Trail of Hope: The Anders Army, An Odyssey Across Three Continents

INTRODUCTION

I HAVE LONG WANTED TO PRODUCE A BOOK ON GENERAL ANDERS AND HIS ARMY, BUT FOR MANY YEARS WAS UNABLE EITHER TO FIT IT INTO MY SCHEDULE OR TO DECIDE ON ITS FORM AND CONTENT.

A book proposal for an academic study of the subject, which would have been similar to my work on the Warsaw Rising — Rising ’44 — failed quite recently to find favour with my British publishers, and I was forced to think again. But I did not lose my conviction that a comprehensive survey of the Anders story was long overdue.

The decision to give preference to a popular, richly illustrated album was inspired by three factors. First, I was greatly pleased by my earlier cooperation with Rosikon Press over To and From, an album, which presented modern Polish history through the medium of philately and postal history. Secondly, I became aware that the number of eyewitness memoirs was multiplying fast, providing valuable insights into every stage of the saga. And thirdly, having noticed the abundance of unpublished photographic materials, I realised that a visual approach could be more effective than the traditional academic route. I found the title — Trail of Hope or Szlak nadziei — long before any detailed plans had been laid.

I also felt strongly that my work should strike a different tone from that of its predecessors. Most of the existing literature concentrates on two episodes — either on the martyrology of Poles deported to the USSR in 1940–1941, or on the culminating Battle of Monte Cassino in May 1944. These remain vital elements within the whole. Yet I was determined to show more. I wished to convey something of the geographical grandeur of the ‘Trail’, which led from Russia and Central Asia through half a dozen Middle Eastern countries to Italy, England, and eventually to more distant continents. I wished to explain the wartime context of the adventures of the Andersowcy (the Anders Army), whose destiny was shaped by successive shifts in the strategic framework: by Operation Barbarossa in 1941; by German defeats at Stalingrad, Kursk, and El Alamein in 1942; by the Allied offensive in Italy in 1943–1944; and by the Yalta Agreement of 1945. Above all, I wished to demonstrate not only the rich diversity of people, who answered to Anders’ command, but also the extraordinary variety of their experiences and emotions, from death and despair, to fear and longing, ordeals and self-sacrifice, and, at the end, to a mixture of relief, resignation, bitterness, and hope.

The main text was written at pace, without any laborious research, drawing on knowledge that had accummulated in my head over the decades. My task was assisted by the fact that in the previous year I had presented a course of twenty lectures on the subject at the Oriental Institute of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. In the second stage, flesh was added to the bones by inserting scores of substantial extracts from memoirs and eyewitness reports, thereby counterbalancing the historian’s views with the voices of people who had completed the Trail in person. Each of the 20 chapters was then embellished by hundreds of pictures, many collected by an Internet appeal. The sheer weight of the pictorial material ensures that the historian’s contribution does not dominate.

AUTHOR NORMAN DAVIES AND PHOTOGRAPHER JANUSZ ROSIKOŃ in Jerusalem (January 2014). Together they visited many (though not all) of the sites along the ‘Trail of Hope’.

AS PART OF MY PREPARATION, I thought it essential, if not to tramp the trail from start to finish, at least to visit a selection of the key sites in person. With this purpose in mind, I succeeded in travelling in the company of Mr Janusz Rosikoń and his camera to Russia, to Iran, to Israel, to Italy, and to several evocative places in England. Our expeditions enabled us to add an extra dimension to the pictorial stock, where the old black-and-white images of yesteryear can be compared and contrasted to the vivid colour of today’s digital wonders. They equally helped to sensitise us to the times and places that figure in the album. It is one thing to write factual sentences such as ‘General Anders was held prisoner in Moscow by Stalin’s NKVD’; it is something else to stand in front of the newly painted Lubyanka, to see that Felix Dzierzhynski is still honoured there, and to realise that today’s Russia is far from changing ‘all its spots’. In Iran, we not only travelled the road from the port of Pahlevi (now Bandar-e Anzali) to Tehran and Isfahan; we saw with our own eyes the glorious snow-capped mountains and fabulous Islamic art that sweetened the exiles’ pain. In Israel, while seeking out some of the survivors, the journey gave us ample food for thought to grasp that the Jewish state, about which some of Anders’ soldiers could only dream, is now a reality. And in Italy, we not only attended the annual commemoration of Monte Cassino; we walked round the flower-filled cloisters of St Benedict’s rebuilt foundation, and recalled the spine-chilling moment when a Polish trumpeter had scaled the heights and with a marvellous sense of appropriateness had sounded the hejnał mariacki (St. Mary’s Trumpet Call).

We have agreed on the popular term, ‘the Anders Army’, for the simple reason that all the alternatives would be infernally complicated. The force, over which Anders was given command in August 1941, was officially called ‘The Polish Armed Forces in the USSR’. When the Army was evacuated to Persia it became Polskie Siły Zbrojne na Bliskim Wschodzie. One also meets the simple PSZ na Wschodzie, ‘in the East’. In March 1943, however, the Army was divided into two: the Polish II Corps, which was to be attached to the British VIII Army, and the Polish III Corps, which was to remain in the Middle East.

General Anders and his army now belong to history. The pain and strivings of his followers have come to an end. For which reason, it is all the more important that the new generation should learn what happened, and pay tribute to a triumph of the human spirit. If the Poles of today knew their history better, perhaps they would be less inclined to decry their nation’s achievements in the last 25 years.

NORMAN DAVIES

OXFORD, JUNE 2015

PHOTOGRAPHER JANUSZ ROSIKOŃ AND AUTHOR NORMAN DAVIES confer over the layout towards the end of three years’ preparation. (As usual, the whole of the text of Trail of Hope was written by hand with pen and ink).

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

PROLOGUE

1 FIRST FRUIT OF THE NAZI–SOVIET PACT

1939–1941

2 THE CONSEQUENCES OF BARBAROSSA

1941

3 CENTRAL ASIA

1942–1943

4 CONSOLIDATION OF THE ARMY

1941–1943

5 EVACUATION FROM THE USSR

1942–1943

6 IRAN

1942–1943

7 THE CARPATHIAN BRIGADE

1941–1943

8 IRAQ

1941–1943

9 WHO WERE THE ANDERSOWCY?

10 CIVILIAN DIASPORA

1942–1944

NEW ZEALAND

AFRICAN EXILE

INDIA

SANTA ROSA

11 PALESTINE

1943–1945

12 SIKORSKI’S LAST MISSION,

1943

13 ‘THE ANDERS’ ALIYAH’

1943

14 EGYPT

1941–1945

15 ITALY: THE ROAD TO MONTE CASSINO

1944

16 WOJTEK, THE SOLDIER BEAR

1942–1963

17 ITALY: THE ROAD FROM MONTE CASSINO

1944–1945

18 WAR’S END: FROM ITALY TO NOWHERE

1945–1946

19 BRITAIN: END OF THE TRAIL

1946–1948

20 RETROSPECT: HISTORIOGRAPHY, FILMS, MUSEUM, MEMOIRS, INTERNET

PROLOGUE

IN DECEMBER 1943, the port of Taranto, on the toe of Italy, was in British hands. It had been captured earlier that year as a result of the military operation, that had driven the Germans and Italians from Sicily, and had brought British and American forces onto the Italian mainland.

Yet the Allied cause was not prospering to the extent that its leaders had hoped. The burden of fighting against the Axis powers was being carried almost exclusively by Stalin’s Red Army, and Stalin was exasperated by the failure of his Western allies to open a new Western Front. The Italian campaign, which was tying down fewer than 20 German divisions, bore no comparison in scale to the titanic struggles in the East, where over 150 German divisions were deployed against a still larger Soviet opponent. But it was politically and psychologically important. It was aimed at detaching Italy from the Axis camp, and it provided the only practical evidence that the Western Allies were serious in their promises of accepting a share of the war against Germany.

The Italian campaign, however, was not going well. The British and Americans were making slow progress in mountainous terrain, where the Germans could build effective defence lines and inflict heavy casualties. Two costly attempts to outflank the German lines by amphibious landings, first at Salerno near Naples and later further north at Anzio, had not brought the expected benefits. The direct road to Rome in the middle of the peninsula was blocked by the massive natural fortress of Monte Cassino. To put the problem simply: the Allies did not possess either the troops or the firepower to dislodge the Germans from their positions, still less to sweep them from the field. Reinforcements were needed urgently.

And reinforcements were finally coming. British officers, nervously pacing the harbourside at Taranto, had been informed that large convoys of troopships had started to leave Alexandria at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, carrying about 50,000 trained men to boost Allied fortunes in Italy. The arrival of the first convoy was awaited with bated breath. The shipping lanes of the Mediterranean had been cleared of enemy attacks only recently; and it was just a matter of weeks since German and Italian ships and planes based in Taranto had made life on the nearby island of Malta a misery.

The British VIII Army of General Oliver Leese, which held Taranto and its surroundings, was a composite force of soldiers from many nationalities. Among others, it included a large formation from India, a Maori battalion from New Zealand, and the Free French Bataillon du Pacifique from Tahiti. So, exotic allies were not unusual. But a special sense of mystery surrounded the identity and origins of the force that was now drawing close. The newcomers had been officially designated as the Polish II Corps, and had already been placed under British command. Their leader was General Władysław Anders, who had led his men into the British orbit two years earlier in Persia. But how, when, and why they had found their way to Persia was near-impossible to understand. There were liaison officers present who could explain the outlines of the history of the II Corps. But for most of the harbourside watchers the explanations would have been incomprehensible. The word was that these were ‘reinforcements from Siberia’, and the question had been posed, as on similar previous occasions whether or not they would arrive with snow on their boots.

Westerners’ knowledge of the war in the East was, to put it mildly, limited.

CHAPTER 1

1939–1941

FIRST FRUIT OF THE NAZI—SOVIET PACT

WARS SET PEOPLE IN MOTION. ARMIES MARCH. OFFENSIVES INVITE COUNTER-OFFENSIVES. FEAR AND VIOLENCE SPREAD. CIVILIANS FLEE. WITHIN DAYS, TENS OF THOUSANDS OF MEN, WOMEN AND CHILDREN, BOTH MILITARY AND NON-MILITARY, ARE ON THE MOVE.

This is what happened in the first week of September 1939, when the German Army invaded Poland, thereby starting the Second World War.

Then, of course, more armies march. More fear and worse violence ensue. And the stream of refugees turns into a tide of humanity heading for destinations and experiences that they could never have imagined. This is what happened after the third week of September 1939, when Stalin’s Red Army unexpectedly joined the Wehrmacht’s invasion of Poland, thereby bringing an end to Polish resistance and ensuring the destruction of the Polish state.

The outbreak of the Second World War, in fact, set several such tides of humanity in motion. One stream ran to the north to the Baltic States, which offered a further escape route into Scandinavia. Another flowed over Poland’s southern frontiers into neighbouring Hungary and Romania, whence the refugees hoped to reach Allied territory. Among them were thousands of Polish soldiers together with the Polish government, which left Warsaw on 18 September, crossed the Romanian frontier, and eventually found an exiled home first in Paris and then in London. A third tide, over 300,000 strong, flowed eastwards, fleeing before the German advance and seeking refuge in the Soviet Union. It contained a large contingent of Polish Jews, fearful of the Nazis’ discriminatory policies that had already surfaced in Germany.

Yet by far the largest tide started to flow with some delay out of Soviet-occupied eastern Poland, whence, under the auspices of Stalin’s security services, between one and two million people were forcibly deported to distant parts of the USSR, the largest country on Earth. Unlike their compatriots who had left their homes under duress of war, these deportees were not refugees in any normal sense of the term; they were victims of official Soviet policies, which actively sought to rid the newly occupied territories of wholesale human categories judged socially or politically undesirable. They were a clear example of the fact that, whereas Nazi ideology condemned various categories of people according to pseudo-racial criteria, Soviet ideology condemned other human categories according to pseudo-sociological criteria. And their ordeal was often destined not to cease when they reached their initial place of exile. It would continue far beyond Soviet Russia — to Central Asia, Persia, Iraq, Palestine, and Egypt, and eventually to every continent in the world — to India, Africa, America, Western Europe, and even to Australasia. It was an essential element of the drama that none of its participants could have known whether they would live or die, or where and when their involuntary wanderings would cease. This volume tells their story.

Western Europeans have grown accustomed to the false notion that nothing much happened in the first months of the Second World War. They talk of la drôle de guerre or ‘the Phoney War’, and they rarely lift their eyes beyond the confines of their own region. The two Western Powers, Britain and France, declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, demanding that the Wehrmacht be withdrawn from Poland, but they did not react in like manner to the Soviet invasion and did not demand that the Red Army also be withdrawn. When the Polish Ambassador, Count Raczyński, visited Britain’s Foreign Office on 17 September attempting to invoke the British Guarantee of his country’s independence, he provoked astonishment among British officials. Britain has guaranteed Poland’s independence, he was told, not her frontiers. Which was a nice piece of sophistry. The Ambassador was left in no doubt that the Guarantee was intended to apply exclusively to actions by Germany, and that neither London nor Paris was prepared to judge ‘Russia’ by the same harsh standards that they judged Germany. Prominent voices, including that of the former Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, expressed the view in the press that while the German attack was despicable, the Soviet attack was somehow understandable. Not for the last time, the Polish government was faced by the painful realisation that many Western politicians saw Russia through ‘rose-coloured spectacles’ and were incapable of seeing Stalin for the tyrant that he was. Their attitude derived partly from strong sentiments established by the strategic set-up of the First World War, in which Russia had been a friendly ally, partly from the lack of accurate reporting on the Great Terror and other horrors of the 1930s, and partly from the fact that the secret terms of the Nazi–Soviet Pact of 23 August 1939 remained secret.

Nowadays, no serious historian can doubt the reality of the Nazi–Soviet Pact. Yet its importance continues to be minimised. It is often presented merely as a cynical political device, which facilitated Hitler’s plan to invade Poland, which set the Second World War rolling, and which bought Stalin time to strengthen Soviet defences. It was much more than that. Among other things, it included an agreement to divide Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence, and in the process to partition the Polish state. In effect, it was Poland’s death sentence.

PARTITION OF POLAND, 28 September 1939: German zone of occupation (left), Soviet occupation zone (right).

SOVIET POSTAGE STAMP issued in 1940: The Liberation of Fraternal Nations in Western Ukraine and Western Byelarus, 17.IX.1939, otherwise known as the Soviet Occupation of Eastern Poland.

THE NAZI–SOVIET PACT, 23 August 1939, Moscow. Molotov signs, Ribbentrop (left) inscrutable, Stalin smiles. The interpreter stays neutral. Lenin presides over the whole thing.

GERMAN TROOPS destroy a Polish factory.

DURING THE BRIEF September Campaign which followed the signing of the Pact, Hitler’s Wehrmacht invaded Poland from the west and north on the 1st, and Stalin’s Red Army followed suit on the 17th. (The Germans were furious at the delay, which was probably caused by Stalin’s insistence on terminating the conflict with Japan in Mongolia before he joined the war on Poland.)

The Western Powers declared war on Germany, but not on the USSR, and did virtually nothing to assist their beleaguered Polish ally. British assistance was limited to dropping leaflets over Berlin urging the Führer to desist. Caught between the pincers of Europe’s two largest armies, the Polish armed forces could not prolong resistance, and a joint German-Soviet victory parade was staged at Brest-Litovsk even before Warsaw had capitulated. The aggressors thereon declared that Poland had ceased to exist, and proceeded to carve up the country between them.

According to the German–Soviet Treaty of Friendship signed 28 September 1939, the eastern half of the defunct Polish Republic was arbitrarily annexed to the USSR and renamed as ‘Western Byelorussia’ and ‘Western Ukraine’. It comprised a broad swathe of territory some 77,612 square miles (201,015 km²) bordered in the north by Lithuania, in the west by the Nazi-run General Government, and in the south by Hungary and Romania. It was roughly equivalent in size to modern-day Belarus or Senegal, and was inhabited by some 15 million people — Poles, Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Jews. The principal cities were Wilno (now Vilnius) and Lwów (now L’viv). In a deft political manoeuvre Stalin initially handed Wilno to Lithuania, but in June 1940, having destroyed the Republic of Lithuania as he had helped to destroy the Republic of Poland, he added it to the Soviet Union.

AFTER THE BATTLE IN MUŻYŁOWICE. On the night of 15 September 1939 Polish troops crushed a crack German armoured regiment, the Ss Germania.

SOVIET POSTER: Our army is one that liberates working people. J. Stalin.

THE TERRITORIES ANNEXED by the USSR were known to the Poles as the Kresy or eastern ‘Marches’. Historically, they had formed part of the ancient Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, which had been dismembered during the Partitions of the late 18th century, and they were deeply bound up with the romantic traditions of Poland’s historic role as the antemurale christianitatis, the ‘Bulwark of Christianity’. Before they succumbed to the Partitions, they had withstood the hostile onslaughts of Turks, Tartars, and Muscovites for centuries. In the 19th century, though submerged by the wave of Russian expansion, they never attracted a significant number of Russian settlers, and most of the population remained staunchly opposed to the Tsar and all his works. Similarly, after the Bolsheviks had overrun Russia, the traditional society of the Kresy provided few enthusiasts for Communism. The Bolsheviks’ advocacy both of atheism and of land collectivisation ensured that the landowners, peasants, and orthodox Jews of the region were all unimpressed. In the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–1920, when Lenin’s Red Army marched through the Kresy and reached the outskirts of Warsaw, the Kresowiacy had its first taste of Communist medicine, and reacted strongly against it. The failure of Leninist propaganda was one of the reasons for the Bolsheviks’ defeat in that war and memory of the defeat was one of the reasons why the Kresy were treated so brutally when the Soviets returned in 1939.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Polish element among the population of the Kresy was strengthened by the plantation of numerous colonies of military veterans, who were rewarded with land for their service, and Poles became the largest single ethnic group. At the same time, thanks to the rise of nationalism among all communities, tensions rose between the state-backed Poles and the others. The Jewish community, for example, became increasingly influenced by Zionism. In the case of the Ukrainians, open conflict broke out in 1931–1932, when the Polish Army conducted so-called pacification campaigns in some disaffected rural areas. Yet nothing occurred that might be compared to the horrors that were being perpetrated both in Nazi Germany to the west or in the USSR to the east. The big development in eastern Poland in those years was the advent of universal schooling and the near-elimination of illiteracy.

JOINT GERMAN–SOVIET victory parade, 22 September 1939, Brest. Generals Guderian and Krivoshein.

IN THE SEPTEMBER CAMPAIGN of 1939, almost all the fighting took place in western Poland against the Wehrmacht; the Kresy remained largely free of military operations. After the intervention of Soviet forces on 17 September, confusion was more common than combat. The terms of the Nazi–Soviet Pact were not known. Red Army commanders sowed misinformation on all sides, often giving the impression that they had come to assist Poland against the Germans. The Soviet press was filled with weasel words of friendship and brotherhood. Stalin’s real intentions did not become clear until it was too late to react against them.

Many history books, especially from the USA and from Russia, skip over the years 1939–1941 as if nothing really worth mentioning occurred in that period. Both Americans and Russians have been taught to think that the Second World War only started when their own countries became openly involved. Europeans know better. In reality, Hitler attacked and subjugated eight countries during the currency of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, and Stalin did the same to five. As soon as Poland was subdued, the Red Army invaded Finland in the so-called Winter War. The moment a truce with Finland was arranged in the spring of 1940, the German Wehrmacht crashed first into Denmark and Norway and then into the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. That summer, when Hitler’s forces were entering Paris, Soviet forces were taking over the three Baltic States and parts of Romania. If not for the Battle of Britain, in which the Luftwaffe was repulsed, the United Kingdom would have joined the long list of subjugated states. In the early months of 1941, Hitler’s ally, Mussolini ran into trouble in Albania, which he had earlier invaded, launching a Balkan crisis that led to the German occupation both of Yugoslavia and Greece. Far from being quiet and peaceful, therefore, the 21 months between September 1939 and June 1941 were filled with military actions, brutal occupations, death, fear, misery, and the maltreatment of civilians on a grand scale. Neither the Nazis nor the Soviets respected the Geneva Conventions.

By the same token, many historians who accept the significance of the Nazi–Soviet Pact nonetheless repeat the mealy-mouthed arguments later produced by Soviet propagandists when their guilty secret leaked out. The USSR, they say, was never an aggressor; it was a ‘peace-loving state’, and prior to the German attack of June 1941 had practiced neutrality. The Red Army did not ‘invade Poland’ in 1939; it entered Western Byelorussia and Western Ukraine to liberate the population from the oppression of feudal Polish lords, and only after the Fascist Polish state had collapsed. The Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact was signed for one reason and one reason only: to win time for preparing the USSR against the inevitable Nazi onslaught that everyone knew was coming. These sorts of argument were to be welcomed by Western opinion in the days when the Red Army’s courageous stand against Nazi Germany was widely admired, when Stalin the Bloody Dictator became ‘Dear Old Uncle Joe’, and when bad-mouthing the Soviet regime was unacceptable. But they do not hold up to rational examination; they are built on sheer delusion. One can only quote the Duke of Wellington, who was once mistaken in the street and addressed as ‘Mr. Jones’. If you believe that, said the Duke, you can believe anything.

When the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed, it is highly unlikely that either Hitler or Stalin imagined that the arrangements would be permanent. Each of Europe’s two great totalitarians harboured ambitions which were incompatible with the indefinite toleration of a major rival. Yet equally, neither thought that the Pact would be short-lived. German re–armament was on course to reach a peak in 1942–1943 or in three–four years’ time, and the Red Army, which was suffering the effects of a deadly officers’ purge, was still less prepared for early action. In any case, both Berlin and Moscow expected that Hitler’s known intention of following his attack on Poland with a major offensive against the Western Powers would necessarily embroil Germany in a prolonged conflict of uncertain outcome. Everyone in 1939 was conscious of the miscalculation of their predecessors in 1914, who imagined that the Great War would be over by Christmas. So the general feeling was that an extended breathing space would open up in the East. Hence, while the Nazis began organising the General Government for the short term and preparing their strategic ‘Generalplan Ost’ for the long term, the Soviets set about transforming eastern Poland beyond all recognition.

POLISH POWS shot by the Wehrmacht, Ciepielów. Neither the Germans nor the Soviets Respected the Geneva Conventions.

TRIUMPHAL ARCH in Volhynia, erected to welcome Soviet troops by a pro-Soviet element in the local population.

THE POLICIES ADOPTED BY STALIN in the new Soviet territories were as radical in vision as they were ruthless in execution. They aimed at the total overthrow not simply of the previous political system but also of the existing social, economic, and cultural structures. A phoney referendum was staged to approve the incorporation of the region into the USSR. All Polish laws were declared null and void. All Polish institutions were disbanded or replaced, and their directors dismissed. All Polish banks were closed, and the currency abolished. All landowners were stripped of their property in preparation for the compulsory collectivisation of agriculture, and all economic enterprises, large and small, were subject to state control. All schools and universities were sovietised, and all churches and synagogues were closed. Russian was introduced as the principal language and all the inhabitants, irrespective of their wishes, were registered as Soviet citizens. Anyone who dared to object was promptly arrested, and sent to the camps. All men of military age were ordered to report for conscription into the Red Army. Confusion was attended by penury and despair. All decisions were placed in the hands of the all-powerful Communist Party. The tentacles of the NKVD (the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) spread into every town and village. Local militias were recruited to do the NKVD’s bidding. And, in a state where children were encouraged to inform on their parents, networks of snitchers and blackmailers were set up to keep people in line. For the duration of the process of ‘social cleansing’, a special police cordon was established to isolate Western Byelorussia and Western Ukraine from the rest of the USSR.

One needs to remember that measures of such a drastic nature could only have been contemplated in a country where the instruments of mass repression were already firmly in place. In this regard, the Soviet Union was years ahead of the Third Reich. The unlimited powers of the Soviet security services could be traced to the Red Terror of 1918–1919. The vast network of state concentration camps, the notorious Gulag, had been established during the Civil War under Lenin, before being expanded by Stalin. The practice of uprooting millions from their homes by administrative decree had become routine during the collectivisation campaigns of the early 1930s. The pseudo-judicial system of false accusations and fake trials had been refined during the Great Terror of 1937–1939, and the capacity of the Soviet railways to cope with vast quantities of human freight was well proven. Therefore the horrific measures which rained down on the people of eastern Poland, were not exceptional; they were but a continuation of the many oppressions which had overtaken numerous groups and regions in the USSR ever since the Bolshevik Revolution.

KAMIEŃ POMORSKI: Polish signs torn down by the passing Wehrmacht.

WARSAW, 2015. Monument to the Fallen and Murdered in the East. Each sleeper bears the name of a Siberian destination.

FOR THE PURPOSES OF THE PRESENT STORY, however, the most pernicious of the NKVD’s policies was embodied in the decree which ordered that the whole population of the annexed territories be filtered for ‘undesirables’ and that all unwanted persons be physically removed. Five main categories of victim were involved. The first were so-called illegal migrants. These in large part were the refugees who had flooded across the Soviet western frontier in September and October 1939, fleeing the German advance. Many were Jewish, and most had gained entry to the USSR without the requisite permission or documents. Some who were willing to work for the new Communist agencies were permitted to stay. But most were unceremoniously despatched to far off destinations in the Urals or Central Asia, often without means of support.

The shockingly arbitrary nature of the treatment of these migrants is beautifully described in a memoir written after the war called Mink Coats and Barbed Wire. The author, Ruth Turkow-Kamińska, was the daughter of a famous actress, Ida Kamińska, star of the Yiddish Theatre in Warsaw, and wife of Adolf ‘Eddie’ Rosner, a popular jazz trumpeter. To begin with, unlike most of their fellow fugitives, the family were warmly welcomed. Though jazz was officially banned, Rosner was in great demand in private party clubs. He played in Leningrad during the siege, and even performed for Stalin himself. As darlings of the Soviet elite, they were showered with caviar and champagne and lavish presents. Yet when he revealed that he hoped to return to Poland at the end of the war, he was promptly arrested, accused of treachery and cosmopolitanism, and thrown into the Gulag where he spent eight years.¹

The second category of deportees consisted of prisoners–of–war. At the end of the September Campaign in 1939, about 250,000 Polish soldiers were held in Soviet captivity. Many of them had been captured on the southern frontier, whence they were trying to escape to Romania or Hungary. They were interned in various parts of the western USSR. Yet the officers were invariably separated from the ranks, and some 22,000 of them were sent to three special camps at Kozielsk and Ostaszków in Russia and at Starobielsk in Ukraine. There, in the winter of 1939–1940, they were permitted — since the postal service worked normally between the Soviet and German zones of occupation — to conduct limited correspondence with their families. They were also interrogated systematically by the NKVD and found lacking in pro-Soviet sentiments. Then suddenly, in the spring of 1940, they disappeared; their correspondence came to an abrupt end and their fate was unknown. The Polish government was unable to discover their whereabouts.

SOVIET LOCOMOTIVE named To Work or to Die, at work during the deportations.

WARSAW, 2015. Norman Davies beside the Monument to the Fallen and Murdered in the East, 17 IX 39.

THOSE IN THE THIRD CATEGORY were, in the eyes of the Soviet regime, ‘social criminals’. Some 400,000 strong, they consisted of Polish citizens who by any normal standards were entirely innocent. They were arrested for no other reason than for belonging to groups that the NKVD rated inimical to the ‘socialist’ system. They included: all state employees such as civil servants, policemen, teachers, and rail-waymen; all politicians irrespective of their party, not excepting Communists; all professionals such as doctors, lawyers, bankers, engineers, architects, company managers, and academics; all major aristocrats and owners of private firms; all gamekeepers (who might have protected runaways in the woods); and all members of occupations such as philatelists, esperantists, and linguists, who maintained foreign contacts. Most of them were hauled before a peremptory court, accused of imaginary offences such as spying, sabotage, or defaming the Soviet state, and in the course of two or three minutes awarded draconian sentences of 10, 15, or even 25 years of hard labour.

After that, with no chance to defend themselves, they were transported to the arctic camps of the Gulag. Soviet civil law at the time did not recognise death sentences. But, since the average life expectancy in the Gulag was one winter, everyone knew that a large proportion of the people who were sent ‘to see the Great White Bear’ would not return.

SEVERAL SPINE-CHILLING accounts of life and death in the Gulag were written by Poles, who were taken away in that period. Józef Czapski’s The Inhuman Land (1951) and Gustaw Herling-Grudziński’s A World Apart (1951) would later become classics. Joseph Scholmer’s Vorkuta, was published in English in 1955 and was an eyeopener for many who still denied the realities of Stalinism. Menachem Begin (1913–1992), the future Prime Minister of Israel, who was a Polish citizen and a native of Brest, was arrested in 1940 and sent to the Gulag for his activities as a Zionist youth leader. His memoir entitled White Nights (1957; English translation 1977) provides perhaps the best description of the NKVD’s methods of interrogation, to which he was subjected during his confinement in a Soviet camp.² Needless to say, none of these titles could be published officially in Poland before 1989.

Among countless absurdities of the Soviet system stands the fact that the death penalty had been abolished and that, notwithstanding, millions died at the hands of the state. Very few inmates of the Gulag were shot, killed, or executed as had been routine during the prewar ‘Great Terror’. Yet conditions were so indescribably harsh, that dying was a daily, not to say hourly experience:

"Throughout the Gulag’s existence, the prisoners always reserved a place at the very bottom of the camp hierarchy for the dying — or rather for the living dead. A whole sub-dialect of camp slang was invented to describe them. Sometimes, the dying were called fitili or ‘wicks’, as in the wick of a candle, soon to be blown out... [But] most often they were called dokhodyagi from the Russian verb dokhodit, ‘to reach’ or ‘attain’ [the end], a word usually translated as ‘goners’…

Put simply, the dokhodyagi were starving to death, and they suffered from all the diseases of starvation and vitamin deficiency: scurvy, pellagra, diarrhoea. In the early stages, these diseases manifested themselves in the form of loosened teeth and skin sores… In later stages, prisoners would lose their ability to see in the dark. Gustav Herling remembered ‘the sight of the night-blind, walking slowly through the zone in the early morning, their hands fluttering in front of them’…

In the final stages, the dokhodyagi took on a bizarre and inhuman appearance, becoming the physical fulfilment of the de-humanizing rhetoric used by the state: in their dying days, the enemies of the people ceased to be people at all. Their skin was loose and dry. Their eyes had a strange gleam. They became demented, ranting and raving… They ate anything — birds, dogs, garbage... and could not control their bowels or their bladders, [thereby] emitting a terrible odour. They stopped washing, stopped having normal reactions to insults…

Despite prisoners’ efforts, many many deaths went unmarked, unremembered and unrecorded... The names, the lives, the individual stories, the family connections, the history — all were lost."³

FIRST SIGHT of a Soviet camp.

IN THE 1940S, the outside world was largely oblivious to the Gulag’s realities. People who survived the Gulag, and reached the West, were to find that telling the truth led to blank stares of incomprehension.

My own introduction to these matters was provided by a Polish man, whom I met in Oxford in the late 1950s. I was a history student, and he was the manager of the foreign department of Blackwell’s Bookshop; though 30 years my senior, he later became a friend, a neighbour, and a bottomless well of information on Polish history. Mr Kazimierz Michalski was born and raised in Jarosław in the Podkarpacie Region, had studied law at the university in Lwów, and in 1939 had just been appointed to his first position as a junior circuit judge in southeast Poland. When the Soviets arrived, he was an obvious target for the NKVD teams who were rounding up ‘enemies of the people’. He was arrested without warning, imprisoned, tried in a perfunctory court-hearing, in which he was not allowed to speak, sentenced to 15 years hard labour, and frog-marched to the waiting cattle trucks. His destination was a camp near Pechora in the north-west of Arctic Siberia.

The fourth category of deportees consisted of the associates and families of persons already convicted in the courts. They had committed no known offence even according to Soviet law, but, being judged guilty by association; it was the practice of the NKVD to round them up and to deport them by administrative order to the republics of Central Asia. Their numbers were not counted, but were clearly several times greater than those of the convicts (Category 3). In the nature of things, they were the most vulnerable elements of society: women, children, and the elderly. Nonetheless, they were taken from their homes, usually in the early hours of the morning; were given 10 or 15 minutes to pack; and were marched under guard to the waiting trains, onto which they were loaded — 50, 60 or 70 to a wagon. Their chances of survival were not high.

The family of a military officer was high on the list of people to be targeted:

"When then war broke out, all hell broke loose. My father, an officer of the reserve, returned home [after the September Campaign], but immediately discovered that the NKVD, were looking for officers and other ‘intelligentsia’, so he went into hiding... My mother went back to work as a teacher to keep the family going.

During February and March 1940, my mother underwent several interrogations by the local NKVD, both about her work as a teacher and the whereabouts of her husband. In March, the NKVD declared her politically unfit to teach, and she lost her job at school.

On 13 April 1940, the second mass deportation began. The NKVD arrived early in the morning, [reading] out the sentence of deportation and internal exile in Russia and allowing 30 minutes to pack essentials and enough food for a journey of up to four weeks. Everyone living in the family home was arrested; my mother with my sister Krysia, my mother’s eldest sister and their parents... They were marched to the local railway station and loaded into cattle trucks.

When my father heard of the arrests, he gave himself up to the NKVD in the hope that he would be allowed to join his family in exile. But that was the last reliable report we had of him, until [many years later] we found his name on the list of officers shot in the back of the head by the NKVD [in the Katyń massacres]…

After a journey of two to three weeks... they were taken off the train with five other families, at Martuk in the district of Aktubinsk in Kazakhstan. From Martuk, they walked 7 km to a small village or posiołek called Nagorny. This was an agricultural kolchoz — a state-owned farm — where they were immediately set to work in the fields. Initially, they were given a shepherd’s hut because in the summer, the shepherd was out on the steppe with his flock. Later, they were moved into a cottage... that belonged to a peasant who had been deported into internal exile. Everyone on the kolkhoz had to work."⁴

Another of my friends and neighbours in Oxford, Mr Michał Giedroyć, belonged to this same category. He was the son and heir of a prominent landed family, whose residence lay at Łobzów near Nowogródek (now in Belarus). In 1939, he was 10 years old. As an aristocrat and a Polish officer, his father was doubly suspect in the eyes of the NKVD, and was soon arrested. The family estate was thereon sequestrated. Michał and his mother took refuge in the local town, fearing the worst. And in due course, in April 1940, they were picked up and taken away. As their train pulled past the Castle of Minsk, which was being used as a prison, Michał’s mother pointed out the tower where his father was being held and, unbeknown to them, would shortly be shot. Their destination was Nikolaevka in Kazakhstan.⁵

HE WHO does not work, does not eat.

POLISH EXILES in Kazakhstan.

MOSCOW (2015). Norman Davies in front of the newly restored Lubyanka: HQ of Russia’s FSB, formerly of the Soviet NKVD AND KGB.

MR MICHALSKI’S WIFE, meanwhile, was suffering a similar fate from a starting-point in Lwów, 300 miles to the south. Mrs Joanna Michalska was 30 years old at the time. She was deported with her mother and two-year-old son, Andrzej. Packed like sardines into a wagon lacking water or sanitation, she and her family had no information either about her husband’s whereabouts or about the length or direction of their journey. Many of her fellow passengers perished on the way. But after six weeks the train came to a halt somewhere on the open steppe. Forty years later, she would recount to her incredulous British neighbours how the doors of the wagon were dragged open to reveal a landscape of deep, pristine snow. The guards forced the passengers to descend into the snow, before they themselves climbed aboard as the train pulled slowly away into the distance. A couple of thousand half-starving, half-frozen wretches were left behind huddled in the drifts beside the track. Mrs Michalska and her charges were among those who refused to succumb. On the second day, the sun came up, warming them with its reflected rays, and miraculously they saw a posse of Kazakh horsemen riding their hardy ponies over the snowfields. Soon the horsemen were searching for the living among the dead. Mrs Michalska, clutching her infant son, was hauled to her feet, wrapped in furs and led on horseback to an encampment of yurts, where she was revived with mare’s milk and hot sweet tea. She did not know where she was; she could not speak with her rescuers; and she had no possible inkling of what the future might hold.

The fifth, much smaller category was made up of what might be called ‘accidentals’. When the NKVD arrived in eastern Poland, they came armed with lists of thousands of names and addresses of people who were slated for arrest. When they knocked on doors in the middle of the night, they would usually read the names aloud from their list before telling the people to pack. Yet the lists, which had clearly been in preparation for years, were often inaccurate or out of date, and an NKVD team, which had been ordered to arrest a given number of bodies, was reluctant to report back with anything less than its quota. So it would pick up victims on the street or at random. Stories abound of people being taken simply because they happened to be visiting when the NKVD appeared, or because they took the place of some sick or infirm relative. One also hears that if someone managed to jump from the train when it started moving, the NKVD found it easier, rather than chase the getaway, to kidnap a passing peasant or an unsuspecting cyclist just to make up the numbers.

Stories also abound about people who slipped through the NKVD’s net. My future parents-in-law, Mr and Mrs Stefan and Janina Korzeniewicz, were among them. Both, by NKVD standards, were suspicious, bourgeois characters. He was a graduate of the John II Casimir University in Lwów and a qualified engineer; she was the daughter of a Polish Army colonel. Fortunately for them, when the NKVD first called in October 1939 in the little town of Brody, the soldiers went to an old address. Stefan and Janina were tipped off, and left town immediately. Next year, when the NKVD tracked them down to a relative’s house in Lwów, they were lucky to have a senior Soviet military officer lodging with them. The NKVD hammered on the door in the early hours of the morning. The angry officer, disturbed in his sleep, opened the door, told them to ‘go to hell’ (or the Russian equivalent thereof) and assured them that no-one of the given description was living there. The dog, amazingly, did not bark. (The scene is identical to one that Andrzej Wajda included in his film, Katyń.)

5 MARCH 1940. Stalin’s signature on the NKVD order to liquidate 20,000 Polish prisoners.

THE EFFECT OF THE DEPORTATION on the folks left behind can only be imagined. Ryszard Kapuściński gave us a glimpse of it. In 1939–1940, aged 7, he was a schoolboy in Pińsk, the main town of the Pripet Marshes, where the Red Army marched in at the beginning of the school year. Every week thereafter he noticed that one or two children disappeared from the classroom. By the New Year, the class was half empty, and his lady teacher told those remaining not to be afraid. Then came the day when the teacher herself disappeared. Running as fast as his little legs could carry him, Ryszard found her standing by the open door of a cattle wagon in the station siding, and he tried to jump in and join her. She kindly helped him to scramble back down, and persuaded him not to go. The teacher was lost, but her pupil lived to become a world-famous writer. Had he stayed aboard, he too would have been one of the ‘accidentals’.⁶

Many deportees spent time in prison either en route to the Gulag or as the result of a court sentence. Life in a Soviet prison consisted of a strange mixture of deprivation, brutality and ideological indoctrination. Most inmates were supervised by a ‘senior’ who received privileged treatment in return for evangelising his fellow convicts. A Polish officer, who had successfully disguised his rank and identity, listened for several months to the daily rants of a particularly persistent indoctrinator:

"At first I was shut in Cell no. 23. Moshe Moseyevitch (son of Moshe) Nizgorodskij, a Russian Jew about fifty years old, was the senior of this cell. He had been a bookkeeper in some Soviet corporation, and now he was kept in prison,