among the Ukrainian peasantry, the Ukrainian partisans could no longer maintain their resistance. Those who weren’t killed were captured, interrogated, and often tortured at Jaworzno, another former Nazi camp that had until then been used to hold Germans (like many Nazi camps, it had a long life, and served many functions). The Ukrainians were dispersed all over Poland. In the 1990s, I once encountered a group of their descendants living near Ełk, in the Mazurian lake district. They no longer spoke much Ukrainian. Because the Polish authorities ruled that no town in the country could consist of more than 10 percent Ukrainians, they had slowly lost their language, their culture, and their distinctiveness.
A few weeks after the end of Operation Vistula, the Soviet Union launched a similarly brutal action on the adjoining territories in Soviet Ukraine. Within the span of a few days in October 1947, the Soviet secret police arrested 76,192 Ukrainians in western Ukraine and deported them to the Gulag.52 Several historians have speculated that the two operations were related. Both were intended to destroy forever the fiercely proud and tightly knit west Ukrainian community that had generated so much resistance to Poles and Russians alike. Operation Vistula ensured that any Soviet Ukrainians who escaped arrest could no longer use Poland as a safe haven.53 Both operations were popular. Polish peasants who had been tormented by Ukrainian partisans were delighted to see them gone—and grateful to the Soviet and Polish troops who had dispersed them.
Operation Vistula was a particularly brutal example of a population exchange within a single country but it wasn’t the only one. When the Czechoslovak government failed to get approval from the Allies, either at Potsdam or at the subsequent Paris Peace Conference, to deport Hungarians from Slovakia, they hit upon a similar solution. On paper, there would be no deportation of Hungarians from Slovakia, just a “voluntary” population exchange. To encourage these “voluntary” departures, Hungarians in Slovakia were deprived of citizenship, of the right to use their language in official places, and of the right to attend church services in Hungarian. Between 1945 and 1948, some 89,000 Hungarians were thus “persuaded” to leave Slovakia for the Sudetenland, where they replaced the missing Germans, or else to cross the border into Hungary itself. Some 70,000 Slovaks arrived from Hungary in their place.54
Not a word of protest was heard from outside the region. One Hungarian historian has declared that this was because “the fate of the Hungarian minority did not interest anyone.”55 But, in truth, the fate of none of the minorities interested anyone. The world hardly noticed the ethnic war between Poland and Ukraine, let alone Operation Vistula. Nor did it notice the 100,000 Hungarians who fled or were expelled from Romania, the 50,000 Ukrainians who left Czechoslovakia for Ukraine, or the 42,000 Czechs and Slovaks who returned from Ukraine to Czechoslovakia after the war.56
By 1950, not much remained of multiethnic Eastern Europe. Only nostalgia—Ukrainian nostalgia, Polish nostalgia, Hungarian nostalgia, German nostalgia—endured. In 1991, I went to visit a tiny hamlet near the town of Zablocko, in western Ukraine. It was occupied by a Ukrainian couple who in 1945 had been frightened by nightly visits from all kinds of partisans, frightened by the fighting and tired of war. Anxious for peace, they agreed to leave behind their beloved village on the river San, in eastern Poland. They piled all of their possessions onto a cart and trudged east. They eventually moved into a wooden house on top of a hill, until recently the property of a Polish family, and there they stayed. Half a century later, their granddaughter, who had never seen Poland, still pined to go there. Was it, she wanted to know, “as rich and beautiful as they say?”
In the end, most deported Germans went to Germany, Poles went to Poland, and Ukrainians could go to Soviet Ukraine. But the Jews of Eastern Europe, already displaced into hiding places, concentration camps, and exile, did not have an obvious homeland to which they could return in 1945. If they did return to their former homes, they found physical destruction, psychological devastation, and worse. Indeed, their postwar fate is impossible to comprehend without understanding that they returned to towns and villages that had been—and often still were—enveloped in ethnic, political, and criminal violence.
Accustomed to the idea that peace followed liberation, few Western Europeans find this easy to grasp. Nor is it easy to pick apart the myths and emotions that have wound themselves around the subject of the Jewish experience in postwar Eastern Europe in the years since. All of the postwar ethnic disputes are inflamed, from time to time, it is true, by contemporary politicians who want to use the past to influence the present. The associations of former expellees played a large and often awkward role in West German politics in the 1970s and 1980s, at times—including the critical moment of 1989—agitating for a change in the Polish-German border and for the return of their homes. The Poles and the Ukrainians occasionally squabble over the memory of the Ukrainian Revolutionary Army, whom the former remember as murderers and the latter now revere as freedom fighters. In 2008, Slovak-Hungarian tensions rose to the point that Hungarians, angered by the arrest of Hungarian activists in Slovakia, actually blocked several border crossings in protest.
Still, there is almost no greater emotional minefield than the history of the Jews in postwar Eastern Europe, and especially of the Jews in postwar Poland. The tangled relationship of the Eastern European Jews to Eastern European communism is a large part of it: some Jews played prominent roles in several of the postwar Eastern European communist parties and were thus perceived as beneficiaries of the new regimes, even though other Jews suffered at the hands of those same regimes. At times, Eastern Europeans and Jews have also engaged in a kind of competitive martyrology. The former resent the fact that the world knows about the Holocaust but not about their own suffering at the hands of both the Nazis and the Soviet Union. At times, the latter have interpreted any discussion of anyone’s wartime suffering other than their own as a denigration of their uniquely tragic experience. There have been arguments about money, property, guilt, and responsibility.
An example of how these emotions play out arose in the 1990s, when a prosecutor at what became the Polish Institute for National Remembrance set out to investigate the unusual case of Salomon Morel, who—all agree—was a Polish Jew and a communist partisan. From February until September of 1945, Morel was also the commandant of Zgoda, a labor camp for Germans in the Upper Silesian town of Świętochłowice, on the site of what had once been an auxiliary camp to Auschwitz. After that, he remained an employee of the Polish secret police, eventually becoming a colonel and the commander of a prison in Katowice. Morel emigrated to Israel in the ear
ly 1990s.
Almost everything else about Morel remains in dispute. According to Polish investigators and prosecutors, Morel joined the Polish security police immediately after the war. He worked first in the prison of Lublin castle, where he assisted in the interrogation of Polish Home Army leaders. He was then transferred to Zgoda. During his tenure there, he became known for his cruelty to the mostly German prisoners, including women and children. He deprived them of food, allowed hygiene to deteriorate, tortured them for pleasure, and sometimes beat them to death. As a result of the poor conditions, a typhus epidemic swept the camp in the summer and some 1,800 prisoners died. According to archival documents, Morel was held responsible for the epidemic by the Interior Ministry, put under house arrest for three days, and deprived of a part of his salary.
In 2005, a Polish prosecutor, having decided Morel was guilty of war crimes, sent an extradition request—one of several—to the State of Israel, where Morel then lived. The prosecutor received, in response, a furious letter from the Israeli Ministry of Justice. Morel, the Israeli letter declared, was not a war criminal but one of the war’s victims. He had witnessed the murder of his parents, brother, and sister-in-law at the hands of a Polish police officer during the war. His older brother was murdered by what the letter calls “a Polish fascist.” According to the Israeli ministry official, the camp at Świętochłowice, when he ran it, contained no more than 600 prisoners, all of whom were former Nazis. Sanitary conditions were satisfactory. The Israeli official’s judgment was not motivated by facts but by emotions: Morel, he declared, had suffered from “crimes of genocide committed by the Nazis and their Polish collaborators,” the case against him was motivated by Polish anti-Semitism, and he would not be extradited.57
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