Read Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw Online
Authors: Norman Davies
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #War, #History
SIBERIA
A Home Army courier evades the Germans but not the NKVD
Before the end of the Rising, I was ordered to leave Warsaw, so as not to fall into German hands. After burning my promotion to second lieutenant, I was transported from the Hospital of the Infant Jesus to Prushkov, hiding among the elderly. Then I reached my uncle and grandmother’s place, to show that I was still alive, scrub up, do my washing, get warmer clothes, sleep, and eat as much as I could. In Gerardov, I received a bicycle. My direct superior, Captain J., arrived once in a while with orders.
On Sunday 11 February 1945, a day off from my work for the Underground, I cycled to Alexandrov. There I met seventeen-year-old Fela, and we rode back together. In the dark, by the market square at Viskitki, we were forced by the cobblestones to dismount. Suddenly the strong lights of torches were directed at us. It was a group of Russian soldiers demanding documents. I handed mine over, they looked over them, gave them back, and let me leave. Fela had no documents, so they took us both. I whispered to Fela, ‘Remember, we do not know each other.’ I, after all, was the one that was heavily implicated, not her.
This regiment was marching to Berlin on foot, between twenty and thirty kilometres daily. We were taken in ‘lifts’. In the evenings and at night an investigating magistrate interrogated me. After a month and a half, Fela was taken home and I was passed on to another department. The new investigating magistrate’s assistant beat me in the face, twisted my arms behind my back and stretched them above my head. He threw me on the floor and jumped on me, breaking my ribs, and he arranged for me to stand at attention for several days without food or drink, with a light bulb right next to my eyes. On the fifth day (Easter Saturday), I pretended to faint. They stopped torturing me. In Mezeritz the military court sentenced me to eight years’ hard labour in educational camps, and I was stripped of my citizen’s rights for three years. It was 9 May 1945.
I was then taken with thirteen women, mainly Russian, to a jail in Brest. After a few months we were transported to Orsha Prison, and then after a while to Gusino Camp, near Smolensk. Here and in the next two camps we repaired part of the Moscow–Berlin highway. Then for fourteen extremely frozen days we travelled in cattle wagons to a camp at Nuzdzialsk. I worked in the forest felling trees, pruning them and arranging them in two-metre piles. At night it was another eight kilometres to load the wood onto the trains.
After a while, to the envy of the Russian women, I was chosen to work in the
kitchen. There were one and half thousand slaves in the camp, but only three workers. We worked forty hours with eight hours’ sleep and no break. After three months, it was unbearable. I was taken to the fifth and last camp – at a State Collective Farm called ‘Sielanka’ (in Russian it meant a ‘village woman’ and in Polish ‘idyll’), near Solikamsk [in the Komi Republic]. After a three-month stay in the camp hospital, I resembled a zombie. At night I mended men’s clothing and by day I worked. I spent the most time on day shifts as a pig-tender, rising to the rank of chief pig-tender. In the end I was taken to the dairy. Here the Russian women showed me respect because I was working ‘in the manger’. I made butter and cheese, which were taken to be sold in the city. The work lasted twenty hours with four hours’ sleep.
Suddenly, there was a telephone call and a letter from Moscow: I was ordered to stop work and to prepare to leave. Two days later, I was taken to a transit camp in Solikamsk, and waited for news of my fate for over a month. At last, on 8 September 1948, I was loaded into a railway prison wagon and a month-long journey began, stopping at a variety of prisons. I was in Kazan, where my great-great-grandmother had died in 1863, and in Molotov, where I met a group of Polish women from Lvuv, who had been taken into captivity in 1944. They left us in Biala Podlaska. Here they wanted to clothe us so that we did not reveal our prison stripes. I was given a train ticket to Warsaw and 200
zloties
. I had arrived back in Komorov before the middle of November. I discovered where I should look for my parents. Only then did I know for certain that my older sister and three brothers had really fallen during the Rising.
And so I spent forty-four months in the hands of the Russians, or three years and eight months.
1
Maria Getka
The principal NKVD collecting centres for political prisoners from Warsaw at this time were located at two separate sites at Rembertov, 10km (six miles) to the east of Praga. Throughout that freezing winter, prisoners were frequently held in the open, without shelter, in a compound surrounded by barbed wire. It was a preliminary to the ‘softening-up process’. According to reports, when locals enquired about the suffering prisoners who were clearly visible from a nearby road, they were told that the compound contained
Volksdeutsche
and Nazis. From January, further centres were prepared in Warsaw itself, notably, as reported by locals, in the deserted grounds of the former KZ-
Warschau
.
A man who passed through Rembertov described the conditions. They were not to be compared to the relative luxury at Sandbostel or Murnau:
The camp . . . had been organized on the terrain of a former armaments factory. NKVD units manned both the guard and the administration. In March 1945, the majority of the prisoners were Poles who had been arrested and brought in from various parts of the country. Apart from them, there were German POWs, Volksdeutsche, ex-Soviet POWs released from captivity in Germany, Soviet civilians, Vlassovites, Russian émigrés from the time of the Revolution, and a few Jews . . .
Crush-Stink-Lice: and organizational chaos. Overcrowded, two-tiered bunks would collapse, causing injuries and even fatalities . . . The numerous attempts at escape ended in volleys of gunfire and collective punishments. In short, not very pleasant . . .
The lavatory was but one of many torments . . . It was designed for a few dozen people, but was supposed to be used by several thousands, many suffering from dysentery. Huge queues formed. Figures would squat all round this inaccessible building day and night,
and the Soviet Guard would amuse themselves by shooting at them. More casualties ensued. (Every morning, the corpses would be carried along the ranks at roll-call for the purposes of identification) . . .
76
Conditions on the trains which carried many of the prisoners into the Soviet Union were no better. The passengers were packed into bare, locked cattle-trucks, with one small window covered with a grating. The train consisted of fifty or sixty such wagons which were guarded by riflemen riding in raised pillboxes. Rations were handed out on average once every two days. They were made up of a chunk of bread and a slice of salted fish for each person, and a bucket of water for each wagon. Hot meals were served up only once or twice a month. A longer stop was fixed for a couple of days in a siding near Moscow, where a disinfection station was located. The prisoners stripped naked. Their clothes passed through a steam chamber, while they washed their bodies from a tap. They were then shaved above and below by women wielding cut-throat razors. The journey from Warsaw to the first camps in the Urals took four to five weeks. At journey’s end, the mortuary wagons at the back of the train would be emptied of their cargo. In a transport of 2,000 prisoners, 300 to 400 could expect to arrive as corpses.
77
It is evident that some captured insurgents found their way directly into the depths of the Gulag at a very early date. Some of them must have been transported from Warsaw, or most probably from Praga, before or immediately after the Capitulation. One such report was made by a Catholic priest who was condemned to a sentence in the great concentration camp complex at Vorkuta in northern Russia six years after the war. When he arrived in the camp, he was surprised to find a group of some 250 former insurgents from Warsaw, all young men and women, some of them still wearing the tattered remnants of their grey scout uniforms. He was even more surprised when a man from the group offered him the whole of his daily food ration. ‘We are all dying,’ the youngster explained, ‘but you must live in order to return and to tell the world.’
78
So long as the war against Germany lasted, the Soviet authorities had little time or inclination to sift carefully or to classify the millions whom they captured in their westward drive. The NKVD was faced with vast tides of German prisoners, of Soviet ‘repatriants’, and of the civilian deportees whom they cleared at random from the rear areas. Their practice was to ship off the captives en masse and to ask questions afterwards. They could not pay any special attention to the ‘bandit-insurgents’ of the Home Army, who were one of the smaller categories and who, despite predictions, were not openly resisting. In any case, once the back of the Home Army had been broken by the Warsaw Rising, the policy was to build up the security organs of the emerging Communist regime in Poland and, if possible, to leave the local problems to them.
FIRESTORM
An ex-insurgent, imprisoned in Stalag IVB in Saxony, is taken on a work party to an unknown city
10–12 February
[1945]. We are getting off at a suburb where the guards, typically for Germans, are shouting, jabbering, and prodding us. Our job is to dig trenches. There are hundreds of German civilians, including women, digging alongside us. I have no intention of helping the Germans, so I’m looking for a chance to escape. I don’t look like a prisoner of war in my grey overcoat.
It is clear that we are in the remote suburbs of [a large city], connected to the centre by an electric train line. I need money to buy a ticket so I sell a packet of American cigarettes. On Monday I leave my group under the pretext of having to go to the toilet, and I don’t come back. At the station I go to the ticket office and say: ‘
Wo ist Bahnhof, bitte
.’ It worked!
For two hours I wander around and fail to locate the main station. Near a park, I can see some subways marked ‘
Luftschutzkeller
’. I guess they must be air-raid shelters. It’s getting dark, I’m cold and tired, so I go downstairs where an entirely empty room is lit by low-voltage bulbs. I sit on a bench, eat a rusk, and fall asleep.
I wake up from powerful bomb explosions that feel like an earthquake, and the wail of sirens. Soon afterwards I am surrounded by a crowd of terrified Germans who fill up the shelter fast. The Germans are shaking with fear as much as I am. The planes come in waves. The bombs drop for hours. The lights in the shelter flicker and then go out. A heavy German hand drops on my shoulder.
Wer bist du?
– the man next to me asks, shining a torch in my face.
Ich bin ein Kriegsgefangener
– I answer hopelessly.
Polnische?
– he asks.
How does this German sod know?
Jawohl!
– I say.
Also Raus! Du Polnische schweine! Raus!
Clear off!
Before I reach the exit I feel the fists of the excited mob on my body. The women hit the hardest.
God, I think to myself, Germans know how to hate – even when they are facing death themselves.
It’s still night but the skies are lit by fires and exploding bombs. I don’t want to risk a confrontation, so I cross the street and hurry towards the park. I find a ditch where I lie down flat, next to a big tree.
God! – I pray. – You didn’t want me to die in Warsaw, where I could have been
buried under rubble in the Old Town. Please don’t let me die here, on German soil so packed with hatred.
Tuesday, 13 February.
Just after midnight. Endless explosions and the roar of aeroplanes. I bury my face in the dry autumn leaves and block my ears. A plane flies above and scatters orange pellets. They look like Christmas-tree decorations but they explode with devilish fire, burning everything – walls, concrete, asphalt and . . . men. People are running out of the shelters, like human torches, screaming with horror. And so their lives end, lives full of hatred. But there are children in the shelters too . . . Choking with emotion I tell myself that’s the price to be paid for the Rising and the lives of innocent Polish children. No! No! No! A hundred times no. Enough hatred! I feel an urgent need to leave this city which no longer exists. I wander around, aimlessly. The railway station has gone because [the city] has gone, too. Rubble everywhere. Just like the Old Town in Warsaw not so very long ago.
1
L. Halko
It was typical of the rough-and-ready methods of those days that the NKVD did not always know whom they had arrested. All Home Army soldiers used pseudonyms and false identity papers. Forged
kennkarte
, which had routinely fooled the Germans who had supposedly issued them, were not going to be questioned by officials who had recently arrived from Russia and who, in some cases, could barely read the Latin alphabet. Hence, on 7 March 1945, no one gave a second thought to an incident in the little town of Milanovek near Warsaw, when an NKVD agent stopped a middle-aged man in a random search and found that he was carrying a roll of American dollars concealed in a packet of coffee. The possession of foreign currency, especially dollars, was a criminal offence in Soviet eyes. So the offender was automatically classed as a
spekulant
or ‘speculator’. He volunteered no information about himself, though he had the papers of a railway worker. Without more ado, he was arrested, sent to Rembertov, and thence conveyed to Russia, where he was sentenced to two and a half years’ hard labour. He served out his time in several camps in the Urals and in the district of Kazan. In this way, throughout the years when
Poland was being annexed by the Communists, no one knew what had happened to the second-in-command of the Home Army, Bear Cub’s deputy. His whereabouts were known neither to the NKVD, nor to his comrades in the Home Army, nor to the British, who had first sent him to Poland. Gen. Nile had simply evaporated.