With calculation, classification, and practiced violence, the Soviets could force Poles into a system that already existed. After a few weeks of chaos, they had extended their state westward, and dispensed with the most dangerous of possible opponents. In the western half of Poland, west of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, the Germans could take no such approach. Hitler had enlarged his Reich very recently, into Austria and Czechoslovakia, but never into territories populated by quite so many non-Germans. Unlike the Soviets, the Nazis could not even claim to be bringing justice and equality to oppressed peoples or classes. Everyone knew that Nazi Germany was for the Germans, and the Germans did not bother to pretend otherwise.
The premise of National Socialism was that Germans were a superior race, a presumption that, when confronted by the evidence of Polish civilization, the Nazis had to prove, at least to themselves. In the ancient Polish city of Cracow, the entire professoriate of the renowned university was sent to concentration camps. The statue of Adam Mickiewicz, the great romantic poet, was pulled down from its pedestal on the Market Square, which was renamed Adolf-Hitler-Platz. Such actions were symbolic as well as practical. The university at Cracow was older than any university in Germany. Mickiewicz had been respected by the Europeans of his day as much as Goethe. The existence of such an institution and such a history, like the presence of the Polish educated classes as such, was a barrier to German plans, but also a problem for Nazi ideology.29
Polishness itself was to disappear from these lands, to be replaced by “Germandom.” As Hitler had written, Germany “must seal off these alien racial elements, so that the blood of its people will not be corrupted again, or it must without further ado remove them and hand over the vacated territory to its own national comrades.” In early October 1939, Hitler conferred a new responsibility upon Heinrich Himmler. Already the leader of the SS and the chief of the German police forces, Himmler now became the “Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of Germandom,” a kind of minister for racial affairs. In the regions that Germany annexed from Poland, Himmler was to remove the native population and replace it with Germans.30
Although Himmler embraced the project with enthusiasm, it was a difficult assignment. These were Polish territories. There had not been a large German minority in independent Poland. When the Soviets said that they were entering eastern Poland to defend Ukrainians and Belarusians, this had at least a demographic plausibility: there were about six million such people in Poland. There were, by contrast, fewer than a million Germans. In Germany’s newly annexed territories, Poles outnumbered Germans by about fifteen to one.31
By now Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had mastered the German press, so Germans (and those who believed their propaganda) had the impression that there were massive numbers of Germans in western Poland, and that they had been subject to horrible repressions. The reality was quite different. It was not just that the nine million or so Poles massively outnumbered the Germans in the new districts of the Reich. Hitler had just added significantly more Jews (at least 600,000) to his Reich than he had added Germans, and for that matter nearly tripled the population of Jews in Germany (from about 330,000 to nearly a million). If the General Government (with its 1,560,000 Jews) was included, he had added well over two million Jews to Berlin’s dominions. There were more Jews in the city of Łódź (233,000), which was added to Germany, than in Berlin (82,788) and Vienna (91,480) combined. There were more Jews in Warsaw, now in the General Government, than there had been in all of Germany. Hitler had added more Poles to the Reich in this annexation than he had added Germans in this and all previous annexations, including Austria and the border regions of Czechoslovakia. Taking into account the General Government and the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia annexed from dissembled Czechoslovakia, Hitler had added about twenty million Poles, six million Czechs, and two million Jews to his empire. There were now more Slavs in Germany than in any other European state, except the Soviet Union. On a crusade for racial purity, Germany had become by the end of 1939 Europe’s second-largest multinational state. The largest, of course, was the Soviet Union.32
Arthur Greiser, placed in charge of the largest of Germany’s new regions, known as the Reichsgau Wartheland, was particularly receptive to the idea of “strengthening Germandom.” His province extended west to east from the major Polish city Poznań to the major Polish city Łódź. It was home to about four million Poles, 366,000 Jews, and 327,000 Germans. Himmler proposed to deport one million people by February 1940, including all of the Jews and several hundred thousand Poles. Greiser began the project of “strengthening Germandom” by emptying three psychiatric hospitals and having the patients shot. Patients from a fourth psychiatric hospital, at Owińska, met a different fate. They were taken to the local Gestapo headquarters in October and November 1939 and gassed by carbon monoxide released from canisters. This was the first German mass murder by this method. Some 7,700 Polish citizens found in mental institutions were murdered, beginning a policy of “euthanasia” that would soon be followed within the boundaries of prewar Germany as well. Over the course of the next two years, more than seventy thousand German citizens would be gassed as “life unfit for life.” Strengthening Germandom had an internal and an external dimension; aggressive war abroad allowed for the murder of German citizens. So it began and so it would continue.33
The goal of removing the Jews from Germany clashed with another ideological priority, that of resettling Germans from the Soviet Union. Once the Soviet Union had extended its borders west by taking eastern Poland, Hitler had to be concerned about the Germans (formerly Polish citizens) who then fell under Soviet rule. Hitler arranged for these people to be sent to Germany. They would live in the Wartheland, on the homesteads vacated by deported Poles. But this meant that Polish farmers, rather than Jews, had to be deported in the first instance, to make room for these incoming Germans. But even if Jews were allowed, for the time being, to remain in their homes, they faced enormous suffering and humiliation. In Kozienice, Orthodox Jews were forced to dance next to a pile of burning books and chant that “the war is our fault.” In Łowicz on 7 November 1939, the entire male Jewish population was forced to march to the prison, to be ransomed by the Jewish community.34
In the first deportation from the Wartheland to the General Government, carried out from 1-17 December 1939, the vast majority of the 87,883 people expelled were Poles. The police chose in the first instance Poles who “represent an immediate danger to German nationhood.” In a second deportation, carried out between 10 February and 15 March 1940, another 40,128 people were sent away, again most of them Poles. The journey was rather short. In normal times, the journey from Poznań, the capital city of the Wartheland, to Warsaw, the largest city of the General Government, would take a few hours. Nevertheless, thousands of people froze to death on the trains, which were often left idle on side tracks for days. Commented Himmler: “It’s just the climate there.” The weather in Poland, needless to say, was essentially the same as the weather in Germany.35
The winter of 1939-1940 in Poland and Germany was unusually cold. The winter in Ukraine, Russia, and northern Kazakhstan was even colder. As the days shortened in the Soviet special settlements, thousands of Polish citizens fell ill and died. In the three camps in Soviet Russia and Soviet Ukraine where the Soviets held the Polish prisoners of war, the men followed their own political and religious calendar. In Kozelsk, Ostashkov, and Starobilsk, people found ways to commemorate the 11th of November, Polish independence day. In all three camps, the men planned to celebrate Christmas Day. These prisoners were generally Roman Catholics, with a considerable admixture of Jews, Protestants, Orthodox Christians, and Greek Catholics. They found themselves in desecrated Orthodox monastic complexes, praying or taking communion in quiet corners of crumbling cathedrals.36
The prisoners saw the signs of what had happened to the Orthodox monks and the nuns during the Bolshevik Revolution: skeletons in shallow graves, outlines of human bodies traced
in bullets against the walls. One prisoner at Starobilsk could not help but notice the clouds of black ravens that never seemed to leave the monastery. Nevertheless, prayer seemed to bring hope, and the people of various faiths worshipped together—until 24 December 1939, when the priests, pastors, and rabbis were taken away, from all three camps, never to be seen again.37
The three camps were a sort of laboratory for observing the behavior of the Polish educated classes. Kozelsk, Ostashkov, and Starobilsk became Polish in appearance. The prisoners had no other clothes but their army uniforms, with white eagles on their caps. Needless to say, no one wore that particular emblem in public in the former eastern Poland, where the public space was now graced by the hammer, sickle, and red star. Even as Polish universities were closed on the German side or made Ukrainian and Russian on the Soviet, camp inmates organized lectures led by the prominent Polish scientists and humanists who were among the reserve officers. Officers organized modest credit unions, so that poorer officers could borrow from richer. They declaimed by heart the poetry that they had learned at school. Some of them could recite from memory the massively long novels from the period of Polish realism. Of course, the prisoners also disagreed, fought, and stole. And a few people—as it turned out, a very few—agreed to cooperate with the Soviets. The officers disagreed about how to comport themselves during the long nighttime interrogations. Yet the spirit of national solidarity was palpable, perhaps to the Soviets as well.38
The men were nevertheless lonely. They could write to their families, but could not discuss their situation. Knowing that the NKVD read everything they wrote, they had to be discreet. One prisoner at Kozelsk, Dobiesław Jakubowicz, entrusted to his diary the letters he wished to write to his wife, his dreams of watching her dress, and of playing with their daughter. The prisoners had to give a sanatorium as their return address, which led to much painful confusion.39
The prisoners befriended the dogs who served as sentries, and the dogs from nearby towns. Dogs would visit the camps, entering through the gate past the guards or through holes in or under the barbed-wire fences too small for a man. One of the reserve officers at Starobilsk was Maksymilian Łabędź, the most famous veterinarian in Warsaw. An older gentleman, he had barely survived the transport. He looked after the dogs, and occasionally even performed surgeries. His special pet was a mutt that the officers called Linek, which was short for Stalinek—“Little Stalin” in Polish. The favorite among the dogs that visited was called Foch, after the French general who was supreme commander of the allied armies that defeated Germany in 1918. This was a time, in late 1939 and early 1940, when a Polish government in exile had established itself in Paris, and when Poles generally hoped that France could defeat Germany and rescue Poland. They attached their own hopes for contact with the outside world to the little dog Foch, who seemed to have a home in town. They would tuck notes under his collar, hoping for a response. One day, in March 1940, they got one: “People say that soon you’ll be released from Starobilsk. People say that you’ll go home. We don’t know if that’s true.”40
It was not true. That month in Moscow, Stalin’s secret police chief Lavrenty Beria had come to a conclusion, perhaps inspired by Stalin. Beria made clear in writing that he wanted the Polish prisoners of war dead. In a proposal to the politburo, and thus really to Stalin, Beria wrote on 5 March 1940 that each of the Polish prisoners was “just waiting to be released in order to enter actively into the battle against Soviet power.” He claimed that counterrevolutionary organizations in the new Soviet territories were led by former officers. Unlike the claims about the “Polish Military Organization” a couple of years before, this was no fantasy. The Soviet Union had occupied and annexed half of Poland, and some Poles were bound to resist. Perhaps twenty-five thousand of them took part in some kind of resistance organization in 1940. True, these organizations were quickly penetrated by the NKVD, and most of these people arrested: but the opposition was real and demonstrable. Beria used the reality of Polish resistance to justify his proposal for the prisoners—“to apply to them the supreme punishment: shooting.”41
Stalin approved Beria’s recommendation, and the mechanisms of the Great Terror began again. Beria established a special troika to deal rapidly with the files of all of the Polish prisoners of war. It was empowered to disregard the recommendations of the previous interrogators, and to issue verdicts without any contact with the prisoners themselves. It seems that Beria established a quota for the killings, as had been done in 1937 and 1938: all of the prisoners at the three camps, plus six thousand people held in prisons in western Belarus and western Ukraine (three thousand in each), plus especially dangerous elements among noncommissioned officers who were not in captivity. After a quick examination of the files, ninety-seven percent of the Poles in the three camps, about 14,587 people, were sentenced to death. The exceptions were a few Soviet agents, people of ethnic German or Latvian background, and people with foreign protection. The six thousand from the prisons were also condemned to death, along with 1,305 other people who were arrested in April.42
The prisoners of the three camps were expecting that they would be allowed to return home. When, in April 1940, the first groups were taken from the camp at Kozelsk, there were given a farewell reception by their comrades. Fellow officers formed, as best as they could without their weapons, an honor guard as they walked to the buses. In groups of a few hundred at a time, the prisoners were taken by rail through Smolensk to the smaller station at Gniazdovo. There they found themselves disembarking from the train into a cordon of NKVD soldiers with bayonets fixed. About thirty of them at a time entered a bus, which took them to the Goat Hills, at the edge of a forest called Katyn. There, at an NKVD resort, they were searched and their valuables taken. One officer, Adam Solski, had been keeping a diary up to this moment: “They asked about my wedding ring, which I. . . . ” The prisoners were taken into a building on the complex, where they were shot. Their bodies were then delivered, probably by truck in batches of thirty, to a mass grave that had been dug in the forest. This continued until all 4,410 prisoners sent from Kozelsk had been shot.43
At Ostashkov, a band played as the prisoners left the camp, to lift their spirits. They were taken by train, in groups of about 250-500, to the NKVD prison at Kalinin (today Tver). All were held briefly while their data were checked. They waited, not knowing what would come next, probably not suspecting until the very last moment. An NKVD officer asked one of the waiting prisoners, alone then with his captors, how old he was. The boy was smiling. “Eighteen.” What did you do? Still smiling. “Telephone operator.” How long had you worked? The boy counted on his hands. “Six months.” Then he, like all of the 6,314 prisoners who passed through this room, was handcuffed and led to a soundproofed cell. Two men held him by the arms as a third shot him from behind in the base of the skull.44
The chief executioner at Kalinin, whom the prisoners never saw, was Vasily Blokhin. He had been one of the main killers during the Great Terror, when he had commanded an execution squad in Moscow. He had been entrusted with some of the executions of high-profile defendants of show trials, but had also shot thousands of workers and peasants who were killed entirely in secret. At Kalinin he wore a leather cap, apron, and long gloves to keep the blood and gore from himself and his uniform. Using German pistols, he shot, each night, about two hundred and fifty men, one after another. Then the bodies were driven, in a truck, to nearby Mednoe, where the NKVD had some summer houses. They were thrown into a large pit dug earlier by a backhoe.45
From the camp at Starobilsk, the prisoners made the trip by rail, a hundred or two hundred at a time, to Kharkiv, where they were held at the NKVD prison. Though they could not have known this, they had been brought to one of the main killing centers of Poles in the Soviet Union. Now it was their turn, and they went to their deaths ignorant of the past, ignorant of what was happening to their comrades in other camps, ignorant of what would happen to them. After a day or so in prison they were tak
en to a room where their details were checked. Then they were led to another room, this one dark and without windows. A guard would ask “May I?” and then lead in the prisoner. As one of the NKVD men remembered, “there was a clack, and that was the end.” The bodies were piled onto trucks. Jackets were pulled over the heads of the corpses so that the truck platform would not be stained by the blood. The bodies were loaded head first, then feet first, so they would stack.46
In this way 3,739 prisoners of Starobilsk were killed, including all of Józef Czapski’s friends and acquaintances: the botanist whom he remembered for his calm, but also an economist who tried to hide his fears from his pregnant wife, a doctor who was known in Warsaw for visiting cafés and supporting artists, the lieutenant who recited plays and novels by heart, the lawyer who was an enthusiast for a European federation, all the engineers, teachers, poets, social workers, journalists, surgeons, and soldiers. But not Czapski himself. He, like a few others from each of the three camps, was sent on to another camp, and survived.47
Fyodor Dostoevsky had set a crucial scene of The Brothers Karamazov at the Optyn Hermitage in Kozelsk, which in 1939 and 1940 became the site of the Soviet prisoner-of-war camp. Here took place the most famous exchange in the book: a discussion between a young nobleman and a monastery elder about the possibility of morality without God. If God is dead, is everything permitted? In 1940, the real building where this fictional conversation took place, the former residence of some of the monks, housed the NKVD interrogators. They represented a Soviet answer to that question: only the death of God allowed for the liberation of humanity. Unconsciously, many of the Polish officers provided a different answer: that in a place where everything is permitted, God is a refuge. They saw their camps as churches, and prayed in them. Many of them attended Easter services before they were dispatched to their deaths.48
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