Read Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw Online
Authors: Norman Davies
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #War, #History
Several passages referred to the Warsaw Rising and to the Home Army. One of them laid out the correspondence between the Lublin Committee and the American Labor leader, Norman Thomas. Rebuffing the ‘fraternal greetings’, Thomas’s reply left no room for doubt about his feelings:
The Rising of the Warsaw workers in the summer of 1944 has been recognised as one of the finest pages in the history of struggles for freedom. Russia’s betrayal of this struggle is one of the most shameless and most tragic episodes of this war.
Another passage, in the chapter on ‘Libellous Propaganda’, described a broadcast made by Lublin Radio in April 1945 on the second anniversary of the Ghetto Rising. Listeners to the broadcast learned that the Home Army had not fought against the Germans but alongside them:
The insurgents [i.e. the Ghetto fighters] had against them the German air force, the SS, German tanks, Polish hooligans, Polish reactionaries, and indeed the Home Army itself. We shall do everything in our power to overcome these bandits [and] criminals of the Home Army.
48
The poisonous smear of labelling the Home Army as ‘anti-Semitic reactionaries’ was already being spread.
A substantial section exposed the propaganda campaign aimed at discrediting Britain and America, and at undermining wartime loyalties. The essay closed with a statement of faith in the long-term future. ‘Once again the Polish community [has taken] up the slogan “We shall survive”,’ it declared, ‘in the unshaken belief that the day will finally dawn when freedom will cease to be “a bourgeois dream” (Lenin) and will become a joyful reality.’
49
On 12 June 1945, the last Foreign Minister of the exiled Government sent a copy to Sir Owen O’Malley at the Foreign Office. The reaction was not enthusiastic – ‘an excellent little essay’ but ‘useless to expect the Prime Minister to read it.’
50
At first sight, the fate of the Warsaw insurgents has all the appearances of an impossibly complicated subject. Certainly, within a couple of years of the Capitulation, survivors of the Rising were found on every continent of the globe. Yet the causes of this remarkable diaspora become much more readily intelligible if one asks when, where, and by whom each category of survivors was captured. To this end, one has to remember that in 1944–45, Poland was divided into a German and a Soviet zone of occupation, that ex-insurgents were unwelcome in both zones, and that the dividing line between the two zones was constantly moving westwards. Hence survivors picked up in the Warsaw district before 17 January 1945 would have been taken by the Gestapo, whilst those captured there at a later date would have been taken by the NKVD. One must also remember that the Third Reich collapsed in May 1945, thereby releasing all surviving captives in Germany to a variety of destinations. The Soviet Union and the Soviet Bloc, in contrast, did not collapse for forty-five years.
The nature of the treatment varied according to time and place. During the Rising itself, when neither Nazis nor Soviets regarded the Home Army as a legitimate combatant force, captured insurgents were in the greatest danger of being shot out of hand. In the period between the Capitulation and the end of the war, the Germans generally sent all their prisoners into formal captivity. The Soviets, in contrast, were given to weeding out officers from rank and file. The former, if not shot, were most likely to be shipped off to the Gulag or to re-education centres.
The latter were often drafted for immediate military duty. After the war, when the Nazi regime no longer existed, the Soviets and their minions continued as before. But now they had all the leisure they needed for political investigations, lengthy torture, secret or show trials, and judicial murder. In this situation, they occasionally succeeded in persuading their captives to change sides and to join in the persecution of their erstwhile comrades.
The real complications may be discerned from the fact that ex-insurgents could easily fall into two or more of the above categories. Those who had stayed in German captivity until May 1945, for example, usually had the choice either of staying abroad or of returning to Poland. If they returned, they were immediately liable to be rearrested by the NKVD and were frequently deported. So it was perfectly possible for men to serve time both in a Nazi camp and then in a Soviet camp. By the same token, insurgents who were drafted into the Soviet-run Polish armies could easily fall foul of their political commissars and find themselves in short order on the road not to Berlin but to Siberia. Similarly, as happened to one of the most famous ex-insurgents, time in the Gulag could turn out to be the prelude to rearrest by the Communist security organs in Poland and to a second, terrible sentence. The permutations were legion. It is not beyond the bounds of realism to imagine people who saw the inside of the Paviak before 1944, and the inside of a Nazi concentration camp afterwards, before progressing to the Gulag in the late 1940s and to a Polish Communist prison in the early 1950s. In some history books, this is called the period of Liberation.
During the Rising
Warsaw was completely cut off. Up to 12 September 1944, it was surrounded by German forces on all sides. From 13 September to 3 October, the Germans continued to control the left bank of the Vistula, whilst the Soviets moved up to the right bank. Military cordons filtered all movement on the city outskirts. Escape was extremely difficult, but not impossible – especially for civilians who chose to test sectors guarded by friendly Hungarian troops. Otherwise, escapers had to take their life in their hands. [
IRKA II
, p. 473]
In the early days of the Rising, the Germans made no special provision for Varsovians who wanted to leave. They relied on a number of catchment centres which received individuals caught by the cordon and which were used as the first stage on the way to the main transit camp. But at the end of August they relented. Regular announcements were made about protected evacuations. Times and meeting-points were designated, even though most Varsovians ignored them.
IRKA II
The young widow of a Home Army soldier, living outside Warsaw, waits for news of her husband
On 23 August I had given birth to a son. The doctor from the nearest town did not make it, so my aunt delivered the baby. He had a lot of hair on his head – and everyone remarked on his unusual resemblance to his father. Many years later, friends of my husband, meeting my son on the street, stopped him, asking, ‘Are you by any chance André F.’s son?’
At the time [in August and September], dozens of people had come to my uncle’s place, expecting to stay. All day we heard the thunder of gunfire, the ominous noise of bombers overhead and even the distant detonations caused by bombs, which we clearly differentiated from the gunshots. In the evening we watched with fear as the sky heated up from ever greater fires. It soon seemed that the whole of Warsaw was burning. However, I believed that the man closest to me was alive.
Throughout the next three months I waited for his return. A camp had been set up, a few kilometres away in Prushkov, where new transports of Warsaw’s inhabitants had been constantly arriving. We went there every day, searching for people and for news of those who had survived and those who had perished. No one told me that André was dead – although often, when I joined a group of people in conversation, they suddenly fell silent. Later I understood that they had been talking about it but that no one had been brave enough to tell me. Everyone had guessed long ago what that sudden silence might mean, but I continued to believe that my husband was still alive . . .
Three months after leaving the camp at Prushkov, my parents-in-law found themselves in Grodzisk. They determined to take me to their house, so that I would discover the truth from their own lips. André was one of four brothers, so they really loved me, as the first ‘daughter’. I will not forget my father-in-law’s words, which may seem grandiloquent, but I know that he only wanted to tell me exactly what he felt. He put his arms around me and said quietly, ‘We should both be proud – your husband, and my son, died for our country.’
[He had been killed on the second day of the Rising.]
During the Warsaw Rising three men from André’s family had been killed – André, his sixteen-year-old brother, and a cousin. My father-in-law was the owner of an estate in the Kuyavy region, which had been theirs for several generations. The family was of German origin. It is worth pointing out that when the Germans arrived in 1939, they
offered to give my father-in-law
Reichsdeutsch
papers. And he would have been free to leave. Refusal could be punished by arrest, yet he chose to escape immediately, and to hide with his whole family in Warsaw.
1
Prisoners of war posed a major problem. At first, the Germans gave it no thought. Since they massacred perhaps 50,000 civilians in the first week, one need not reflect too long on how they dealt with the ‘bandits’ who had caused this mess in the first place. But attitudes changed as the Rising wore on. The German Command knew that the insurgents were holding a considerable number of German prisoners, also that the Western powers had belatedly publicized the Home Army’s combatant status. So in the later stages, the number of instances increased where German soldiers refrained from killing captured insurgents outright.
On the opposite side of the Vistula, the Soviet authorities had priorities of their own. They were not officially at war with the insurgents, but granted them no more respect than the Germans did. There is ample evidence to show firstly that any insurgent who crossed the Vistula to the Soviet lines was promptly arrested, and secondly that after 13 September the NKVD was conducting a systematic roundup in Praga.
The tasks faced by the NKVD after arriving in Poland can be gauged from the stream of reports sent to Beria by Gen. Serov, and by Beria to Stalin.
51
Having completed the liquidation of Home Army units east of the Bug, the Soviets may well have been labouring under the illusion created by the misinformation supplied earlier. If so, they would have been quickly disabused. They would have found that the People’s Army was not even the most influential branch of the socialist movement, let alone of the Underground as a whole; that the great majority of workers and peasants supported the Home Army; and that the Home Army, which was actively fighting the Germans, was the only Underground formation that really counted. They must have been deeply disappointed by the inability of the Lublin Committee to act as an efficient or reliable partner; and they can only have been bewildered to find in August that the Warsaw Rising had brought the AL and the AK together. Their first practical measure was to call for a special NKVD battalion to guard the Soviet diplomatic building in Lublin.
52
Before long they were calling for a general increase of NKVD troops.
53
In August and September 1944, the NKVD was working through a considerable backlog in its efforts to filter the population of the occupied areas. Beria only reported on 3 August on the completion of disarmament operations in Lithuania, and on 16 September from Novogrodek in Byelorussia. His letter to Stalin on the latter occasion concluded: ‘Military-Chekist operations for the liquidation of bandit-insurgent formations are continuing.’
54
In NKVD jargon, ‘liquidation’ was, to put it mildly, ambiguous, but orders dating from 20 July indicate the established procedures:
At this juncture, the main catchment centre was on the upper Bug. The principal destination of officers transported to Russia was Ostashkov near Kalinin, a notorious NKVD camp in a disbanded monastery on Lake Seliger, which had figured earlier in the Katyn story.
It is in this context that one can make soundings about NKVD conduct in Praga, which the Soviet Army occupied when the Rising was still in progress. There can be no doubt that Serov was there, and that the usual apparatus of filtration and repression was put into place. Arrests and deportations certainly occurred. The only query concerns their scale. Since fighting persisted until the end of the month, it is possible that Serov kept a relatively low profile until this particular ‘rear area’ stabilized.
Nonetheless, there can equally be no doubt that numerous insurgents managed to cross to the Soviet side in the dying days of the Rising, and that they received something short of a warm welcome. Abundant evidence exists to suggest that Soviet practice was to arrest everyone and anyone, wounded or not, who came to them from across the river, and to leave it to their prisoners to prove their innocence. [
EXODUS
, p. 476]
EXODUS
Civilians leave Warsaw filled with various degrees of despair and determination
‘Raus! Alle Männer raus!
’ they shout ever more violently.
On the way to the Western Station a crowd blackening into a large seething mass moves slowly, weighed down with packages clutched in complete silence. Expressionless, it does not let the watching Germans see the tragedy unfolding inside every one of us.
The guards spaced out along the length of the street do not sneer, but watch with interest and even admiration. Warsaw has set a new record, beating the length of Stalingrad’s resistance by a few days, even though the odds had been more heavily stacked against us. We are rather proud of that.
We walk past burnt-out houses. On the pavements, the charred bodies of people and animals tell a tragic tale. As we walk through this city of vampires our consciousness is gradually permeated by the pompous tones of Chopin’s funeral march. Someone passing us whistles it through gritted teeth.
1
2 October, Monday
The whole of Mokotov had been captured and every last one of the inhabitants expelled onto the Mokotov Fields. It was a beautiful day and people walked with bundles on their backs and suitcases in their hands. The sick were carried by the healthy, children by their mothers, all dazed, lamenting their fates. The German soldiers were not bad to us, transporting the old and the sick, giving us apples and sweets. The Ukrainians, however, were awful, stopping people and robbing them.
At last we reached the Race Course, where twelve barracks had been set up. We settled down on the bare ground, and on benches, but there was not enough room. Some lighted bonfires, which had to be put out at dusk, because of the air raids. So they paced up and down so as not to freeze. In the daytime the Germans brought black coffee and bread, and soup in the evenings, but we ate nothing because we had no utensils and no one wanted to lend us any.
At last trains consisting of cattle wagons arrived for the journey to Prushkov, which was rumoured to be a model camp run by the International Red Cross. There would be care for the elderly, children, and the injured, and food and clothes. But people fought to get onto the train, so the Germans waded in with rifle butts. It was impossible to sit down. There were few benches and no free places. The carriage was closed from the outside and we travelled for three hours. People were wailing, unable to see to their toilet needs; and they stood in urine and excrement.
We arrived on a beautiful September afternoon. After a two-month break, we caught sight of baskets of fruit, white bread, and of people walking about freely.
2
‘We knew that the first stage was the transit camp at Prushkov, near Warsaw, whither we were to be transported by rail. As we were passing through Tvorki station we heard some encouraging words and I jumped from the train with my mother. Well, I was pushed. We hid ourselves in the local psychiatric hospital. I remember it most intensely. (I later made two films in that hospital,
Illumination
and then
Wherever It Is
.) The director during and after the war was Dr K., and I had to hide under the bed whenever he came into the ward with Germans. My mother was disguised as a patient and all around there were more false patients than real ones. For a child the real patients were frightening. From Tvorki we went to a farm and lived there until the day when my father, who had been in Cracow, found us through the Red Cross. We managed to reach him before Christmas. In Cracow, I saw the Germans leave and the Russians arrive.’
3
Krzysztof Zanussi
An insurgent soldier prepares to surrender
We left Warsaw disarmed, but with heads held high, at regulation pace, four abreast. We passed a group of German officers, who looked with interest at this insurgent army, which they had not been able to get the better of for sixty-three days: a force, which had destroyed a significant number of their tanks, and inflicted heavy losses, but which now marched bravely past, as if victorious. I heard one of them saying loudly to his men ‘
Stolze Polen
’ (Proud Poles).
We neither looked nor felt defeated. It was deeply enshrined in our minds that we had done something great, despite the eventual capitulation. I did not predict that it would be fourteen years before I saw Warsaw again, and that the city would not be really free even then. The civilian population also left Warsaw in a disciplined manner, with high personal self-esteem and national pride.
4
A. Janicki