The bitter fighting in the capital radicalized the Polish public. Many of those who had hoped for a romantic, triumphant ending of the war now lapsed into nihilism. In later years, the Warsaw Uprising would often be remembered as a heroic last stand for Polish independence, and its leaders would become heroes, first of the anticommunist underground, later of the postcommunist state. Contemporary Warsaw is filled with monuments to the uprising, and Warsaw streets and squares are rightly named after its leaders and its fighters. But in the winter of 1944–45, as the reality of Warsaw’s destruction sank in and as the Red Army’s brutality increased, the uprising was widely considered a terrible, disastrous mistake. Andrzej Panufnik, a deeply patriotic musician and composer, had been outside the city caring for his sick mother while the events unfolded. When his father finally returned from the city and began to describe the “brave self-sacrifice of men, women and children,” Panufnik “became convinced that the Uprising had been an appalling mistake based on the false hope that the Russians would come to the rescue.”32 Szymon Bojko, a Pole serving in the Kościuszko Division, the Polish division of the Red Army, arrived in the last days of the uprising and watched Warsaw burn from the other side of the river. “I had a feeling of disaster inside me,” he remembered later. “Nothing political. Just foreboding.”33 In the words of the historian Andrzej Friszke, the failure created “a deep gloom, a crisis of faith in the West, and a sharp realization of the country’s dependence on Russia.”34
The gloom would deepen even further a few months later when news of the Yalta agreement filtered back to Poland. Poles pored over the treaty’s vague language, especially its call for “free and unfettered elections” that could not be monitored or enforced. Yalta was understood, then and later, as a Western betrayal. Finally the reality sank in: The Western Allies were not going to help Poland. The Red Army would remain in power in the East.35
After Yalta, the leaders of the Home Army never again had the same authority. Following the uprising, the organization had rebuilt its structures under the leadership of General Leopold Okulicki. But without Western allies, and without the tens of thousands of young combatants who had died in Warsaw, many Poles lost faith in their ability to fight the USSR. Aware of his lost legitimacy, Okulicki officially dissolved the Home Army in January. In his last, profoundly emotional message, he told his soldiers to keep the faith:
Try to be the nation’s guides and creators of an independent Polish state. In this activity each of us must be his own commander. In the conviction that you will obey this order, that you will remain loyal only to Poland, as well as to make your future work easier, on the authorization of the President of the Polish Republic, I release you from your oath and dissolve the ranks of the [Home Army].36
Having called upon his countrymen to renounce their membership in the resistance, Okulicki himself withdrew into deeper conspiracy. The remaining Home Army leaders kept themselves concealed too, waiting for a better future. But the future never came. At the end of February, the NKVD made contact with Okulicki and his commanders, and invited them to a meeting with General Serov in a Warsaw suburb. Aware that their identities had become known to the Soviet secret police, operating in the belief that the Yalta treaty still obliged the Soviet Union to include some noncommunists in the new Polish government, hopeful of a better outcome, they went.
None returned. Like General Wilk before them, sixteen men were arrested, flown to Moscow, imprisoned in the Lubyanka (the Soviet Union’s most notorious prison), and indicted under Soviet law for “preparing an armed uprising against the USSR in league with the Germans.” They were accused, in other words, of “fascist” sympathies. Most received long camp sentences. Three of them, including Okulicki, would eventually die in prison.
The arrests were intended both to serve as a lesson to the Polish underground and to notify the outside world of Soviet intentions. They also sent a message to the Polish communists, at least some of whom had hoped to win over the Home Army’s supporters legitimately. In notes he made later, Jakub Berman wrote that the arrests had “shocked and worried” his comrades, who had planned to undermine the Home Army leaders through a policy of “divide and rule,” forcing them to squabble with one another so that, eventually, Okulicki and the rest would have become unpopular. Instead, the arrest of the sixteen men unified a large part of society against the communists.37
The abrupt abduction of the Polish underground leadership also caused the first major rupture in the alliance between the USSR and the Anglo-Saxon powers. In a letter to Roosevelt, Churchill described these arrests as a turning point: “This is the test case between us and the Russians of the meaning which is to be attached to such terms as democracy, sovereignty, independence, representative government, and free and unfettered elections.”38 As subsequent events would show, Churchill was right to question the Russians’ interpretations of the words penned into the Yalta agreement, which very quickly came to appear not so much vague as meaningless.
After the arrest of the Home Army leadership, part of the Polish population decided there was nothing left to do except learn to live under a Soviet-style regime. But others drew the opposite conclusion and decided that there was nothing left to do except fight. By the spring of 1945, one large group of anti-Nazi and anticommunist partisans, the National Armed Forces (Narodowe Siły Zbrojne, or NSZ), a nationalist grouping to the political right of the mainstream underground, had decided to take this path. Instead of following the Home Army’s orders to end the struggle, their leaders decided to continue fighting. As the bulk of the Red Army moved west toward Germany, they regrouped in the forests of eastern Poland, especially around Lublin and Rzeszów, where they dedicated themselves to the new struggle.39 Their goal, as a Polish secret police document not inaccurately put it, was “the liquidation of the workers of the Department of Public Security” using either “quiet disappearances (drowning, kidnapping, torture) or open shooting.”40
In the vacuum opened up by the dissolution of the Home Army, new groups began to form. The most famous was Wolność i Niezawisłość—Freedom and Independence—usually known as WiN. Jan Rzepecki, its leader, was a Home Army officer. Unlike the mainstream Home Army, he and his colleagues decided to remain underground after the failure of the Warsaw Uprising. They kept their identities secret, continued to observe the rules of conspiracy, and communicated using codes and passwords. Their intention was to remain a civilian organization, though they stayed in touch with armed partisans of all kinds. Until October 1946, they subsidized a newspaper, Polska Niezawisła (Independent Poland), whose editor argued that Poles should not be tempted to accept a status quo he characterized as “Soviet terror.”41 The NKVD identified and arrested Rzepecki not long afterward, in November 1945. He was interrogated and forced, or convinced, to reveal the names of his colleagues. He was freed on the condition that he call on the rest of the underground to reveal their identities, which some of them did.
Starting from scratch, WiN reconstituted itself once again. Its “Second Executive” launched itself in December 1945, and lasted for almost a year, maintaining some communications with the outside world via long chains of couriers and messengers who passed inscrutable notes to one another over many weeks. Finally, after a woman working for WiN was captured on the border and found to be carrying an encrypted message, the chain unraveled, and the ringleaders were again captured and tortured into naming names. Eventually a Third Executive and a Fourth Executive were formed, both of which were penetrated by the Polish secret police from the start, probably according to a Soviet plan (the Bolsheviks had created a phony Russian “opposition” at one point in the 1920s to attract foreign spies as well). After the Fourth Executive was disbanded the secret police created their own pseudo-WiN, which kept in contact with naïve foreigners as well as those Poles too clueless to know that the “clandestine organization” was a police operation. WiN existed in this sorry state until 1952, though a few of its former members did manage to live for long periods
in hiding.
The story of WiN is often held up as an example of the pointlessness of anticommunist resistance in the immediate postwar period, and it was certainly perceived that way at the time. But it is also possible to view the sad history of WiN as a testimony to the Polish desire for resistance. Some 10,000 members of the organization were arrested, tortured, and jailed. Hundreds were executed. Despite the amount of pressure on the group, and despite the obsession with which its members were pursued, at its zenith WiN had about 20,000 to 30,000 members.42
Among postwar Polish resistance groups, WiN was unusual in its size and in retaining some theoretical links to the old Home Army chain of command. Most other such groups were very small, often consisting entirely of young people who modeled themselves on an idea of the Home Army, which they themselves had not quite been old enough to join, or who called themselves “NSZ” without really knowing what that organization was or what it stood for. A thirteen-member partisan group calling itself “Home Army Youth” began to collect weapons in the forests south of Kraków after 1945, for example, and secretly practiced using them until all were arrested in 1950.43
As Soviet troops moved west for the final assault on Berlin, the situation grew even more complicated. As the Red Army left a region, it often happened that partisan groups of all political stripes moved back in: NSZ groups, ex–Home Army soldiers, Ukrainian partisans who were fighting for Ukrainian independence. All of them were intent on fighting the Red Army and its Polish allies, but sometimes they fought with one another as well. Despite the chaos, some remained true to the ideals of the old underground. Others came to rely on theft to stay alive and degenerated into semi-criminal gangs. Vicious battles often broke out between them, especially between Poles and Ukrainians.
Although the USSR had “pacified” eastern Poland in the summer of 1944, by the following spring the east was thus convulsed by what should correctly be described as a civil war. For communists and their allies, the villages and forests around the city of Lublin became unsafe, and for a time even the city itself was a danger zone. According to one report filed in May 1945, the work of “all party and government organs” had ground to a halt in the area. In four local districts, the police no longer existed, having been either disarmed by partisans or murdered outright.44 Soon afterward, Stalin, still celebrating the German surrender, was informed, in the most alarming terms, that “in Poland the anti-state underground continues to be active, everywhere.”45 Another five NKVD regiments, plus a motorized battalion, were duly called in to assist the hapless Polish secret police once again.46
In August 1945, the minister of public security, Stanisław Radkiewicz, attended a regional meeting of the Security Department in Lublin and heard some hard truths. One local officer reckoned that no more than 20 percent of the people in his county supported the new regime. Another explained that they had not managed to place any agents inside the armed anticommunist partisan movement because “they don’t want to cooperate.” Others thought the situation would improve because the peasants were tired of supporting the partisans, some of whom regularly stole food. But all present agreed that “bands” were still a major problem. Some were hiding in the forests, others worked on their farms by day, but “at an agreed signal they come together and carry out a criminal attack.”47 They regularly assaulted security policemen, communist party officials, and others who collaborated with them.
Yet even as it fought, the armed resistance already seemed aware of its tragic position. Its members were exhausted by the long struggle with the Germans. Many had already spent five or six years living in the forests. Often very young, they had missed months or years of schooling. They knew that surrender meant the end of their dream of national independence, but at the same time they were now fighting against a new and more amorphous enemy. In the course of their duties, they were required to murder not German occupiers but Polish communists and Polish policemen. Some of them considered these tasks fratricidal and wanted out. Others resented those who left. In 1946, one armed gang beat up a pair of schoolteachers, both former Home Army men, accusing them of “collaboration” because they had returned to ordinary life.48 Eventually, tens of thousands accepted one of a series of “amnesties,” turned in their weapons, and joined civilian life.
Many were embittered by the experience. Lucjan Grabowski, the young man from the Białystok region, had stayed with his Home Army unit until he was asked to kill one of its members for treason. Suspecting the man was innocent, he refused to carry out the order. “They were terrible times, brother was killing brother for any kind of reason.” Finally, “I began to become conscious of a few facts that until then I hadn’t paid attention to and hadn’t thought much about. A lot of my friends, former partisans, had gone to the West. Others had started university courses, or were finishing high school diplomas and working. And I was still fighting, for the fifth year in a row.” Grabowski turned in his weapons along with forty other men, mostly from WiN. All had tears in their eyes: “We left the secret police building without weapons and no longer the same people we had been a few hours earlier.”49
Others kept fighting. Tiny numbers of men—one or two dozen—remained in the forests for many years. One small group of NSZ partisans gave itself up in 1956, after Bołeslaw Bierut’s death. One lone operator, Michał Krupa, remained in hiding until he was finally tracked down and arrested in 1959.50 But most of those who kept fighting did so knowing there was no hope.
Among them was an underground leader known by the pseudonym “Mewa.” According to the Polish security police who tracked his movements, Mewa, who fought with the Home Army during the war, had returned to the armed struggle in 1945 out of desperation and disillusion: he was suicidal, a psychological profile of him explained, “he wants to die.” Many of the 300 members of his gang—some former Home Army, some deserters from the Polish division of the Red Army—felt the same way. Most were from southeastern Poland, and their morale was low. In May 1945, they held an outdoor mass and pledged allegiance to the Polish government in exile in London—a government that was no longer recognized as legitimate by its allies or by anyone else, as all of those present knew perfectly well.
From then on, Mewa’s group slowly shrank. In the months that followed, many of Mewa’s men drifted back to their family farms or decided to leave the area and head to the former German territories, now part of western Poland, in order to begin new lives. Some of those who stayed began to steal from the local Ukrainian population, at that time still a large percentage of the inhabitants of southeastern Poland. More than once they burned Ukrainian villages to the ground. The archival record of their exploits says a lot about their desperation. In January 1945 they attacked a factory director, a Polish communist, and stole 100 zlotys of Polish currency. In April they stole two horses. In July they killed a Ukrainian peasant and threw his body into the river. By the end of 1945, the local police were working hard, but not very competently, to break up Mewa’s group. They infiltrated two agents into the gang, only to learn that one turned back against them and the other had been uncovered and murdered. His body was thrown into a river too. Over the year and a half of its existence, the group carried out 205 attacks and murdered many local communist officials—until finally, in July 1947, Mewa was captured. As he must have expected, he was sentenced to death.51
A decade later, the ambiguity of this moment was perfectly captured in Ashes and Diamonds, Andrzej Wajda’s classic film about this period. The movie tells the story of a partisan with a dilemma: he must choose between a girl he has just met and a political assassination he has been ordered to carry out. He chooses the assassination, but is shot himself while carrying it out. In the final scene he runs, stumbles, and finally dies on a field full of garbage. The metaphor was clear enough to Polish audiences: the lives of the young men who joined the resistance had been thrown away on the trash heap of history.
Though precise figures are hard to calculate, the NKVD itself reckoned that in 1945 be
tween January and April alone it had arrested some 215,540 people in Poland. Of this number, 138,000 were Germans or Volksdeutsche—local people who had claimed to be of German descent. Some 38,000 Poles were also arrested in this four-month period, and all were sent to camps in the USSR. Some 5,000 died “in the course of the operation and investigation.”52 Among them must have been thousands of Mewa’s men who fought until the end, knowing they would lose.
Once the war had ended there was no sustained or armed resistance to the Soviet occupation of eastern Germany. Hitler had hoped there would be: before his suicide he exhorted the Germans to fight to the death, to burn cities to the ground, to sacrifice everything in one last violent struggle. He also ordered the Wehrmacht to create youth battalions that would conduct a partisan struggle against the Red Army after his death.
These youth battalions were the “Werewolves” who featured so largely in both Nazi and Allied propaganda, but who in reality were every bit as mythological as their name implied. With Hitler’s death and Germany’s defeat, they simply melted away: the spell was broken. Erich Loest, later a prominent East German novelist, was a twenty-five-year-old Hitler Youth leader and a junior Wehrmacht officer when he was first recruited to the Werewolf movement. He was told of his new role in the final weeks of the war, and even given some partisan training in preparation for the Russian occupation. Yet when the Russians actually marched into Mittweida, his hometown in Saxony, the underground struggle was the furthest thing from his mind. Instead of fighting the Red Army, his family helped him escape to an aunt’s farm farther west, where he could safely surrender to the Americans.
Loest never spoke of his Werewolf training in the years immediately after the war—“I am not stupid,” he told me—and he was never arrested. Others were less lucky. During the last days of the war, the SS ordered all of the teenagers in Mittweida to attend a lecture on the Werewolves. No training was given and no oaths were sworn, but an attendance list was passed around. Soviet authorities found the list after the war’s end. “Nothing had happened except for this lecture, but all of them were arrested. Arrested for one year,” explained Loest.53
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