Wojtek the Bear [paperback]

by Orr, Aileen;

  What followed was one of the greatest tragedies in Polish history. The Warsaw Rising, almost the last of the mighty street insurrections of European history, began on 1 August 1944 and held out against overwhelming odds until 2 October. Home Army and People’s Army soldiers fought side by side at the barricades. So did the civilian population. Small boys ran to fling grenades at tanks. Schoolgirls running with despatches under fire died by the hundred. By the time that Warsaw surrendered and the survivors had been marched out to prison camps, some 250,000 people were dead and almost the entire city was reduced to blackened ruins.

  The memory of the rising later became a towering shrine of national self-sacrifice and comradeship, of martyrdom and betrayal. At the same time, it radically and perhaps permanently changed Polish attitudes away from the Romantic tradition of revolutionary nationalism. Another rising like that, the survivors felt, and there would be no Poland left to die for.

  Some historians have blamed Bór-Komorowski for giving the order to fight. But others say that the excitement in Warsaw had reached such a pitch that fighting would have broken out within hours anyway. There were several reasons why the rising failed. One was that the German civilian evacuation of Warsaw was misleading; powerful armoured units were already moving up to the city. Another reason, the decisive factor, was Stalin’s refusal to cross the Vistula and rescue the insurgents. The Soviet divisions which reached the river were ordered to halt on the further bank, in full view of burning Warsaw, and – with the exception of some Polish units under Soviet command – made no attempt to cross. Stalin knew precisely what was in Bór-Komorowski’s mind, and he was content to let the Germans do his dirty work for him. It was months after the Germans had crushed the rising that Soviet forces crossed the river and resumed their advance. By then Warsaw was a ghost city of uninhabited ruins.

  The Polish troops in Scotland, Italy and Normandy, like Poles all over the world, watched in agony as Warsaw fought and died. But there was little they could do. Some long-range aircraft, Polish, British and South African, managed to reach Warsaw from airfields in Italy, but they suffered terrible losses and the supplies and ammunition they dropped often fell into German hands. Predictably, Stalin refused to let the Allies use airfields in Soviet-held territory until it was too late. The British, for their part, refused to let the London Poles fly the Parachute Brigade to Warsaw.

  From the military point of view, that would have been suicidal madness. But there was political reluctance too. Both Churchill and Roosevelt knew that the Soviet Union was carrying the main burden of a war now approaching its climax. They were determined not to let ‘Polish problems’ disturb their partnership with Stalin.

  After the collapse of the rising, the Home Army in the rest of Poland began to disintegrate. A few groups retreated into the forests and carried on a hopeless guerrilla war against the new Communist authorities. Within a few years, anyone who had fought in the Home Army fell under suspicion as a ‘counter-revolutionary’, and thousands were imprisoned. The parachute couriers from Scotland were hunted down by Soviet military intelligence, and some – caught with their radios tuned to the Polish government in London – were tried and shot as ‘imperialist spies’. The true story of the Warsaw Rising, and the main role in the resistance played by the non-Communist Home Army, became forbidden topics.

  From trenches in Italy, or from camps in Lowland Scotland, Wojtek’s friends watched this process in deepening despair. Although they did not know it, their country had already been abandoned by Britain and America. At the Teheran summit in late 1943, Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed that Poland should remain under Soviet occupation when it was liberated and that the new eastern frontier established by the Soviet invasion in 1939, leaving the cities of Lwów and Wilno (Vilnius) in Soviet hands, should become permanent. As compensation, Poland would be given the eastern provinces of Germany. The whole country would be shifted 150 miles to the west.

  The Yalta conference in February 1945 did little more than publicly confirm these decisions. Postwar Europe would be divided into ‘spheres of influence’ – with Poland left in the Soviet sphere. Roosevelt and Churchill eagerly accepted Stalin’s assurance that there would be free elections in Poland.

  It didn’t escape the soldiers’ notice that Poland was invited to neither of these meetings, nor to the Big Three Potsdam Conference after the Nazi surrender. It was behind closed doors that the ‘Victor Powers’ had dictated Poland’s political future.

  General Sikorski had died in a plane crash at Gibraltar in 1943. His successor as prime minister in the London government was Stanisław Mikołajczyk, a peasant politician who tried desperately but vainly to save what he could from the Yalta settlement. But the Communist-led Committee of National Liberation had now become the provisional government of Poland. In July 1945, a few months after Germany’s unconditional surrender, Britain and the United States withdrew recognition from the London government-in-exile and transferred it to the Communist-led regime in Warsaw.

  At first, the new regime pretended to be an alliance of ‘progressive forces’ and Mikołajczyk felt able to join a coalition government in Warsaw. But the Communists controlled the security police and within two years the opposition was being crushed by violence and threats. The promised free elections produced crudely faked results. Late in 1947, Mikołajczyk fled Poland, hidden in the back of an American diplomatic car. The Communist monopoly of power soon became complete.

  By now, Poland was being ruled by state terror. Veterans of the AK were still being rounded up and imprisoned. The Home Army commanders were kidnapped, taken to Moscow and tried on incredible charges such as ‘collaborating with the Nazis’. Returning soldiers who had served in the Polish armies under British command were treated as suspected traitors and saboteurs.

  The Polish troops in the West, by now demobilised and living in temporary camps scattered over England and Scotland, knew what was going on. The postwar British government hoped that they would go back to Poland, but – in a rare act of guilt-driven generosity – promised to care for them if they preferred to stay.

  It was a miserable choice that they all faced. Most of them longed to go home and help rebuild their beloved, shattered land. But there they would be rewarded by persecution, by the sadness of life under foreign tyranny. On the other hand, what future could they have in a land whose language they hardly spoke, where they lacked friends, where their skills beyond manual labour and soldiering seemed to count for nothing?

  But for the men who lived with Wojtek in the camp at Winfield, the choice was a little easier. Before they came across that bear cub in the Persian hills, they had seen the real face of Soviet Communism and had experienced on their own bodies its brutality, its callous indifference to human suffering, its hunger and its lies. If Poland were to become like that, it would no longer be a country they could live in. These were the men who had travelled the third path, and they knew only too well what they were being offered.

  The third path, like the first, began on 17 September 1939, in south-eastern Poland. But this path led eastwards, into the depths of the Soviet Union. A part of the defeated Polish army was able to escape over the border into Romania and Hungary. But some 200,000 others were captured by the Soviet invaders and became prisoners of war. Some 15,000 of them, mostly officers, were moved into three prison camps in Russia and Ukraine: Kozielsk, Starobielsk and Ostaszków.

  All over the regions which had been Poland’s eastern provinces, Poles in responsible jobs – teachers, judges, police chiefs, mayors, editors – were arrested and imprisoned. Under directions from Moscow, the local Communist Parties in what was now Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine filled the posts with their own Belorussian or Ukrainian supporters.

  But this turned out to be only the first act in an immense programme designed to obliterate Polish identity for ever in this part of eastern Europe. In February 1940, the Soviet authorities began the first mass expulsion of the Polish civilian population. T
roops from the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB, as the political security force) herded Polish families to railway stations and crammed them into unheated cattle wagons. From there, the trains set forth on journeys which could last many weeks, and which the old, the youngest children and the sick often did not survive, until the prisoners were dumped in Arctic labour camps, at railheads near Siberian mines or on the empty steppes of Kazakhstan.

  More deportations followed in 1940, until by early 1941 something like 1.5 million Poles – Christians and Jews, Communists and Catholics – had been driven into exile. For the gulag empire, the life or death of these slave labourers was a matter of indifference. By the time that they were allowed to leave the camps, in the summer of 1941, between a third and a half of the deported Poles were dead from hunger, exposure, exhaustion and disease.

  As Aileen Orr makes clear, this had been the experience of Wojtek’s companions in Scotland. Their homes before the war had been in eastern Poland. They, and often enough their families, had been among those deported to Siberia and central Asia. Somehow, they had survived. But Siberia was to be only a halting-place along the third path.

  On 22 June 1941, the history of the world changed. That morning Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. With that order, Hitler set in motion a chain of consequences which were to shape the lives of hundreds of millions of people for the next halfcentury.

  In the longest term, Hitler created postwar Europe. On that day, he began a war which could only end in his defeat. That defeat, in turn, would inevitably bring about the destruction of Germany, the arrival of Russian power in the centre of the continent and the partition of Europe into two hostile military camps. In this way, the Cold War – lasting roughly 42 years – was Adolf Hitler’s legacy to those who survived him, and to their children and grandchildren.

  The medium-term consequence was a reversal of alliances. The Soviet Union, until yesterday Hitler’s accomplice in the destruction of Poland, now became an enemy of Nazi Germany and therefore the ally of Britain. Winston Churchill at once offered Stalin support. This put the Polish exile government in a painful position, but Sikorski decided he had to follow Churchill. In July, the Soviet and Polish governments signed an agreement which granted an ‘amnesty’ to all Poles held in Soviet captivity, and allowed a free Polish army to be formed in the USSR to fight the Germans alongside the Red Army. The Nazi–Soviet Pact was declared null and void. But – ominously – there was no clear Soviet consent to restore Poland’s pre-war frontiers.

  The short-term result was to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of Polish captives. This was probably Sikorski’s main motive for the agreement. In London, a section of the exile government tried in vain to unseat him; they were outraged by the word ‘amnesty’ (what crimes were the Poles supposed to have committed?) and deeply alarmed about the failure to get a Soviet guarantee of the pre-war borders. But the need to save the prisoners overshadowed everything.

  The gulag gates were opened. Very slowly – in many remote lagers and penal settlements, the camp commandants did not inform the Polish prisoners about their freedom for months – the captives emerged and set out to find the places where the Polish army was setting up its tents and huts. For some, it was a chance to become soldiers and fight again. For others, especially the civilian families, the army offered their only chance to find food, shelter and medicine. Their physical condition was shocking. Thousands died on the long, arduous journey towards the first Polish bases at Totsk and Buzuluk in the Volga steppe, and thousands more who made it to the bases were too weak and ill to survive.

  The commander of this army of walking skeletons was General Władysław Anders. Still pallid after months in the NKVD’s Lubianka prison, Anders told his officers that ‘it is our duty to forget the past’ and to fight the common Nazi enemy ‘shoulder to shoulder with the Red Army’. This proved easier said than done. Stalin remained suspicious of this foreign army on Soviet soil, and the equipment and rations provided by the Soviet authorities were completely inadequate for the tens of thousands of men, women and children arriving at the bases and begging for rescue.

  In addition, there was a puzzling lack of officers. Some 15,000 prisoners of war, most of them officers, could not be found. They had apparently left the three camps of Kozielsk, Starobielsk and Ostaszków, but in spite of repeated Polish pleas to Stalin, the Soviet authorities seemed not to know where the missing officers had gone. Polish emissaries travelled about the Soviet Union but could find no trace of them.

  Sikorski, Anders and their colleagues began to suspect the worst. But it was only much later, when in 1943 the Germans found and excavated a mass grave in Katyń Forest near Smolensk that the truth began to emerge. The dead had all been shot, hands wired behind their back and then a bullet in the head, between April and May 1940. And the Katyn grave, containing some 5,000 corpses, turned out to be only one of many. Secret Kremlin documents, which finally came to light after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, revealed that the killing of the 15,000 had been part of a monstrous selective genocide of Polish elites – military, judicial, administrative – ordered by Stalin personally in early March 1940.

  Meanwhile, the conditions in which the ‘Anders Army’ lived were becoming unbearable. The original plan had been for a Polish division to fight alongside the Red Army on the Russian front. But as the Soviet authorities cut rations and demanded a reduction in the army’s numbers, Anders concluded that the only chance for his men and the civilian mass huddled around them was to get out of the Soviet Union as soon as possible.

  This was a hard decision. Crowds of starving, ragged Poles were still reaching the army in its new quarters near Tashkent in Uzbekistan, and evacuation would abandon thousands of other refugees to their fate. Sikorski was at first against the idea, but on political grounds. He hoped that a free Polish army fighting alongside the Russians would give him leverage on Soviet policies when the armies reached Poland. But Anders, anxious about the state of his men and more mistrustful of Russian intentions, knew that this plan was unrealistic. Stalin, who saw all too clearly what Sikorski had in mind, agreed with Anders and allowed these troublesome aliens to leave.

  The first contingent of Poles made their way down to the Caspian Sea in spring 1942. About 44,000 men and women, three-quarters of them soldiers, embarked on old steamers and were taken across to the Iranian shore of the Caspian at the port of Pahlevi, where British military teams were waiting for them with ambulances, food and medicine. In the next few months, another 70,000 were evacuated to Iran, a third of them civilians. Among them was a quiet non-commissioned officer named Lance-Corporal Peter Prendys – the man who was soon to adopt a Persian bear cub.

  There are different figures for how many Poles were left behind. Some put it as high as a million. The Soviet authorities now blocked their movement south across the country, but small parties of Poles, men, women and surviving children, continued to journey towards the deserts of Turkmenistan and the mountains which marked the Persian frontier. Some of them travelled all the way on foot. A Polish mission left at Ashkhabad, on the Soviet side of the frontier, sheltered them and helped them to cross over to the city of Meshed, on the Iranian side.

  At about this point, the ‘third path’ of the Polish soldiers forked into two branches. The Anders Army left the USSR for Iran in 1942. Out of the thousands of Poles who remained behind, a new army was formed – this time under Soviet control. Its politics were set by a small group of Polish Communists in Moscow. But the gibe that this was a ‘Red Polish Army’ was not the full truth. Most of its officers and men were deportees who had survived the gulag and who joined the new force simply because they had not managed to reach the Anders Army in time. They were determined to fight for their country, even under Soviet orders. Apart from the Stalin-worshipping propaganda they had to endure, the men of what became the 1st Polish Army were allowed traditional patriotic symbols and could attend Catholic Mass.

  Their comman
der was the enigmatic General Zygmunt Berling. A conservative officer who had fought the Bolsheviks in 1920, Berling never forgave the army for censuring his conduct during a messy divorce. He was captured by Soviet forces in 1939, and for obscure reasons agreed while still in a prison camp to collaborate with the NKVD. This was not at first known to General Anders, who gave him a senior job organising the evacuation to Persia. It was only when Berling refused to leave Russia and began to organise the new army that Anders accused him of treachery, and in 1943 a Polish court-martial sentenced Berling in absentia to death for desertion and for assisting the (Soviet) enemy.

  In reality, Berling seems to have been a cynical maverick who took this course more out of dislike for the old Polish officer caste than from any Marxist–Leninist convictions. He had no illusions about the Soviet Union and had no respect for the Polish Communist group in Moscow. They in turn never trusted Berling.

  The new formation became the Kościuszko Division, then the 1st Polish Army. In its first battle at Lenino, in 1943, Berling’s troops fought doggedly and suffered heavy losses. But in the summer of 1944 the 1st Army was among the Soviet forces which arrived on the far banks of the Vistula as the Warsaw Rising broke out.

  Stalin’s order to halt the advance was too much for the Polish troops. Some units – apparently with Berling’s approval – managed to cross the river and establish a bridgehead on the other side, where they tried to make contact with the Home Army insurgents. But they failed to hold the bridgehead, and had to return. Shortly afterwards, Berling was recalled in disgrace to the Soviet Union and relieved of his command.

  By now, the 1st Army had grown to some 80,000 men. Once across the Polish borders, it had merged with the Peoples’ Army partisans, and general conscription in the ‘liberated areas’ brought a flood of recruits. By the end of the war, the force numbered some 400,000 Polish soldiers who had fought their way across Germany, taken part in the triumphant storm of Berlin in May 1945, and raised the red-white flag over the ruins alongside the Soviet banners.