The prisoners in the three camps, or at least many of them, guessed that they were being filtered, selected for some role that they might play in the Soviet Union. They had little or no idea, however, that when they failed this test they would be killed. They knew nothing of the Polish operation of the Great Terror, in which tens of thousands of Soviet Poles had been shot only two years before. Even had they understood the stakes, it seems hard to imagine that very many of them could have demonstrated any sort of believable loyalty to the Soviets. In the camps they had to see Soviet newspapers, watch Soviet propaganda films, and listen to Soviet news broadcasts over loudspeakers. They generally found it all ridiculous, and insulting. Even those who informed on their comrades found the system absurd.49
The two cultures did not communicate well, at least not without some obvious shared interest. During this period, when Stalin was Hitler’s ally, no such common ground could easily be imagined. The possibilities for misunderstanding, on the other hand, were enormous. Collectivization and industrialization had modernized the Soviet Union, but without the attention to the population, or rather to consumers, that characterized the capitalist West. The Soviet citizens who ruled eastern Poland were falling off bicycles, eating toothpaste, using toilets as sinks, wearing multiple watches, or bras as earmuffs, or lingerie as evening gowns. Polish prisoners were also ignorant, and about more fundamental matters. Unlike Soviet citizens in their position, the Poles believed that they could not be sentenced or killed without a legal basis. It was a sign of the great civilizational transformation of Stalinism that these Soviet and Polish citizens, many of whom had been born in the same Russian Empire, now understood each other so poorly.
The chief interrogator at Kozelsk, the man who inherited the residence of Dostoevsky’s monastic elder, put this delicately: it was a matter of “two divergent philosophies.” In the end, the Soviets could extend and enforce theirs. Jokes at the expense of the Soviets in eastern Poland could be answered with the easy retort: what is the country called now? The Poles in the camps would not be made to fit Soviet civilization. They did not live like Soviet people: this was the recollection of the Russian and Ukrainian peasants who saw them, who decades later recalled their neatness, cleanliness, and proud bearing. They could not be made to live like Soviet people, at least not on such short notice, and not in these circumstances: but they could be made to die like them. Many of the Polish officers were stronger and better educated than the NKVD captors. But disarmed, confused, and held by two men, they could be shot by a third, and buried where no one, it seemed, would ever find them. In death, it seemed, they could join the silence of the citizens of Soviet history.50
In all, this lesser Terror, this revival of the Polish operation, killed 21,892 Polish citizens. The vast majority of them, though not all, were Poles by nationality. Poland was a multinational state, with a multinational officer corps, and so many of the dead were Jews, Ukrainians, and Belarusians. Some eight percent of the victims were Jews, corresponding to the proportion of Jews in eastern Poland.51
As in the Great Terror, the families of the repressed were to be punished as well. Three days before proposing that all of the prisoners in these camps be shot, Beria had ordered that their families be deported. The Soviets knew who these people were: this was why they had allowed the prisoners to correspond with their loved ones, to collect names and addresses. Operational troikas in western Belarus and western Ukraine prepared the names of 60,667 people to be sent to special settlements in Kazakhstan. Most of them were family members of what one order called “former people.” These were usually families without husbands and fathers. Wives were told, in a typical Soviet lie, that they were being sent to join their husbands. In fact, families were dropped on the Siberian taiga (“the eternal mud and snow” as one thirteen-year-old Polish boy remembered it) as the men were being shot at Katyn, Kalinin, Kharkiv, Bykivnia, and Kurapaty. Some Polish children wrote to Stalin on 20 May 1940, promising to be good Soviet citizens, complaining only that “it’s hard to live without our fathers.” The following day NKVD men were given cash awards for having cleared out the three camps without allowing a single escape.52
Because the men were absent, this deportation was even harder on its victims than the one in February. Women were dropped with their children, and often with their aged parents-in-law, in Kazakhstan. Departing in April on a moment’s notice, most women had inadequate clothing. The clothes they brought they often had to sell to buy food. Women survived the following winter by learning to collect and burn dung for heat. Thousands of women died. Many of them had to decide how to keep their children alive. They wished to raise them as Poles, but often realized that they had to give them to Soviet institutions if they were to be fed and to survive. One woman left five of her six children at an NKVD office, and disappeared with the sixth at her breast, never to be seen again. The pregnant wife of the worried economist held at Starobilsk and killed at Kharkiv gave birth to their child in exile. The infant died.53
At the same time, in March 1940, NKVD chief Beria had ordered a deportation of people who had declined to accept a Soviet passport. This meant a rejection of the Soviet system, and also a practical problem for Soviet bureaucrats. Polish citizens who refused to allow their identities to enter Soviet records could not be observed and punished with desirable efficiency. As it happened, the vast majority of people who had rejected the Soviet passport were Jewish refugees from western Poland. These people had fled the Germans, but had no wish to become Soviet citizens. They feared that, if they accepted Soviet documents, they would not be allowed to return to Poland—once it was restored. So, in this way, Jews proved to be loyal citizens of Poland, and became victims of both of the regimes that had conquered their homeland. They had fled the depredations of the SS, only to be deported by the NKVD to Kazakhstan and Siberia. Of the 78,339 people deported in the June 1940 action that targeted refugees, about eighty-four percent were Jewish.54
Usually people who had no experience in the countryside, Polish Jews were at least as helpless as the Poles who had gone before them. Artisans and cobblers were sent to the far Russian north to fell trees. A Jewish boy called Joseph remembered that the Jews in his hometown had been forced to burn down their own synagogue as the Germans laughed. His family fled to the Soviet zone, but refused the Soviet passport. His brother, father, and mother all died in exile.55
In western Europe, this period was known as the “phony war”: nothing seemed to be happening. France and Britain were at war with Germany as of September 1939. But that autumn, winter, and the following spring, as Poland was defeated, destroyed, and divided, and tens of thousands of its citizens murdered and hundreds of thousands deported, there was no western front in the war. The Germans and their Soviet allies were free to do as they liked.
The Germans invaded Denmark and Norway in April 1940, thereby securing access to mineral reserves in Scandinavia and preventing any British intervention in northern Europe. But the phony war was well and truly over when Germany attacked the Low Countries and France on 10 May. By 14 June about a hundred thousand French and sixty thousand British soldiers were dead, and the Germans were in Paris. France had fallen, far more quickly than anyone expected. That same month, June 1940, the Soviet Union also extended its empire to the west, annexing all three of the independent Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
The largest and most populous Baltic State, Lithuania, was also the one with the most complicated nationalities issues and international relations. Throughout the interwar period Lithuania had claimed the city of Vilnius and its environs, which lay in northeastern Poland. Though these territories were inhabited mainly by Poles, Jews, and Belarusians, Lithuanians regarded Vilnius as their rightful capital, since the city had been the capital of an important medieval and early-modern state known as the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In the 1920s and 1930s, the leaders of the independent Lithuanian state had used Kaunas as an administrative center, but regarded Vilnius as their capital
. Stalin played on such emotions in 1939. Rather than annexing Vilnius to the Soviet Union, he granted it to still-independent Lithuania. The price, not surprisingly, was the establishment of Soviet military bases on Lithuanian territory. Soviet forces, already installed in Lithuania, stood at the ready as a political revolution, even more hasty and artificial than in eastern Poland, was imposed in summer 1940. Much of the Lithuanian political elite escaped to Nazi Germany.56
All of this was carefully observed by the Japanese consul in Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara, who was in Kaunas to monitor German and Soviet military movements. In summer 1940 the Japanese leadership had set a clear course: it would seek a neutrality pact with the Soviet Union. With the north thus secured, the Japanese could plan a move southward for 1941. Sugihara was one of the relatively few Japanese officials in a position to follow German-Soviet relations after the fall of France. Lacking a staff of his own, he used as his informers and assistants Polish military officers who had escaped arrest by the Soviets and the Germans. He rewarded them with Japanese passports and the use of the Japanese diplomatic post. Sugihara helped the Poles find an escape route for their officer comrades. The Poles realized that it was possible to arrange a trip across the Soviet Union to Japan with a certain kind of Japanese exit visa. Only a very few Polish officers escaped by this route, though at least one of them reached Japan and filed intelligence reports about what he had seen while crossing the USSR.57
At the same time, Jewish refugees began to visit Sugihara. These Jews were Polish citizens who had originally fled the German invasion of September 1939, but who now feared the Soviets. They had heard of the June 1940 deportation of Jews, and feared the same for themselves. They were right to do so: a year later, the Soviets would deport about 17,500 people from Lithuania, 17,000 from Latvia, and 6,000 from Estonia. With the help of the Polish officers, Sugihara helped several thousand Jews escape Lithuania. They made the long trip across the Soviet Union by rail, then to Japan by ship, and then onward to Palestine or the United States. This action was the coda, silent but firm, of decades of Polish-Japanese intelligence cooperation.58
In 1940 the Nazi leaders would have liked to rid themselves of the two million or so Jews in their half of Poland, but could not agree among themselves as to how this was to be achieved. The original wartime plan had been to create some sort of reservation for Jews in the Lublin district of the General Government. But since the area of German conquest in Poland was relatively small, and Lublin not much further from Berlin (seven hundred kilometers) than the two great cities from which Jews would have to be deported, Warsaw (six hundred kilometers) and Łódź (five hundred kilometers), this had never been a satisfying solution. Hans Frank, the general governor, objected to the arrival of more Jews in his terrain. In late 1939 and 1940 Himmler and Greiser continued to dump Poles from the Wartheland into the General Government—some 408,525 in all, similar to the number of Polish citizens deported by the Soviets. This brought enormous suffering to the people in question, but did little to change the national balance in Germany. There were simply too many Poles, and moving them from one part of occupied Poland to another brought little more than chaos. It hardly fulfilled Hitler’s grand dreams of living space in the east.59
A specialist on deportation, Adolf Eichmann, was recruited in autumn 1939 to improve the efficiency of the operation. Eichmann had already shown his skills by speeding the emigration of Austrian Jews from Vienna. Yet the problem of deporting Jews to the General Government, as Eichmann found, was not so much inefficiency as senselessness. Eichmann learned that Hans Frank, the general governor, had no wish to see any more Jews in his colony. Eichmann managed to send about four thousand Austrian and Czech Jews to the General Government in October 1939 before this policy was halted. Eichmann then drew what must have seemed like the obvious conclusion: that the two million Jews under German power should be deported east to the vast territory of Germany’s ally, the Soviet Union. Stalin, after all, had already created a zone of Jewish settlement: Birobidzhan, deep in Soviet Asia. As the Germans noted (and would have occasion to note again), the Soviet regime, unlike their own, had the state capacity and sheer terrain required for effective mass deportations. The Germans proposed a transfer of European Jews in January 1940. Stalin was not interested.60
If the General Government was too near and too small to resolve what Nazis saw as the racial problem, and the Soviets were not interested in taking Jews, what was to be done with the racial enemies who made up its native population? They were to be held under control and exploited until the time for the Final Solution (still seen as deportation) came. The model came from Greiser, who ordered the creation of a ghetto for the 233,000 Jews of Łódź on 8 February 1940. That same month Ludwig Fischer, the German mayor of Warsaw, entrusted the lawyer Waldemar Schön with the task of designing a ghetto. In October and November more than a hundred thousand non-Jewish Poles were cleared out of the northwesterly district of Warsaw that the Germans declared to be the ghetto, and more than a hundred thousand Warsaw Jews moved in from elsewhere in the city. Jews were forced to wear a yellow star to identify themselves as Jews, and to submit to other humiliating regulations. They lost property outside the ghettoes, in the first instance to Germans, and then sometimes to Poles (who often had lost their own homes under German bombs). If Warsaw Jews were caught outside the ghetto without permission, they were subject to the death penalty. The fate of the Jews in the rest of the General Government was the same.61
The Warsaw ghetto and the other ghettos became improvised labor camps and holding pens in 1940 and 1941. The Germans selected a Jewish council, or Judenrat, usually from among people who had been prewar leaders of the local Jewish community. In Warsaw the head of the Judenrat was Adam Czerniaków, a journalist and prewar senator. The task of the Judenrat was to mediate between the Germans and the Jews of the ghetto. The Germans also created unarmed Jewish police forces, in Warsaw headed by Józef Szerzyński, which were to maintain order, prevent escapes, and carry out German policies of coercion. It was not at all clear what these would be, although with time Jews were able to see that life in the ghetto could not be sustained indefinitely. In the meantime, the Warsaw ghetto became a tourist attraction for visiting Germans. The ghetto historian Emanuel Ringelblum noted that the “shed where dozens of corpses lie awaiting burial is particularly popular.” The Baedeker guide to the General Government would be published in 1943.62
The Germans themselves returned in summer 1940, after the fall of France, to the idea of a distant Final Solution. The Soviets had rejected a deportation of Jews to the Soviet Union, and Frank had prevented their massive resettlement in his General Government. Madagascar was a French possession; with France subdued, all that stood in the way of its recolonization was the Royal Navy. Himmler mused along those lines: “I trust that thanks to a great journey of Jews to Africa or to some other colony I will see the complete extirpation of the concept of Jews.” That, of course, was not the end of the ambition, as Himmler continued: “Over a somewhat longer period of time it must be possible to cause the disappearance on our territory of the national conceptions Ukrainians, Górals, Lemkos. And what has been said about these clans applies, on an appropriately greater scale, also to the Poles. . . . ”63
Jews were dying at high rates, especially in the Warsaw ghetto, where well over four hundred thousand Jews were assembled. The ghetto comprised an area of only about two square miles, so the population density was about two hundred thousand people per square mile. For the most part, however, the Jews dying in Warsaw were not Warsaw Jews. In the Warsaw district, as elsewhere in the General Government, the Germans drove Jews from smaller settlements into the larger ghettoes. Jews from beyond Warsaw were usually poorer to begin with, and lost what they had as they were deported. They were sent to Warsaw with little time to prepare, and often unable to carry what they had. These Jews from the Warsaw district became the vulnerable ghetto underclass, prone to hunger and disease. Of the perhaps sixty thousand Jews who
died in the Warsaw ghetto in 1940 and 1941, the vast majority were resettlers and refugees. It was they who suffered most from harsh German policies, such as the decision to deny any food to the ghetto for the entire month of December 1940. Their death was often a hungry one, after long suffering and moral degradation.64
Parents often died first, leaving their children alone in a strange city. Gitla Szulcman remembered that after the death of her mother and her father she “wandered aimlessly through the ghetto and became entirely swollen with hunger.” Sara Sborow, whose mother died with her in bed, and whose sister then swelled and starved and died, wrote: “Inside myself I know everything, but I can’t say it.” The very articulate teenager Izrael Lederman understood that there were “two wars, a war of bullets and a war of hunger. The war of hunger is worse, because then a person suffers, from bullets you die at once.” As a doctor remembered, “ten-year-old children sold themselves for bread.”65
In the Warsaw ghetto, Jewish community organizations established shelters for orphans. Some children, in their desperation, wished for their parents to die so that they could at least get their food allotment as orphans. Some of the shelters were awful spectacles. As one social worker remembered, the children “curse, beat each other, jostle each other around the pot of porridge. Critically ill children lie on the floor, children bloated from hunger, corpses that have not been removed for several days.” She worked hard to bring order to a shelter, only to see the children catch typhus. She and her charges were blockaded inside, in quarantine. The shelter, she wrote in her diary with uncanny foresight, “now serves as a gas chamber.”66
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