Cruel World (47 page)

Death was a frequent occurrence both at the factories and in the punishment camps. The dead were buried in shallow graves within the confines of the camp. The boys tried to decorate the graves of their friends with crudely carved markers and flowers plucked from the roadside. At night the guard dogs often dug up the corpses, which the children duly reburied the next day.

Moments of fun and leaves were few and far between, and homesickness was palpable. There were escapes, but survival outside the camps was almost impossible. Within, such pastimes as card playing were forbidden, and singing a Polish song at the wrong moment was grounds for being sent to prison. Treatment of young women was only marginally better than that of the boys. Celina Drozdek was just nineteen when she and thirty-nine other girls were sent to a jute factory in Bremen in 1940. The group was housed in a former children’s home that was at first positively luxurious compared to the boys’ barracks, but by 1942, when Celina escaped, it was crammed with more than 1,000 women. Life in the building was strictly controlled. Curfew was at 8:00 p.m., and uniformed officers made frequent inspections during which the women had to stand for hours in the halls. Celina was lucky to be assigned to kitchen duty. Here she was warm and was at least assured of her proper rations.

Even the distribution of food in these camps was carefully regulated according to racial rules. The midday meal for everyone consisted of soup, but there were separate pots for each nationality of forced laborers in the huge factory, and still another for the German staff. Their pot contained
“thick and tasty” soup with meat and vegetables; they also got rice pudding with vanilla sauce for dessert. Czech, Belgian, French, and Hungarian laborers, being of Aryan origin, got less meat in their soup and no pudding. The Polish pot had no meat at all, and its potatoes were sometimes transferred to the French pot when that one needed thickening. Later, when Russian workers began to arrive, there would be a Russian pot containing a thin gruel with a few potatoes, beets, and oats. All the soups were carefully inspected, and if the chief cook felt the Russian soup was too thick, she ordered it to be diluted with water. For reasons that are unclear, the spoon used to stir the Russian pot absolutely could not be used in any other one. Not only were the Russians lowest in the soup pecking order, but their dormitory consisted of a windowless room with no beds and their sole recreation of one half hour a week took place on a balcony.
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This complex classification was not limited to soups, but in theory governed every aspect of the forced laborer’s life. By the end of 1942 each nationality had its own classification: “A” were the Italian allies, soon to be demoted. “B” were “Germanic” peoples such as the Dutch and Norwegians. “C” was for “non-Germanic” peoples with whom the Nazis were allied or linked, such as the Hungarians and the French, through their pro-German Vichy regime. “D” denoted Slavs: Poles, Croats, Serbs, Czechs, Slovenians, and, lowest among these, Russians. Though satisfying to the racial agencies, these classifications and their accompanying sets of rules and privileges were too much trouble to enforce for factory supervisors and were reduced to a simplistic “East is bad and West is acceptable” classification by the average German.
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The subtleties were even more lost on the young workers, whose main thoughts were of food and home leave, which was sporadically available. The temptation not to return from such furloughs was often overwhelming, but every worker knew that relatives would be punished and no further leaves would be given to his campmates until he had returned. Family crises were not grounds for release. Henryk Grygiel was not allowed to go home when his mother was dying. Permission was given for him to attend her funeral, but camp officials took so long over the paperwork that he arrived too late even for that.
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In the early days of the war things were not all bad. The boys amused themselves by pretending not to understand German, and other minor irritating acts that drove their bosses crazy. There were walks and some dancing during the free time allotted on Sundays, and great efforts were made by each barrack to make secret decorations for Easter and erect some sort of a Christmas tree. The young workers were allowed to send
home group photographs, in which they look quite presentable, but all other letters sent and received were censored. At every opportunity the kids went into the towns to spend their tiny stipends on more food or, having removed their badges, to sneak into a movie. Along the way there were kindly people both in the camps and the towns who tried to give these children a small amount of affection. But as the war went on, both living and working conditions deteriorated steadily. To many of these young slaves, it seemed that they had lost forever the possibility of a real life, which was, of course, what the Nazis intended.

On September 17, 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland, as had been secretly arranged beforehand with the Nazis. The USSR was just as eager as its ally to begin cleansing the buffer zone between East and West. The criteria were different, being based not on race, but on class and economic status; nonetheless, the required purging and rearrangement of the residents of the area would be no less ferocious than that carried out by the Nazis.

In the Soviet-controlled territories the ideologies and enmities were also long established. Poland had been the object of Russian desire since tsarist times. In 1920, the Red Army had attempted to take Warsaw and had been humiliatingly defeated by Poland, where the nobility, the Catholic Church, and an independent peasantry—all anathema to the Communists—were still firmly in place. After this conflict, millions of Poles were forcibly repatriated from the Soviet-controlled areas of Belorussia and the Ukraine, but over a million had remained in the USSR and had been the targets of continuing Soviet repression, totaling nearly 40 percent of those purged as national minorities in the 1930s.
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The feeling was mutual: in the areas of the Ukraine that the Poles administered, they were also given to brutal measures against the Ukrainian majority, who deeply resented the Polish “military colonists” who had been sent in to Polonize the region after World War I.

The genetic card was played by the Soviets in Poland too. Their invasion was explained as a mission to rescue Soviet “blood brothers,” that is, the Belorussians and the Ukrainians (whose numbers Stalin had so recently decimated in the USSR proper), and as an effort to impose order in the now disintegrated Polish state while assisting its population to “reconstruct its statehood.”

As they moved into their new territory, the Russians, like the Germans, took every advantage of the existing ethnic hatreds. Poles who thought the
Soviets were now turning on the Germans were, at first, not disabused of this opinion, while the Ukrainians and Belorussians were encouraged to attack the minority Polish landowners and administrators.
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In the vacuum left by the removal of the Polish administration, makeshift governments and militias of locals sprang up, but these independent entities would not last long. On October 1, 1939, the Soviet Politburo issued to officials five pages of detailed instructions for the “Sovietization” of the area.
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The effects began to be felt within days.

That “liberation” had been a myth soon became clear. Total economic exploitation, collectivization, and other Soviet policies were to be introduced. Anything of value, including whole factories and buildings, was shipped east. And, as had been the case in the Ukraine, private food supplies were forbidden to the peasants. Businesses were expropriated, Polish symbols and language were prohibited, and, in order to provide quarters for Soviet administrators, arbitrary evictions were instituted. Families were thrown out on a moment’s notice and forced to find new lodgings in towns and villages already overwhelmed with refugees from the German-occupied areas. The threat of Sovietization and the dreadful living conditions led thousands of Ukrainians and Jews (who of course were rejected) to apply for repatriation to German-occupied Poland under the auspices of a German Repatriation Commission.

Meanwhile, the Soviets too had plans for demographic rearrangements, which would also require classification and census of the entire population. It was an effort just as massive as that of the Nazis. Wasting no time, the Soviet authorities sent in hundreds of Party officials and Komsomol members, the Communist equivalent of the Hitler Youth, to do the paperwork.
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In the process of this registration, most of those who had served in the Polish armed forces would be discovered and slated for eventual execution. Refugees were identified, and everyone’s ethnic origin was recorded. Workers were required to join unions and fill out forms giving personal information.

On October 11, while Hitler was organizing the transfer of the Balts, the Soviets announced that there would be a plebiscite on October 22. Preparations for the election gave the new overlords further opportunity for the gathering of personal information under the guise of voter registration. During the political campaign, mandatory and infinitely boring propaganda meetings, usually conducted in Russian, created opportunities for surveillance and intimidation. Voting was obligatory: those who did not appear at the polling place were fetched by militiamen. Ballot boxes were taken to hospitals and even synagogues, and every corrupt practice ever
heard of in an election was used to assure a massive turnout.
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Needless to say, the election returned assemblies in the Ukraine and Belorussia that voted for full incorporation into the USSR, and cleared the way for a “legal” restructuring of society that would differ from the Nazi model only in the categories of groups to be eliminated or incarcerated.

Some 65,000 Polish prisoners of war went immediately to concentration or labor camps. On November 10, 1939, a commission on refugees was formed to decide the fate of the hundreds of thousands of civilian Poles who had fled east before the Germans. A few weeks later, the Politburo ordained that 33,000 of them, plus 21,000 families of “military colonists” who had lived in the region since the end of World War I, would be sent to Siberia as forced labor. Any property they left behind would revert to the state. Simultaneously, the Soviet government instructed the various commissariats involved, and especially the Commissariat of Forestry, to prepare for the arrival of these “resettlers.” Transportation would be arranged by the NKVD. Far more generous than the Nazis, the Soviets allowed their resettlers to take along 500 kilograms per family of the necessities of life, such as clothes, bedding, utensils, and tools. What they chose would later often determine their survival.

Accommodations for the voyage were, in theory, not so bad. Convoys were to consist of fifty-five railroad cars, four for freight and the rest designed to hold twenty-five persons each. The settlers were “guaranteed” one hot meal and 800 grams of bread per day during the trip. In order to avoid resistance, the actual deportations were to be carried out without notice, on a single day. The planning was incredibly elaborate. Special teams carefully charted train routes to the settlement areas, how each targeted house was to be approached, and how the families were to be moved to the heavily guarded train stations. Reality, except for the element of surprise, would bear little resemblance to the written plan.
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The first deportation took place on February 10, 1940. Before dawn, in the winter darkness, small detachments of Russian troops arrived at thousands of sleeping houses. Twelve-year-old Kazimierz F. remembered that the soldiers

This scene was repeated with little variation for some 28,000 families totaling 139,590 people.
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At some point during the chaotic hours of packing, a sentence was read to the deportees to inform them that they were now Soviet citizens being “resettled” to another country.
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The Russian troops looted freely; attempts to deceive them by plying them with vodka were to little avail. Sometimes the soldiers could be kind. Clearly having witnessed such scenes before, they often gave the deportees good advice: at one house a soldier found a saw and an axe in the attic and advised his prisoners to take them along.
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The transfers to the trains stayed long in the children’s memories. They recalled the mournful howls of their abandoned dogs as they moved away from their houses. The overburdened sledges in which they rode often turned over, throwing everyone into the snow. “The frozen children cried, the NKVD man shouts to stop crying.” Sometimes the sleds stopped for hours in the freezing cold. At the stations, groups waited in locked enclosures to board the trains, and those who tried to escape through the windows were shot. Loading the trains was dreadful. Families were often separated, luggage was lost, and the directive to put only twenty-five people in each car was nowhere observed. One child saw a woman who moved too slowly be decapitated as the freight car doors were slammed shut.
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