The Numbers Had to Tally

Introduction

We should learn all the lessons history has to offer but at the same time we should not become its prisoner

The Numbers had to Tally is set during the first two years of the Second World War. In Europe hostilities began at 0445 local time on 1st September 1939 with Germany’s invasion of Poland. The German battleship Schleswig-Holstein, on a ‘courtesy visit’ to the Baltic Sea port of Gdańsk, suddenly opened fire at virtually point blank range on the small Polish garrison stationed on the Westerplatte peninsula. Seventeen days later the Soviet Union invaded from the east as a result of the Molotov Ribbentrop pact.

Britain and France declared war on Germany on 3rd September. The Soviet Union did not become a combatant in the Second World War until they were invaded by the Nazis in June 1941. The United States was attacked by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor in December 1941 but did not formally become a participant in the European conflict until Germany and Italy declared war on them a week later.

Many books have been written and films produced that give a graphic account of dramatic escapes from the savagery of this conflict and its aftermath. However, the story that unfolds in The Numbers had to Tally is a first hand account of survival told by the author. The odds of coming through such an ordeal, viewed from a comfortable modern perspective, seem quite slim, so it is remarkable that so many did survive. The catalyst for writing the story and reviving painful memories was the year 1968 when the Prague Spring had just been crushed by Soviet tanks. The Cold War was at its height and Europe still divided by the Iron Curtain. However it took another forty years for the book to come to press.

In order to gain a better understanding of the The Numbers had to Tally it is essential to outline a brief history of Poland. Polish history stretches back more than 1,000 years. Its borders have constantly changed. The state once expanded into a mighty central European Empire. Under the Jagiellon dynasty, in the fifteenth century, the Polish Empire covered much of central Europe from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

It then contracted and for over one-hundred years, until the end of the First World in 1918, Poland disappeared off the face of the map altogether.

In this book we will only dwell on the period following the conclusion of the First World War in 1918 when the modern Polish State (or Second Republic) came into being. The victorious Allies, principally the United Kingdom, France, Italy and the United States decided that an independent Polish state should be recreated from territories that were previously part of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian or German Empires.

In 1919 the Treaty of Versailles was signed. It was supposedly meant to settle outstanding territorial disputes. The Allies concluded that the borders of Poland should be determined by taking into account the ethnic population diversity.

There were nearly 30 million people who perhaps called themselves Polish but lived as subjects of the German Kaiser, The Tsar of Russia or the King of Austria. Over a vast area in Central Europe there were not only Poles but a mixed population of Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Russians, Germans and Belarusians who intermixed and had homes within ever changing, seemingly elastic, national borders. Poland’s western and southern frontiers were agreed at the Versailles conference although the Germans were not happy with the outcome.

The British Foreign Secretary in 1919 was Lord Curzon. He proposed a line for the new eastern border of Poland that separated it from Russia. It ran North to South and on average lay 120 miles east of the Polish capital Warsaw. It became known as the Curzon line. This greatly influenced the negotiations about the Polish eastern border during the later peace conferences in Teheran and Yalta during the Second World War.

However the compromises achieved in Versailles were overtaken by events on the ground in Eastern Europe. Russia was embroiled in its revolution and imploded. Germany was weak and beset by internal problems and most other central European states were in turmoil. Against this background the new Polish state began to assert itself.

Many small conflicts broke out but the most significant was the savage Russian-Polish war which ended in a Polish military victory. After three years of fighting a truce was agreed and another Treaty (Riga) ended that war in 1921.

The result was that Poland gained a vast swathe of land some 160 to 200 miles to the east of the originally proposed Curzon line.

However, much like the Versailles Treaty, The Treaty of Riga satisfied almost no one. It left East Prussia, which was part of Germany, surrounded by a foreign country.

Poland on the other hand had to settle for a narrow strip of land called the Polish Corridor – as its only access to the sea. Furthermore it was sandwiched between East Prussia and the German state proper.

There was seething ethnic tension in the new land areas and, given the economic depression and volatile conditions of the 1920s and 1930s, it was only a matter of time before the agreements began to unravel.

With Hitler’s rise to power in Germany friction between Germany and Poland over the Polish Corridor increased. Poland was still weak but Germany was regaining its former military and industrial strength. Unsettling border incidents were manufactured and were used by Hitler to justify his decision to tear up the Non-Aggression treaty with Poland that had been signed in 1934.

To the east the Soviet Union, despite having signed the Treaty of Riga and continually consumed with internal purges, was still brooding over territorial losses in the 1918 - 1921 war with Poland.

Nazi Germany’s primary intention was to completely dismember the Polish state and add it to their land area as living space, or ‘lebensraum’, for the Germanic people. The policy carried out was simple - its objective was to enslave, deport or, where necessary, kill the Polish and other Slavic populations who lived there, then repopulate the land with Germanized people they considered racially pure. The Nazis were confident in their objectives as far as Poland was concerned as territorial gains in the west had been legitimized by the British and French policy of appeasement. Hitler, in his quest for Poland, didn’t want any interference from the Soviet Union. He sought a way to keep them out of any conflict until he was ready. This was achieved when Germany and the Soviet Union signed a secret Non-Aggression pact in August 1939 which essentially carved up Poland into Nazi and Soviet spheres of interest.

The pact gave the Soviet Union the opportunity to get back their ‘lost’ territories. The Nazis struck Poland from the west on the 1st September 1939 following a fake raid on a radio station by German prisoners dressed up in Polish military uniforms. On the 17th September the Soviet Union moved into Poland from the East. Once again Poland was removed from the map of Europe. Poles in the west of their country were subjected to the degradations of military occupation and forced removal by the Nazis, whilst the Poles in the east, many of whom had fled from the German onslaught, effectively became the property of the Soviets. The land area the Red Army occupied was incorporated into the territory of the USSR.

In the Soviet acquired zone of Poland thousands of Polish Military Officers were rounded up and summarily executed. Many other Poles were simply deemed enemies of the state (The Soviet Union) and in need of re-education so were shipped off as slave labour to remote labour camps in the Russian hinterland. Many were never seen or heard of again.

In ‘Operation Barbarossa’, June 1941, the German Army invaded the Soviet Union. Suddenly things changed for the Poles in the East. Almost overnight they became allies of the Soviet Union in the great patriotic struggle against the Nazi invaders.

Nearly all the Poles who had survived the hardships of the labour camps were released, given travel documents and left to find their own way to assembly camps located in south central Russia close to the border with Kazakhstan. By the end of World War II, Poland had the forth largest land army fighting for the Allied cause, after those of the Soviet Union, The United States and Great Britain.

Many nations suffered grievously during and after World War II but perhaps the case of Poland is unique. When the tide turned in favour of the Allies and the Soviet forces drove the German Army out of Poland, the Polish resistance that remained, and had fought heroically in the Warsaw Uprising or sabotaged German logistics, was once more classed as enemies of the Soviet state. This also applied to all those Poles who fought in the West as pilots in the Battle of Britain, or on the battlefields of Monte Cassino, Normandy or Arnhem.

The Soviet authorities, where they were able to, had them rounded up and imprisoned or in some cases executed on the grounds that they were deemed bandits or fascist sympathizers.

For Poland, technically a victor nation, the outcome of the Second World War was a disaster. Nearly a fifth of the population had died during the fighting and most towns and cities had been completely destroyed. Poland’s frontiers were completely redrawn. Only about forty percent of its original pre-war land area remained. To the east well over a third of Polish territory was incorporated into the Soviet Union. Although there were compensating land gains in the north and east from Germany overall Poland had shrunk by over 27,000 square miles – about the size of the Republic of Ireland.

Following the conclusion of the war hundreds of thousands of Poles chose to stay in exile rather than return home as their homeland had been taken over by a Communist dictatorship backed up by Soviet force of arms.

Chapter 1

Invincibility

In 1938, I lived in Warsaw Old Town, on Pivna Street. I attended the University, Josef Pilsudski, a name taken from a Polish hero, builder and saviour of independent Poland - at least that was my own opinion.

The year before I had served my conscription term, lasting one year, in the Polish Army. The place where I learned the art of ‘modern’ warfare was the Cadet Officers Corps in the second biggest city in Poland, Łodz, 120 miles south west of the capital Warsaw. I came out of the army having obtained the dizzy rank of Cadet Sergeant – a budding future officer. I was 22-years-old at the time, strong and full of energy, surrounded by a number of friends, men and women who shared my joys and sorrows. An exciting life was there in the making - after all I was born and brought up in an independent Poland and had great plans for the future. Unlike our forefathers we were free. We wanted to build a strong and prosperous nation. I wanted to fulfil a promise given to my tutor and to the leaders of the new Polish state that I and my contemporaries would be the pillars on which the structure of Poland would rest. We had no idea that the writing was already on the wall and that Poland’s short independence was about to come to an abrupt end. The thought of Poland losing its independence never crossed my mind, as somehow I could never imagine that her great and patriotic army, full of enthusiasm, could ever be defeated. I must admit I was not much of a strategist at that time. To me, Poland had its painfully complicated but glorious history, with its army, navy, police, government and the greatness of its brave people – it was unconquerable.

After matriculating from school aged 18, I had gone to stay with my father. During the day I worked as a store man in the tool magazine of a remote quarry in Janova Dolina in the Polish province of Volynia, (about 300 miles east of the capital Warsaw and close to the border with the Soviet Union). After hours I played football for the local side.

The small settlement of Janova Dolina was located in the midst of a somewhat disgruntled Ukrainian peopled area of Poland. Mr Szutkovski was the chief administrator. He acted like a local Tsar and ruled the place in a feudal but benevolent way. Everything revolved around his personality and importance to such an extent that even his servants felt keen to display their high position.

A local steam train ran from Janova Dolina to Kostopol, the nearest large town where the local people could shop. The train was supposed to start at eight o’clock each morning but it never did, as Mr Szutkovski’s housekeeper, an attractive well proportioned young woman, was always late and the train would not go without her. The people already on the train craned their necks out of the windows and on seeing her coming in the distance would burst into spontaneous clapping and cheering. The handsome, cheeky female would then walk by the carriages smiling and throwing kisses, as a beauty queen might do. She would board the carriage next to the engine and the train would start in a festive atmosphere which lasted all the way to Kostopol. Everyone seemed to enjoy the maid’s antics.

But the local Ukrainians were hostile and seething with discontent. The history of the Ukraine is even more complicated than that of Poland. The Ukraine, try as it might, never gained independence*, never knew independence and so trusted no one not even themselves. That was perhaps the source of their hostility. At least that is what I thought.

I was quite happy in Janova Dolina until I received my conscription papers to join the Army. This was in 1937. After the 12 month term in the army I returned to Warsaw to enrol as a law student which had always been my ambition. Warsaw in 1938 was a happy place. I remember the Christmas period with the carnival season in full swing. There were private parties where we danced till the small hours to the tunes of heady tangos, waltzes and foxtrots. Invitations to dinners and balls filled my time to capacity.

All women seemed wonderful and I kept falling in love, each new girl more exciting than the one I had met before. I attended lectures as frequently as I could, for I had also to earn a living as scholarships and grants were rare in those days. Students, unless they came from well-to-do families, had to work.

The most popular way of earning money was to be a private tutor. I earned my living in a very interesting way. I won a contest for public speaking. The first three places in this competition led to employment in the Polish Navy League. My duties were to visit public institutions and by means of projecting a film, followed by a speech, to stress the importance to Poland of the sea, the Navy, and the Merchant Fleet.

I was a fully grown man, always busy, always on the go, but really knew very little about the realities and responsibilities of life and its sordid problems. I thought everything in the Polish garden was lovely. The political, religious, economic and military situation of Poland seemed to me healthy and sound. After all, I listened to the radio which repeated many times how strong and united we were. I enjoyed life and the challenge and beauty of it. I found it tingling with excitement which completely absorbed me.

Often while dining in the more fashionable quarters of Warsaw I encountered older people who were usually at some stage of intoxication. They would sadly tell their life stories - of how they had fought and suffered and then found independent Poland was not to their satisfaction. These alleged heroes had expected Poland to reward them handsomely with all that they desired. I thought that all they wanted was a sea of vodka. I thought they were lazy and it was simply a case of them never having been willing to work. Their sorrowful tales went in one ear and out of the other. I felt no sympathy or understanding for them.

My mind worked in a simple way. Somebody had to rule. Somebody had to carry out orders. Somebody had to work. Of course there was a lot of suffering everywhere and Poland was no exception. Suffering and pain were part of the human set up. The world could not be the same without it. However I firmly believed that by individual effort and by a combination of brawn and brain one ought to be able to conquer the world.

In a small way I thought I could make the best of whatever came along. That was how I thought at the time. My education and upbringing conditioned me that way. After all I was a proud citizen of the new Poland which had been reborn on the ashes of the empires of Prussia, Austria and Russia. The future was mine for the taking.

I was a true Polish patriot and I loved my country and its leaders. Poland was something of my own flesh and blood and I would willingly fight and die for it if necessary. I felt like a master there. Of course I knew nothing of the problems faced by the older generation brought up under oppressive imperial masters.

In 1939 Poland was again at a centre of political conflict. Hitler threatened from the west and Stalin from the east and Poland, as so often before in her history, stood in the way of both.

Russia and Germany (Prussia) were Poland’s traditional adversaries. Our Foreign Secretary, Colonel Jósef Beck, made strong passionate, speeches that were music to our ears. Poles would fight for their freedom, whoever the enemy, he often said. Naturally with my strong convictions I had no reason to worry. I carried on my daily routine zestfully. I would not give way to panic with its ugly face.

I did not want to believe that war might break out but sometimes I was disturbed by the forebodings of young women, some close friends of mine, fearful as if they knew that terrible events were on the horizon. Was it intuition or better judgement? It was unnerving and disturbing.

I thought Poland strong enough to fight to final victory and was sure that any danger would come from the west. I was not afraid of Soviet Russia especially since our victory against the Russians in 1920. Any threat coming from that quarter never entered my head.

My father had been born under Tsars and served in the Russian Army. In 1905 he had been sent to Manchuria to fight the Japanese. He had never been to school but had by his own efforts learnt to read and write. When Poland became independent he left the Army and worked in a glass works in Piotrków my home town.

His most cherished desire was to see his children educated and given what he himself had missed. My mother too had never been to school. She had been brought up in the Russian Empire where learning the Polish language was forbidden. She had been a domestic servant before she married my father.

Although our family was suspicious of the Russians and the communists, our background was ideal for communist cultivation. We had suffered many privations in our childhood years. Although sympathetic to communism, I preferred to see communists stay in Russia and not be in Poland. Anyway the Communist Party was illegal in Poland and I was convinced that it was right that it should be so. I could not imagine that any Pole would seek advice or help from the Bolsheviks or act under orders from Moscow. If Polish communists wanted a communist state they should go to Russia.

I might sympathise with ordinary Russian people but their way of living and system of government should be confined to their own country. Poland was mine and I was Polish and to be a communist was treason in Poland. I knew little enough about Soviet Communism in those days. When working in the Basalt Quarry in Janova Dolina I had heard of the meetings of strange persons who would talk in the greatest secrecy of the goings-on in Russia or Bolshevia as we used to call it. They spoke of letters from their Polish relatives living in the Soviet Union that asked for clothing, pieces of material and even empty sacks. There was talk of famine, murder, rape, desolation and unheard of cruelties there. I didn’t know what to make of it.

Soviet citizens who were caught crossing the frontier without permission were declared enemies of the people. The usual punishment was a term of at least three years in prison or a labour camp. We had a neighbour, Szura Lazina a Russian woman who had married a Pole and had obtained permission to come to Poland. She had an eight year old son. Late at night she would tell gruesome stories of hardship, want, corruption and cruelty. I was always an eager listener. I wondered though if she was a genuine settler or one of perhaps many infiltrators sent to Poland to spy, inform or act as a guide when the time of the Bolshevik invasion came.

In spite of this I did not worry about any threat from the Soviet Union unduly.

There were seven in my family: my mother and father, my younger brother Stasiek, my sisters Czesława, Regina and Stefa, and me. We lived in two tiny rooms in the Budki district of Piotrków close