Bloodlands

by Timothy Snyder

  Poland never surrendered, but hostilities came to an end on 6 October 1939. Even as the Germans established their civilian occupation authorities that autumn, the Wehrmacht continued to kill Polish citizens in large numbers in quite arbitrary reprisal actions. In December, after two German soldiers were killed by known Polish criminals, the Germans machine-gunned 114 men who had nothing to do with the incident. In January the Germans shot 255 Jews in Warsaw after the Jewish community had failed to turn over someone whom the Germans, judging by his last name, thought to be Jewish. The person in question had nothing to do with the Jewish community.8

  German soldiers had been instructed to regard the Jews as eastern barbarians, and in Poland they did encounter something that they never would have seen in Germany: large communities of religious Jews. Though Hitler raged on about the destructive role of Jews in German society, the Jews were an extremely small proportion of the German population. Among the German citizens defined by the Nuremberg laws as Jewish, most were secular, and many did not identify strongly with the Jewish community. Jews in Germany were highly assimilated, and very often married non-Jews. For historical reasons, Jewish life in Poland was very different. Jews had been expelled from Germany in the late middle ages, as they had been from most of central and western Europe. Poland had been for centuries a haven for Jews, and became and remained the center of European Jewish settlement. In 1939 about ten percent of the Polish population were Jews, and most of these were religiously observant and traditional in dress and custom. They generally spoke Yiddish, which Germans tended to hear as a deformed version of their own language. In Warsaw and Łódź, the most important Jewish cities in Poland, Jews were about one third of the population.

  Judging by their correspondence, German officers and soldiers saw Polish Jews as living stereotypes rather than as human beings, a special blight on an already benighted Polish land. Germans wrote to their wives and girlfriends to describe an inhuman assemblage of disorder and filth. In their image of Poland, everything that was beautiful was the work of previous German settlers, while everything ugly was the result of Jewish corruption and Polish laziness. Germans seemed to feel an uncontrollable urge to neaten the appearance of the Jews. Again and again, soldiers would surround Jewish men and shave their sidecurls, while others would laugh and take photographs. They would also rape Jewish women, casually, as though this were not an offense for which they could be punished. When they were caught, they were reminded of German laws against racial mixing.9

  In the town of Solec, Jews were taken as hostages and locked in a cellar. After an escape attempt, soldiers threw grenades into the cellar, killing everyone. In Rawa Mazowiecka, a German soldier asked a Jewish boy for some water. When the boy ran away, the soldier took aim and shot. He hit one of his own comrades instead. The Germans then gathered hundreds of people in the town square and killed them. In Dynów, some two hundred Jews were machine-gunned one night in mid-September. In all, Jews were about seven thousand of the forty-five thousand or so Polish civilians killed by the Germans by the end of 1939, somewhat more than the Jewish share of the Polish population.10

  Even more than a Polish soldier, a Jewish soldier posed a problem for the Nazi worldview in which German soldiers and officers had been indoctrinated. Jews had been purged from the German armed forces since 1935. Yet Polish Jews, like all male Polish citizens, were subject to military service in the Polish Army. Jews, especially Jewish doctors, were well represented among officers. Germans separated Jews from their units and sent them to special punitive labor camps.

  Germany had all but won the war by the time the Soviets entered it on 17 September. On that day the German air force was bombing Lwów (today Lviv), the most important Polish city in the southeast, as the Red Army approached it. The crossing of half a million Soviet soldiers into Poland had elicited both fear and hope. Poles wanted to believe that the Soviets had come to fight the Germans. Some confused Polish soldiers, driven eastward by the German attack, could believe for a moment that they had found allies. The Polish armed forces were desperate for support. 11

  The Soviets claimed that their intervention was necessary because the Polish state had ceased to exist. Since Poland could no longer protect its own citizens, went the argument, the Red Army had to enter the country on a peacekeeping mission. Poland’s large Ukrainian and Belarusian minorities, went the Soviet propaganda, were in particular need of rescue. Yet despite the rhetoric the Soviet officers and soldiers were prepared for war, and fought one. The Red Army disarmed Polish units, and engaged them wherever necessary. Half a million men had crossed a frontier that was no longer defended, to fight an enemy that was all but defeated. Soviet soldiers would meet German soldiers, demarcate the border, and, in one instance, stage a joint victory march. Stalin spoke of an alliance with Germany “cemented in blood.” It was mainly the blood of Polish soldiers, more than sixty thousand of whom died in combat.12

  In cities like Lwów where both the Wehrmacht and the Red Army were nearby, Polish soldiers had a difficult choice: to whom should they surrender? The Soviet military promised them safe passage back home after a brief interview. Nikita Khrushchev, who had accompanied the Soviet soldiers, repeated the assurance. The artist Józef Czapski, a Polish reserve officer, was among those who were betrayed by this lie. His unit had been beaten back by the Germans, and then surrounded by Soviet armor. He and his men were promised that they would be taken to Lwów and released there. Instead, they were all packed into trucks on the city’s market square. Tearful women threw them cigarettes. A young Jewish man bought apples from a stand and tossed them to the prisoners in the truck. Near the post office, women took the notes that the soldiers had written for their families. The prisoners were taken to the train station, and sent east.13

  As they crossed the Soviet border they had the feeling of entering, as Czapski recalled, “another world.” Czapski sat with a botanist friend, another reserve officer, who marveled at the tall grasses of the Ukrainian steppe. In another train, Polish farmers looked through the cracks at Soviet collective farms, and shook their heads in distress at the disorder and neglect they saw. At a stop in Kiev, the capital of Soviet Ukraine, Polish officers met an unexpected reception. Ukrainians were saddened to see Polish officers under Soviet guard. Some of them, it seems, still believed that it would be the Polish Army that would liberate Ukraine from Stalin. Instead, about fifteen thousand Polish officers were taken to three Soviet prison camps, run by the NKVD: one in the eastern part of Soviet Ukraine, in Starobilsk, and two more in Soviet Russia, at Kozelsk and Ostashkov.14

  The removal of these men—and all but one of them were men—was a kind of decapitation of Polish society. The Soviets took more than one hundred thousand prisoners of war, but released the men and kept only the officers. More than two thirds of these officers came from the reserves. Like Czapski and his botanist companion, these reserve officers were educated professionals and intellectuals, not military men. Thousands of doctors, lawyers, scientists, professors, and politicians were thus removed from Poland.15

  Meanwhile, Soviet occupying forces in eastern Poland placed the lower orders of society in the vacated heights. Prisons were emptied, and political prisoners, usually communists, were put in charge of local government. Soviet agitators urged peasants to take revenge on landlords. Though most people resisted the call to criminality, chaos reigned as thousands did not. Mass murders with axes were suddenly frequent. One man was tied to a stake, then had some of his skin peeled off and his wound salted before being forced to watch the execution of his family. Usually the Red Army behaved well, though sometimes soldiers joined in the violence, as when a pair killed a local official and then took his gold teeth.16

  In the background, the NKVD entered the country, in force. In the twenty-one months to come it made more arrests in occupied eastern Poland than in the entire Soviet Union, seizing some 109,400 Polish citizens. The typical sentence was eight years in the Gulag; about 8,513 people were sentenced to death.1
7

  West of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, where Germany ruled, methods were even less subtle. Now that the Wehrmacht had defeated a foreign army, the methods of the SS could be tried against an alien population.

  The tool of persecution, the Einsatzgruppe, was the creation of Heinrich Himmler’s right-hand man, Reinhard Heydrich. The Einsatzgruppen were special task forces led by Security Police and including other policemen, whose apparent mission was to pacify the rear areas after military expansion. As of 1939 they were subordinate to Heydrich’s Reich Security Main Office, which united the Security Police (a state institution) with the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD (the intelligence service of the SS, a Nazi party institution). Einsatzgruppen had been deployed in Austria and Czechoslovakia, but met little resistance in these countries and had no special mission to kill selected groups. It was in Poland that the Einsatzgruppen were to fulfill their mission as “ideological soldiers” by eliminating the educated classes of a defeated enemy. (They were in some sense killing their peers: fifteen of the twenty-five Einsatzgruppe and Einsatzkommando commanders had doctorates.) In Operation Tannenberg, Heydrich wanted the Einsatzgruppen to render “the upper levels of society” harmless by murdering sixty-one thousand Polish citizens. As Hitler put it, “only a nation whose upper levels are destroyed can be pushed into the ranks of slavery.” The ultimate goal of this decapitation project was to “destroy Poland” as a functioning society. By killing the most accomplished Poles, the Einsatzgruppen were to make Poland resemble the German racist fantasy of the country, and leave the society incapable of resisting German rule.18

  The Einsatzgruppen approached their task with murderous energy, but lacked the experience and thus the skills of the NKVD. They killed civilians, to be sure, often under the cover of retaliatory operations against supposed partisans. In Bydgoszcz the Einsatzgruppen killed about nine hundred Poles. In Katowice they killed another 750 in a courtyard, many of them women and girls. All in all, the Einsatzgruppen probably killed about fifty thousand Polish citizens in actions that had nothing to do with combat. But these were not, it seems, the first fifty thousand on their list of sixty-one thousand. They were very often groups selected on the spur of the moment. Unlike the NKVD, the Einsatzgruppen did not follow protocols carefully, and in Poland they did not keep careful records of the people they killed.19

  The Einsatzgruppen were more successful in missions against Jews, which required much less discrimination. One Einsatzgruppe was tasked with terrorizing Jews so that they would flee east from the German occupation zone to the Soviet side. As much of this as possible was to be accomplished in September 1939, while military operations were still taking place. So in Będzin, for example, this Einsatzgruppe burned down the synagogue with flamethrowers, killing about five hundred Jews in two days. Einsatzkommandos (smaller detachments) fulfilled similar missions. In the city of Chełm one of them was tasked to rob wealthy Jews. The Germans carried out strip-searches of women who looked Jewish on the street, and cavity searches in private. They broke fingers to get at wedding rings. In Przemyśl between the sixteenth and the nineteenth of September Einsatzkommandos shot at least five hundred Jews. As a result of such actions, hundreds of thousands of Jews fled to the Soviet occupation zone. In the vicinity of the city of Lublin more than twenty thousand Jews were simply expelled.20

  After the conquest of Poland was complete, the Germans and their Soviet allies met once again to reassess their relations. On 28 September 1939, the day Warsaw fell to the Germans, the allies signed their treaty on borders and friendship, which changed the zones of influence somewhat. It assigned Warsaw to the Germans and Lithuania to the Soviets. (It is this border that appears on the maps as the “Molotov-Ribbentrop line.”) It also obliged the two sides to suppress any Polish resistance to the regime of the other. On 4 October Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to a further protocol, defining their new common border. Poland had ceased to exist.

  A few days later Germany formally annexed some of the territories in its zone, leaving the rest as a colony known as the General Government. This was to be a dumping ground for unwanted people, Poles and Jews. Hitler thought that Jews could be held in some eastern district in a kind of “nature preserve.” The general governor, Hitler’s former lawyer Hans Frank, clarified the position of the subject population in two orders issued in late October 1939. One specified that order was to be maintained by the German police; the other, that the German police had the authority to issue a death sentence to any Pole who did anything that might appear to be against the interests of Germany or Germans. Frank believed that Poles would soon realize the “hopelessness of their national fate” and accept the leadership of the Germans.21

  East of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, the Soviets were extending their own system. Moscow enlarged its Ukrainian and Belarusian republics to the west, forcing their new populations, the residents of what had been eastern Poland, to participate in the annexation of their own homeland. When the Red Army entered Poland, it presented Soviet power as the great liberator of the national minorities from Polish rule, and the great supporter of the peasants against their masters. In eastern Poland, the population was about forty-three percent Polish, thirty-three percent Ukrainian, and eight percent each Jewish and Belarusian, with a small number of Czechs, Germans, Russians, Roma, Tatars, and others. But now everyone from every nation and every class would have to express a ritualized support of the new order. On 22 October 1939, all adults in what the Soviets called “Western Belarus” and “Western Ukraine” had to vote in elections to two assemblies, whose provisional character was revealed by their one legislative undertaking: to request that the lands of eastern Poland be incorporated by the Soviet Union. By 15 November, the formalities of annexation were complete.22

  The Soviet Union was bringing its own institutions and practices to eastern Poland. Everyone now had to register for an internal passport, which meant that the state had a record of all of its new citizens. With the registration of citizens came the military draft: some 150,000 young men (Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Jews) soon found themselves in the Red Army. Registration also allowed for the smooth pursuit of a major Soviet social policy: deportation.23

  On 4 December 1939 the Soviet politburo ordered the NKVD to arrange the expulsion of certain groups of Polish citizens deemed to pose a danger to the new order: military veterans, foresters, civil servants, policemen, and their families. Then, on one evening in February 1940, in temperatures of about forty below zero, the NKVD gathered them all: 139,794 people taken from their homes at night at gunpoint to unequipped freight trains bound for special settlements in distant Soviet Kazakhstan or Siberia. The entire course of life was changed before people knew what had happened to them. The special settlements, part of the Gulag system, were the forced-labor zones to which the kulaks had been sent ten years before.24

  Because the NKVD defined family very expansively, the trains were full of aged parents as well as the children of people who were thought to be dangerous. At halts on the journey east, guards would go from car to car, asking if there were any more dead children. Wiesław Adamczyk, an eleven-year-old child at the time, asked his mother if the Soviets were taking them to hell. Food and water were given very irregularly, and the cattle cars were without facilities and extremely cold. As time passed, the children learned to lick the frost from metal nails, and watched as the elderly began to freeze to death. Now the adult dead would be taken out and thrown into a hastily dug mass grave. Another boy looked out and tried to remember them, writing later that even as the dead disappeared, “in our thoughts remained their dreams and their wishes.”25

  During the passage alone, some five thousand people would die; about eleven thousand more would perish by the following summer. One little Polish girl in a Siberian school described what happened to her family: “My brother got sick and in a week died from hunger. We buried him in a hill on the Siberian steppe. Mom from worry also got sick from hunger swelled up and lay in the barrack for
two months. They didn’t want to take her to the hospital until it was the end. Then they took her mama lay in the hospital for two weeks. Then her life ended. When we learned this we were seized by a great despair. We went to the burial twenty-five kilometers away we went to the hill. You could hear the sound of the Siberian forest where two of my family were left.”26

  Even more than the kulaks who had preceded them, these Poles were alien and helpless in central Asia or the Russian north. They usually did not speak Russian, let alone Kazakh. The locals, especially in central Asia, saw them as one more imposition coming from the center. “The natives,” as one Pole recalled Kazakhstan, “spoke little Russian and greatly resented the whole arrangement and the new mouths to feed; and would at first sell us nothing, nor help in any way.” Poles could not have known that a third of the population of Kazakhstan had starved to death only a decade before. One Polish father of four was murdered for his boots on a collective farm. Another father died of starvation in Siberia. As his son remembered, “He swelled up. They wrapped him in a sheet and threw him in the ground.” A third father died of typhus in Vologda, the north Russian city of death. His son, age twelve, had already learned a kind of philosophy: “A man is born once and dies only once. And so it happened.”27

  Deported Polish citizens had probably never heard the Russian word kulak before, but now they were discovering its history. In one Siberian settlement Poles found the skeletons of kulaks deported in the 1930s. In another, a sixteen-year-old Pole realized that the foreman at his work camp was a kulak. “He told me frankly,” the boy remembered, “what was in his heart”: faith in God. Because Poles were thought to be Roman Catholics and thus Christian believers, their presence elicited such confessions of faith from Ukrainians and Russians. But even in the distant east the Soviet authorities reacted with great hostility to any sign of Polishness. A Polish boy who came to town to sell his clothes for food met a policeman who struck the cap from his head. The cap had a white eagle, the symbol of the Polish state. The policemen would not let the boy pick it up from the ground. As Soviet journalists kept writing and teachers kept saying, Poland had fallen and would never rise again.28