Read Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw Online
Authors: Norman Davies
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #War, #History
The NKVD records of the period reveal an extraordinary attention to detail. For Serov’s men did not simply root out undesirables. They collected facts on anyone and anything that would throw light on the attitudes and activities of the communities which they were processing: and literally tons of evidence was forwarded to Moscow. When they captured a Home Army radio station in Lublin, for example, they also captured its archive and all its correspondence with the exiled Government in London. Even they must have been amused to find a summary of Anthony Eden’s speech to the House of Commons of 27 September and of his view that no arrests were taking place. They also found a report from the station operator telling London what local conditions were really like:
Telegram, nr. 303, from 28/X
1. Mass arrests of Home Army soldiers and also of civilians faithful to the London Government have intensified since 10 October, with the simultaneous seizure of landowners, teachers, doctors and educated people. The Militia and the NKVD are pacifying villages which oppose the Lublin Committee. Public and secret shootings of Home Army soldiers are the order of the day. In the towns, roundups take place in the evenings . . . The prisons and concentration camps are overflowing. When intoxicated, Soviet officers talk openly about shooting Poles . . .
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Such was life in the districts adjoining Warsaw within a month of the Capitulation.
As the NKVD took in their latest wave of prisoners, others could be considered for release. In December 1944, for instance, Stalin told Beria that ‘Comrade Bierut’ should be allowed to see the full roll-call of the NKVD’s Polish prisoners and that he could submit a shortlist of names for
special amnesty. Bierut duly submitted twenty-three names of ‘Poles and Polish Jews’. They were all pre-war Communists who had been languishing in the Gulag since the purge of 1937–38.
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One individual, who fell into the hands of the NKVD on 12 November 1944, proved to be of exceptional interest. A Varsovian by education and an army officer by profession, Boleslas P. – alias ‘Sablevski’ – had served in 1939 in a tank unit commanded by Arrow, and in 1943–44 had commanded a battalion which operated in western Byelorussia. In July ’44, he had disbanded his unit in order to facilitate their infiltration into Warsaw. But surrounded by the Red Army, he had not managed to reach the Rising and had gone to earth in a village only ten miles north-east of the capital. Both his brother and his first wife were AK soldiers killed in the Rising.
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The really interesting thing about him, however, was his pre-war membership of the illegal fascistic offshoot of the nationalist movement and his reputation as the ideologist of an extreme right-wing faction of radical Catholics, who admired Gen. Franco and who favoured a strong-arm totalitarian regime. In short, he was the sort of politician whom the Communists badly needed. They shared his contempt for Western-style democracy, and welcomed his readiness to defy the traditions and authority of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. And they soon realized that he could be very useful in their designs for splitting the Church. As a result, Sablevski was given special treatment. Taken by the NKVD for interrogation at the Royal Castle in Lublin, he was subsequently handed over to the Polish Secret Police, and held by them in the Mokotov Prison amid the Warsaw ruins. In due course, as the President of the Catholic PAX movement, he would emerge as one of the Communists’ key collaborators. By the lights of Western political science, he was a figure that was not compatible with Communism. But in the light of Soviet practice, he was entirely acceptable.
What exactly ensued during Sablevski’s imprisonment by the NKVD and the UB has been the subject of much speculation. But one may assume that he was made a tempting offer that he could only have refused on pain of death: ‘[Sablevski] was a figure larger than life . . ., a fanatic who [threw] himself in full frenzy into the extremist politics which [overwhelmed] Europe and ravaged the lives of its inhabitants like a medieval bubonic plague.’
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The openings for opportunists like Sablevski were made by the gaps left by the decimated generation of the Rising. But he paid dearly. His brother was killed in the first days of the Rising. His first wife, courier
‘Halina’, a Protestant, was shot dead on 14 August, when carrying an order from the AK Command. His second wife was a colleague of his first wife from the Radoslav Grouping. His first son, who had survived the Rising as an infant, despite his mother’s death, was cruelly murdered in 1957 by avengers who fled to Israel.
A new stage of intensive work began for the NKVD with Zhukov’s January offensive. Warsaw fell almost immediately into Soviet hands, followed rapidly by all the villages, towns and cities west of the Vistula. [
GHOST TOWN
, p. 492]
At one small town near Warsaw, the NKVD were given an unusual mission which reveals much about their trade. A popular author, Ferdinand O., who enjoyed international acclaim and whose Mongolian travelogue
Beasts, Men and Gods
(1922) had been translated into many languages, was on their blacklist. Among other offences, he had written a less than reverential semi-fictional biography of Lenin. When they came to arrest him in mid-January 1945, they were told that he had died only a few days earlier. So for good measure, they exhumed his body to make sure that he was dead.
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False burials were widespread: Home Army men on the run were adopting the disgraceful practice of erecting gravestones to themselves. The NKVD was no doubt tired of hearing ‘Sorry, he was killed in the Rising.’ [
SIBERIA
, p. 495]
The next big group of ex-insurgents to fall into NKVD hands were the ‘Robinson Crusoes’, who came out of hiding as soon as the Soviet Army moved into the ruins of Warsaw on 17 January. Many of their fellow stowaways had not managed to hold out. In the following days and weeks, when every inch of the ruins was thoroughly searched, scores of hideouts were found inhabited only by the dead. They had perished from cold or hunger or despair, frequently shot through the head with their own last bullet. But many hundreds, if not thousands, of gaunt and ghostly individuals were able to emerge, and in scenes of extreme emotion to greet their liberators. As usual, they were warmly greeted by the common soldiers. But as soon as the NKVD arrived the climate of their reception changed abruptly. It made no difference that they were the heroic survivors of the sixty-three-day battle against the Germans or that many of them were Jews. In the eyes of the NKVD, they were illegals who had been living on the enemy side of the front and who, having failed to die, were potential collaborators. Without exception, they were hauled in for questioning.
GHOST TOWN
A young woman, a double agent working for the Home Army, enters Warsaw in the company of the NKVD on the first full day of the Capital’s liberation
For me, the most tragic experience of all was entering Warsaw. I saw a wilderness, terrifying sights . . .
I was almost the very first person to go in, on the first or second day, before the civilian population was allowed to cross the pontoon bridge. I walked across that bridge with all those Soviet officials and various others. I think I may have been the first . . . I know that I had to get permission beforehand, and that I went in the company of my ‘colleagues’ from the NKVD. All the top leaders went – Colonel Shkurin, Petrov, and two others from another unit. The procession was a large one; but there wasn’t a single Pole among them. I’d have remembered if I had seen a Polish uniform. They wanted to cross [the river] like conquerors . . .
The bridge, which was built on pontoons, swayed as we walked over it. Terrible sights, such as I’d never seen before. It seemed as if the world had fallen apart.
One started from Diamond Street, an image of destruction, picking a path through the rubble. Sometimes one had to scramble up to the height of the first floors, and then to clamber down. The figure of Christ was lying there, beside an overturned cross, as if He had again fallen under its weight.
The smell of dust and smoke was wafting around, mixed with the stench of corpses . . . Hardly anyone was to be seen, except for those who had stayed on [after the Rising] and who now came out of their hideouts, terrible shadowy figures. I could not approach them, or talk to them. I just walked like a robot in the direction of Skolimov Street, until I lost my way, surrounded by ruins. I met someone who said that everyone in the house [nearby] had been shot . . . I didn’t cry; I just sat there. It quickly grew dark; and I realized that there was no point whatsoever in looking for anything. There was not much point either in asking those few people with their bundles: they didn’t react.
But I asked someone after Skolimov Street. The most important thing was for me to find out what had happened there. People were weeping, kneeling, and praying beside the mass of improvised graves. Some of the crosses had notes pinned to them on a scrap of paper or cloth. But the writing had faded, or had been washed away [by the snow and rain].
I spent the night with an old woman on Diamond Street. I must have told her that I was with the army, because she was very suspicious and took me in very reluctantly. At least she allowed me to stay, and gave me something hot to drink . . .
I asked her about the Rising . . . I could not forgive myself for not having been there . . . I asked her how it had been. But she said nothing.
I returned to Praga, completely broken. They [the NKVD] immediately jumped on me, demanding to know if I’d met any Home Army types, if any conspiratorial cell was still operating. I snapped back at them: ‘What do you think? Could any conspirators have survived in those ruins?’ . . . When they saw how depressed I was, they started talking politics. ‘Look, girl,’ they said, ‘see what the AK has done – so much destruction, so much death.’
1
Ludwika Z.
One of the larger companies of ‘Robinsons’ consisted of some thirty men and women who had immured themselves in a complex of cellars in the City Centre between Slippery and Hay Streets. Led by Dr Henry Beck and his wife Yadviga, they included a Polish army officer, a dentist called Dr Schindler, an AK nurse and her underground journalist friend, and two Greek Jews liberated by the AK from the Goose Street Camp, together with the Fisher, Goldberg, Sobelsohn, and Goldfarb families. They kept a dog called Bunker, who never barked. When their water ran out, they had succeeded in digging an effective well that was 9m (thirty feet) deep. Their first outside reconnaissance had taken place on 18 November, when they joined up with a fugitive Soviet officer called ‘Vania’. Their liberation came suddenly, when Dr Schindler returned from a patrol with the news: ‘The Bolsheviks are here!’
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Another group of some twenty Robinsons survived in a cellar at 26 Golden Street. Their leader, an AK officer known as ‘Selim’, had arranged that his fiancée, Eva, would leave Warsaw at the Capitulation and that she would return to release them. When Eva duly returned 107 days later, she found to her horror that 26 Golden Street had been taken over by a unit of the NKVD. So she told them everything. The NKVD men thereupon descended to the cellar, knocked down the dividing wall, and saw eighteen half-living creatures emerge on all fours through the resultant hole. They shot two people, who could not make it, and promptly took the rest under armed guard to a special investigation villa in Jolibord. Selim contrived to escape from the villa, married Eva, and at the first opportunity emigrated to Venezuela, where (one presumes) they lived happily ever after.
The ‘Pianist’s’ liberation almost proved fatal:
The Germans had withdrawn without a fight . . . I ran downstairs, put my head out of the front door of the abandoned building, and looked out into the [Independence] Boulevard. It was a grey, misty morning. To my left, not far away, stood a woman soldier in a uniform that was difficult to identify at that distance. A woman with a bundle on her back was approaching from my right. When she came closer I ventured to speak to her: ‘Hello. Excuse me . . .’ I called in a muted voice, beckoning her over.
She stared at me, dropped her bundle and took to her heels with a shriek of, ‘A German!’ Immediately the guard turned, saw me, aimed and fired her machine pistol. The bullets hit the wall and sent plaster flaking down on me. Without thinking, I rushed up the stairs and took refuge in the attic . . . I heard soldiers calling to each other as they went down into the cellars, and then the sound of shots and exploding hand grenades.
This time my situation was absurd. I was going to be shot by Polish soldiers in liberated Warsaw, on the very verge of freedom . . .
I began slowly coming down the stairs, shouting as loud as I could, ‘Don’t shoot! I’m Polish!’
Very soon I heard swift footsteps climbing the stairs. The figure of a young officer in Polish uniform, with the eagle on his cap, came into view beyond the banisters. He pointed a pistol at me and shouted, ‘Hands up!’
I repeated my cry of, ‘Don’t shoot! I’m Polish!’
The lieutenant went red with fury. ‘Then why in God’s name don’t you come down?’ he roared. ‘And what are you doing in a German overcoat?’
However, I could not go with them just like that. First, I had to keep a promise I had made myself that I would kiss the first Pole I met after the end of Nazi rule. Fulfilling my vow proved far from easy. The lieutenant resisted my suggestion for a long time . . . Not until I had finally kissed him did he produce a small mirror and hold it up to my face, saying with a smile, ‘There, now you can see what a good patriot I am!’
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A considerable number of insurgents from Warsaw found their way into the 1st and 2nd Polish Armies from the autumn of 1944 onwards. Even more Home Army men had been trapped by the Soviet cordon on their way to assist the Rising. Many of these men continued to give trouble. As hardened veterans, they were very welcome to the fledgeling Communist-run forces. On the other hand, as self-reliant and independent-minded individuals, proud of their patriotic sacrifices during the Rising, they were exactly the sort of recruits which irked the political department. Yet cannon-fodder was badly needed. And more of them came forward in January and February ’45, after Poland was fully occupied and the AK had been disbanded. So the problem grew, until it came to a head in the spring, when the Battle for Berlin was already underway. To the NKVD’s horror, it was discovered not only that their Polish charges were in possession of ‘illegal’ radio transmitters but also that they were using them to communicate with their compatriots who were fighting under British command in Italy and the Netherlands. The alarm was sounded. Wildly exaggerated reports
were sent back to Moscow, warning of a dastardly plot which would bring a million-strong army of Polish exiles, led by Gen. Anders, marching through Germany to contest Soviet domination. The reaction was true to form: arrest all suspects!
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So yet another contingent of innocents wended their way to the pit of misfortune. If they were lucky, such prisoners were sent to one of the milder NKVD camps, where the chances of survival for fit young men were moderate. If they were unlucky, they were drafted into a Soviet penal battalion, which was used among other things for clearing minefields with nothing more sophisticated than human feet.
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[
FIRESTORM
, p. 499]