Whereas the Germans preserved prewar Polish-Jewish elites, choosing from among them a Judenrat to implement German policies in the ghetto, they tended to regard non-Jewish Polish elites as a political threat. In early 1940, Hitler came to the conclusion that the more dangerous Poles in the General Government should simply be executed. He told Frank that Polish “leadership elements” had to be “eliminated.” Frank drew up a list of groups to be destroyed that was very similar to that of Operation Tannenberg: the educated, the clergy, the politically active. By an interesting coincidence, he announced this plan to “liquidate” groups regarded as “spiritual leaders” to his subordinates on 2 March 1940, three days before Beria initiated the terror actions against the Polish prisoners in the Soviet Union. His basic policy was the same as Beria’s: to kill people already under arrest, and to arrest people regarded as dangerous and kill them too. Unlike Beria, Frank would use the opportunity to execute common criminals as well, presumably to clear prison space. By the end of summer 1940, the Germans had killed some three thousand people they regarded as politically dangerous, and about the same number of common criminals.67
The German operation was less well coordinated than the Soviet one. The AB Aktion (Ausserordentliche Befriedungsaktion, Extraordinary Pacification Action), as these killings were known, was implemented differently in each of the various districts of the General Government. In the Cracow district prisoners were read a summary verdict, although no sentence was actually recorded. The verdict was treason, which would have justified a death sentence: but then, contradictorily, everyone was recorded as having been shot while trying to escape. In fact, the prisoners were taken from Montelupi prison in Cracow to nearby Krzesawice, where they dug their own death pits. A day later they were shot, thirty to fifty at a time. In the Lublin district people were held at the town castle, then taken to a site south of the city. By the light of the headlamps of trucks, they were machine-gunned in front of pits. On one night, 15 August 1940, 450 people were killed.68
In the Warsaw district prisoners were held at the Pawiak prison, then driven to the Palmiry Forest. There the Germans had used forced labor to dig several long ditches, three meters wide by thirty meters long. Prisoners were awakened at dawn and told to collect their things. In the beginning, at least, they thought that they were being transferred to another camp. Only when the trucks turned into the forest did they understand their fate. The bloodiest night was 20-21 June 1940, when 358 people were shot.69
In the Radom district, the action was especially systematic and brutal. Prisoners were bound, and read a verdict: they were a “danger to German security.” As in the other cities, Poles did not usually understand that this was supposed to have been a judicial procedure. They were taken away in large groups in the afternoon, according to a schedule: “3:30 binding, 3:45 reading of verdict, 4:00 transport.” The first few groups were driven to a sandy area twelve kilometers north of Częstochowa, where they were blindfolded and shot. The wife of one of the prisoners, Jadwiga Flak, was later able to find her way to the killing site. She found in the sand the unmistakable signs of what had happened: shards of bone and bits of blindfold. Her husband Marian was a student who had just turned twenty-two. Four prisoners who were members of the city council had survived. Himmler’s brother-in-law, who happened to be the man who ran the city for the Germans, believed that he needed them to construct a swimming pool and a brothel for Germans.70
Later groups from Częstochowa were taken to the woods. On 4 July 1940 the three Glińska sisters, Irena, Janina, and Serafina, were all shot there. All three of them had refused to disclose the whereabouts of their brothers. Janina called German rule “laughable and temporary.” She said that she would never betray “her brother or another Pole.” She did not.71
On the way to the killing sites, prisoners would throw notes from the truck, in the hope that passersby would find them and convey them to their families. This was something of a Polish custom, and the notes would surprisingly often find their way to their destination. The people who wrote them, unlike the prisoners in the three Soviet camps, knew that they were going to die. The prisoners at Kozelsk, Ostashkov, and Starobilsk also threw notes from the buses as they left the camps, but they said things like: “We can’t tell where they are sending us.”72
Thus a difference between Soviet and German repression. East of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, the Soviets wished for secrecy, and barring some extraordinary accident they preserved it. West of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, Germans did not always want discretion, and were poor at maintaining it even when they so wished. So the victims of the AB Aktion were reconciling themselves, or trying to reconcile their families, to a fate they foresaw. The people awaiting death disagreed about the meaning of it all. Mieczysław Habrowski wrote that: “The blood shed on the Polish land will enrich her and raise the avengers of a free and great Poland.” Ryszard Schmidt, who had physically attacked his interrogators, wanted to discourage revenge: “Let the children not take revenge, for revenge breeds more revenge.” Marian Muszyński simply bade farewell to his family: “God be with you. I love you all.”73
Some of the people going to their deaths in the AB Aktion were thinking of family who had been taken prisoner by the Soviets. Although the Soviets and the Germans did not coordinate their policies against the Polish educated classes, they targeted the same sorts of people. The Soviets acted to remove elements that they regarded as dangerous to their system, on the pretext of fighting a class war. The Germans were also defending their territorial gains, though also acting on their sense that the inferior race had to be kept in its place. In the end, the policies were very similar, with more or less concurrent deportations and more or less concurrent mass shootings.
In at least two cases, the Soviet terror killed one sibling, the German terror the other. Janina Dowbor was the only female among the Polish officers taken prisoner by the Soviets. An adventurous soul, she had learned as a girl to hang glide and parachute. She was the first woman in Europe to jump from a height of five kilometers or more. She trained as a pilot in 1939, and enlisted in the Polish air force reserve. In September 1939 she was taken prisoner by the Soviets. According to one account, her plane had been shot down by the Germans. Parachuting to safety, she found herself arrested by the Soviets as a Polish second lieutenant. She was taken to Ostashkov, and then to Kozelsk. She had her own accommodations, and spent her time with air force comrades with whom she felt safe. On 21 or 22 April 1940, she was executed at Katyn, and buried there in the pits along with 4,409 men. Her younger sister Agnieszka had remained in the German zone. Along with some friends, she had joined a resistance organization in late 1939. She was arrested in April 1940, at about the time that her sister was executed. She was killed in the Palmiry Forest on 21 June 1940. Both sisters were buried in shallow graves, after sham trials and shots to the head.74
The Wnuk brothers, who hailed from a region that had once been in east-central Poland but was now quite close to the German-Soviet border, met the same fate. Bolesław, the older brother, was a populist politician who had been elected to the Polish parliament. Jakub, the younger brother, studied pharmacology and designed gas masks. Both married in 1932 and had children. Jakub, along with the other experts from his institute, was arrested by the Soviets and killed at Katyn in April 1940. Bolesław was arrested by the Germans in October 1939, taken to Lublin castle in January, and executed in the AB Aktion on 29 June 1940. He left a farewell note on a handkerchief: “I die for the fatherland with a smile on my lips, but I die innocent.”75
In spring and summer 1940, the Germans were extending their small system of concentration camps so that they could intimidate and exploit Poles. In late April 1940, Heinrich Himmler visited Warsaw, and ordered that twenty thousand Poles be placed in concentration camps. At the initiative of Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, Himmler’s commissar for the Strengthening of Germandom for the Silesia region, a new concentration camp was established at the site of a Polish army barracks
close to Cracow: Oświęcim, better known by its German name, Auschwitz. As the AB Aktion came to a close, prisoners were no longer executed, but sent to German camps, very often Auschwitz. The first transport to Auschwitz was made up of Polish political prisoners from Cracow; they were sent on 14 June 1940 and given the numbers 31-758. In July transports of Polish political prisoners were sent to Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald; in November followed two more to Auschwitz. On 15 August began mass roundups in Warsaw, where hundreds and then thousands of people would be seized on the streets and sent to Auschwitz. In November 1940 the camp became an execution site for Poles. At around the same time it attracted the attention of investors from IG Farben. Auschwitz became a giant labor camp very much on the Soviet model, although its slave labor served the interests of German companies, rather than Stalin’s dream of planned industrialization.76
Unlike the Germans, who wrongly believed that they had eliminated the Polish educated classes in their part of Poland, the Soviets in considerable measure actually had. In the General Government the Polish resistance was growing, whereas in the Soviet Union networks were quickly broken and activists arrested, exiled, and sometimes executed. Meanwhile, a new challenge to Soviet rule from Ukrainians was in view. Poland had been home to about five million Ukrainians, almost all of whom now inhabited Soviet Ukraine. They were not necessarily satisfied by the new regime. Ukrainian nationalists, whose organizations had been illegal in interwar Poland, knew how to work underground. Now that Poland no longer existed, the focus of their labors naturally changed. Soviet policy had made some local Ukrainians receptive to the nationalists’ message. While some Ukrainian peasants had initially welcomed Soviet rule and its gifts of farmland, collectivization had quickly turned them against the regime.77
The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists now began to take action against the institutions of Soviet power. Some leading Ukrainian nationalists had interwar connections with German military intelligence and with Reinhard Heydrich’s SS intelligence service, the Sicherheitsdienst. As Stalin knew, several of them were still gathering intelligence for Berlin. Thus a fourth Soviet deportation from the annexed territories of eastern Poland chiefly targeted Ukrainians. The first two operations had targeted mainly Poles, and the third mainly Jews. An action of May 1941 moved 11,328 Polish citizens, most of them Ukrainians, from western Soviet Ukraine to the special settlements. The very last deportation, on 19 June, touched 22,353 Polish citizens, most of them Poles.78
As a little Polish boy from Białystok remembered, “They took us under bombs and there was fire because people began to burn up in the cars.” Germany invaded the Soviet Union in a surprise attack on 22 June, and its bombers caught up with the Soviet prison trains. About two thousand deportees died in the freight cars, victims of both regimes.79
In purging his new lands, Stalin had been preparing for another war. But he did not believe that it would come so soon.
When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in a surprise attack on 22 June 1941, Poland and the Soviet Union were suddenly transformed from enemies to allies. Each was now fighting Germany. Nevertheless, it was an awkward situation. In the previous two years, the Soviets had repressed about half a million Polish citizens: about 315,000 deported, about 110,000 more arrested, and 30,000 executed, and about 25,000 more who died in custody. The Polish government knew about the deportations, but not about the killings. Nevertheless, the Soviets and the Poles began to form a Polish Army from the hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens now scattered across Soviet prisons, labor camps, and special settlements.80
The Polish high command realized that several thousand Polish officers were missing. Józef Czapski, the Polish officer and artist who had survived Kozelsk, was sent to Moscow by the Polish government with the mission of finding the missing men, his former campmates. A sober man, he nevertheless understood his task as a calling. Poland would now have a second chance to fight the Germans, and Czapski was to find the officers who would lead men into battle. As he journeyed to Moscow, to his mind came snatches of Polish romantic poetry, first the deeply masochistic reverie of Juliusz Słowacki, asking God to keep Poland on the cross until she had the strength to stand by herself. Then, speaking to an appealingly honest fellow Pole, Czapski recalled the most famous lines of Cyprian Norwid’s poem of desire for the homeland, written in exile: “I long for those who say yes for yes and no for no / For a light without shadow.” An urbane, sophisticated man from a nationally mixed family, Czapski found solace by understanding his own nation in the terms of Romantic idealism.81
Czapski was indirectly invoking scripture, for Norwid’s poem cites the Book of Matthew: “let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.” This was the very same verse with which Arthur Koestler had just ended Darkness at Noon, his own novel of the Great Terror. Czapski was on his way to the Lubianka prison in Moscow, the setting of that novel; this was also the very place where Koestler’s friend, Alexander Weissberg, had been interrogated before his release in 1940. Weissberg and his wife had both been arrested in the late 1930s; their experiences were one source of Koestler’s novel. Czapski was intending to ask one of the Lubianka interrogators about his own friends, the missing Polish prisoners. He had an appointment with Leonid Reikhman, an NKVD officer who had interrogated Polish prisoners.82
Czapski passed Reikhman a report, describing the known movements of the thousands of missing officers. Reikhman seemed to read it from beginning to end, following each line with a pencil, but marking nothing. He then spoke some noncommittal words, and promised to call Czapski at his hotel after he had informed himself about the matter. One night at about midnight the phone rang. It was Reikhman, who claimed that he had to leave the city on urgent business. He had no new information. He provided Czapski with some names of other officials with whom to speak, all of whom had already been approached by the Polish government. Czapski even now did not suspect the truth, that all of the missing officers had been murdered. But he understood that something was being concealed. He decided to leave Moscow.83
The next day, returning to his hotel room, Czapski felt a pair of eyes staring at him. Weary of the attention that his Polish officer’s uniform drew in the Soviet capital, he paid no attention. An elderly Jew approached him as he reached the elevator. “You’re a Polish officer?” The Jew was from Poland, but had not seen his homeland in thirty years, and wished to see it again. “Then,” he said, “I could die without regrets.” On the spur of the moment, Czapski invited the gentleman to his room, with the intention of giving him a copy of a magazine published by the Polish embassy. On the first page happened to be a photograph of Warsaw—Warsaw, the capital of Poland, the center of Jewish life, the locus of two civilizations, and the site of their encounter. The castle square was destroyed, the famous column of King Zygmunt broken. This was Warsaw after the German bombing. Czapski’s companion slumped against a chair, put his head down, and wept. When the Jewish gentleman had gone, Czapski himself began to weep. After the loneliness and mendacity of official Moscow, a single moment of human contact had changed everything for him. “The eyes of the poor Jew,” he remembered, “rescued me from a descent into the abyss of unbelief and utter despair.”84
The sadness the two men shared was of a moment that had just passed, the moment of the joint German-Soviet occupation of Poland. Together, between September 1939 and June 1941, in their time as allies, the Soviet and German states had killed perhaps two hundred thousand Polish citizens, and deported about a million more. Poles had been sent to the Gulag and to Auschwitz, where tens of thousands more would die in the months and years to come. Polish Jews under German occupation were enclosed in ghettos, awaiting an uncertain fate. Tens of thousands of Polish Jews had already died of hunger or disease.
A particular wound was caused by the intention, in both Moscow and Berlin, to decapitate Polish society, to leave Poles as a malleable mass that could be ruled rather than governed. Hans Frank, citing Hitler, defi
ned his job as the elimination of Poland’s “leadership elements.” NKVD officers took their assignment to a logical extreme by consulting a Polish “Who’s Who” in order to define their targets. This was an attack on the very concept of modernity, or indeed the social embodiment of Enlightenment in this part of the world. In eastern Europe the pride of societies was the “intelligentsia,” the educated classes who saw themselves as leading the nation, especially during periods of statelessness and hardship, and preserving national culture in their writing, speech, and behavior. The German language has the same word, with the same meaning; Hitler ordered quite precisely the “extermination of the Polish intelligentsia.” The chief interrogator at Kozelsk had spoken of a “divergent philosophy”; one of the German interrogators in the AB Aktion had ordered an old man to be killed for exhibiting a “Polish way of thinking.” It was the intelligentsia who was thought to embody this civilization, and to manifest this special way of thinking.85
Its mass murder by the two occupiers was a tragic sign that the Polish intelligentsia had fulfilled its historical mission.
CHAPTER 5
THE ECONOMICS OF APOCALYPSE
The twenty-second of June 1941 is one of the most significant days in the history of Europe. The German invasion of the Soviet Union that began that day under the cryptonym Operation Barbarossa was much more than a surprise attack, a shift of alliances, or a new stage in a war. It was the beginning of a calamity that defies description. The engagement of the Wehrmacht (and its allies) with the Red Army killed more than ten million soldiers, not to speak of the comparable number of civilians who died in flight, under bombs, or of hunger and disease as a result of the war on the eastern front. During this eastern war, the Germans also deliberately murdered some ten million people, including more than five million Jews and more than three million prisoners of war.
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