Read Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw Online
Authors: Norman Davies
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #War, #History
Deportation to the Soviet Union remained a common option. It is no accident that several of the earliest insider’s accounts of the Gulag were written by Poles, especially by members of the Home Army:
‘The forest grew sparser as we travelled on, and the trees more stunted. Then there were only low bushes and finally the emptiness of the tundra . . . Everywhere there was snow, metres of it. Everything gradually turned white as far as the eye could see . . . We reached Vorkuta . . . on the thirty-third day . . .
The doors opened and we were given bread, and some sugar to make up for the past few days when there had been no food. Through the open door [of the railway wagon] I could see some huts and camp watchtowers . . . We began to move again . . . After
several hours of travelling past coalmines, camps and watchtowers, we reached an encampment built entirely of wood and filled with [electric] lights . . .Outside, two lines of guards stood with their guns trained on us. Other guards watched from a distance. We were told to line up in ranks of four . . . The transport chief handed our confidential files to the NKVD colonel responsible for our reception: “Here are the documents for wagon nr.13.” The colonel gave us a sharp look, and asked: “Did you get your food ration today?”; “Yes, but not yesterday”, some of us replied.
“I asked about today . . . Listen to me . . . This is not a forest of the kind where you roamed with your bands. There are no towns or villages to offer you protection. This is a holding-camp whence you will be sent to coalmines and building sites. Through diligent work . . . you may be able to make up for your crimes against our government and our people. But you must prove that you have repented. Our government is just, like our system. Forget any dreams you may have had. Justice and law are here. Understood?” ’
42Poland’s Ministry of Public Security (MBP) was created in 1944 under NKVD guidance as a completely separate body from the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MSW). Under the pre-war dispensation the Interior Ministry had run all police and security matters, but ex-Premier Mick made the bad mistake of making control of internal affairs a precondition of his joining the Government. On arrival, he found that he had gained control of traffic control and dog-licences, but not of state security.
From start to finish, the Security Ministry was headed by Col. Stanislas R., a pre-war Communist who had spent the war in the Red Army and who in 1944 had run the security office of the Lublin Committee. His two deputies, Roman R. and Mechislav M., were trained in the USSR to hold foreign loyalties. The operational departments were run by a gallery of ill-starred rogues. The Investigative Department, directed by Yatsek R., a former NKVD agent, was responsible for preparing charges against ‘enemies of the people’. The Social Department, which initially covered cultural, youth and church affairs, was directed by the notorious Julia ‘Luna’ B., whose speciality was working between the sheets in order to recruit intellectual collaborators. The Department of Party Vigilance was directed by another degenerate, Anatole F., who held the party elite in fear. It was his deputy, ‘Light’, who eventually spoiled the game for everyone. The best informed man in Poland on the foibles and vices of the party leadership, he defected to the West in 1953. Col. Stanislas R. was arrested, Feigin dismissed. In 1955, the ministry itself was disbanded.
43
AUSTRALIA
Many ex-insurgents, still lingering in DP camps or in dead-end jobs in Western Europe, decide to sail away ‘Down Under’
Australia was looking attractive, offering government-sponsored jobs for two years. Films were shown. There was one showing cattle being driven . . . I was not interested in cattle but something caught my eye. The power poles carrying electrical wires . . . looked so primitive – half-rotten wood leaning one way or another. In Warsaw or German towns that sort of wiring had long since been underground. Electricians were obviously going to be in demand in Australia.
We embarked sometime in late November 1950 onto the
Anna Salen
. The trip lasted thirty-five days. The boat arrived in Perth to take on provisions, then sailed for Melbourne to disembark. When we were halfway there, the boat suddenly turned around back to Perth (Fremantle). We had to make the quota for 1950; and the ship could not make Melbourne by the last day of 1950. We arrived back in Fremantle on 31 December 1950 at 22.00 hrs. However, I did not step down on the fifth continent until 1 January 1951, 00.15 hrs! The wharf was dark, sparingly lit by electric bulbs, all hanging from old leaning power poles.
Here we were, at last earning money, at a start of a real new life. I was never unemployed. I had only three jobs in Australia – four months in a stone quarry, twenty years in an electronics factory, then twenty years in a physics laboratory at a university, all of them most enjoyable times! I long forgave the old leaning power posts for misleading me.
PS I am retired and live with my wife in a large house in a Sydney suburb. My street is nice, except for the ugly old leaning power poles. I love them now!
1
In 1950, the Korean War broke out. My colleagues were called up into the forces. Since we had a one-year-old son, and baby food was disappearing from the shops, I decided it was time to leave [France].
We travelled to Paris to talk to the Australian consul . . . Mr Rice, who turned out to be a liar. He told us we would live in ‘motel-style’ accommodation and reassured me that I would be able to work in my profession as a textile engineer, saying, ‘We have the best wool in the world, and it all needs turning into cloth.’
We found ourselves in Australia, in the Bonegil Camp, in tin shacks, eating mutton stew and working on a two-year contract of physical work. When I produced my [professional] diploma, the official said, ‘Oh good, you can fix the car!’ At the end
of the contract, my French qualifications were not recognized, and I had to start a correspondence course in English . . .
In the 1950s Australians were suspicious of us, and many thought that we had been sent out from Europe for some sort of criminal offence . . .
2
We sailed for Australia on 20 May 1952 on the
Oronsay
. During the five-week voyage, we fed the apes in Gibraltar, haggled in the bazaar at Port Said, and swam in the sea with elephants in Ceylon . . . We landed in Sydney at the end of June, and that same evening we were loaded onto the Coonamble mail train. Our worldly possessions consisted of two cases, a sack containing a sewing machine, and £15 in sterling.
We travelled to the little town of Dubbo, where I was given work digging artesian wells. There were only jobs in the steelworks, mines, or on building projects in the semi-desert outback of New South Wales. A Polish couple rented us their veranda, where we lived for the next two years. We then bought a building plot on the outskirts. Despite having no diploma, I got work as a draughtsman. I could manage because my father had been a surveyor and my brother a civil engineer, so I was used to plans, measuring, and theodolites.
3
In the Rising, my pseudonym was ‘Bullet’. I frequently acted as deputy commander of the volunteer ‘Attack Company’. No one knew that I was only seventeen . . .
In 1964, sponsored by fellow Poles, I, my wife, and my daughter arrived in Adelaide. We landed on 29 December. It was a huge country full of freedom and wide open spaces. The weather, after [Britain], was marvellous. And a large Polish community helped us find our feet. I got a job in a factory, and by taking out a loan, we were able to buy a house. I felt myself needed, no longer a ‘bloody foreigner’. A year later we took out Australian citizenship. I was made a departmental manager, and stayed there until retirement as a war veteran in 1987 at the age of sixty.
In Australia, as in Britain, I always took part in the work of Polish organizations, especially among ex-combatants.
4
The training, development, and operations of the MBP were subordinated to the Soviet authorities from beginning to end. On 20 March 1945, Gen. Serov himself, the commander of the NKVD’s special regiments, was appointed an adviser to the Ministry. As one historian remarked, ‘advisers do not come much higher than Commissar of State Security of the Second
Rank’.
44
The appointment could only have been more prestigious if Beria himself had moved from Moscow to Warsaw. No less revealing is the fact that once the war had ended Beria stationed the largest concentration of repressive force not in Germany but in Poland. Moscow judged ten NKVD security regiments sufficient for defeated Germany, whilst fifteen regiments under Gen. Selivanovsky were allocated to ‘victorious’ Poland. Selivanovsky was appointed ‘counsellor’ at the MBP. ‘This perhaps was the best indication of the truth behind Stalin’s assertion at Yalta that the Soviet Union was interested in “the creation of a mighty, free and independent Poland”.’
45
Soviet advisers, and the units which accompanied them, stayed in Poland in large numbers for years. They were locally known as ‘POPs’ – both a word which means ‘Orthodox Priest’ and an acronym for ‘Persons Pretending to be Poles’. Throughout this time, Gen. Serov, who used the pseudonym ‘Ivanov’, was effectively in charge. After the so-called ‘civil war’ the number of advisers decreased, but the vigilance remained. Soviet officers could be found at every level. After Rokossovsky’s arrival in 1949, their presence swelled once more, though they were now more noticeable in the military than in the internal security sphere.
The activities of the Security Ministry bore little resemblance to those of legal states. Arrests, for example, generally took the form of shock raids. They took place in the street in broad daylight or through the dreaded knock on the door in the middle of the night. They often descended on social gatherings, such as parties or weddings, so that whole droves of captives could be put into custody and sifted.
Imprisonment on open-ended remand was a dire punishment in itself. Political prisoners from the Home Army or the democratic parties were habitually cast into cells with Nazis or with known recidivists. Awaiting interrogation themselves, they had routinely to tend the battered bodies and maltreated minds of cellmates whose turn had come first.
The purpose of interrogation was less to establish the truth than to extract confession on prearranged accusation. The distinction between suspect and accused was ignored, and prisoners were rapidly disarmed and disorientated by their truly Kafka-esque surroundings. Crude physical torture was often more bearable than the various techniques of sensory deprivation which the NKVD had perfected. One of the inner circle, who had witnessed these methods, spoke of ‘the Asiatic cruelty’.
46
Prisoners who were not intended to appear in court could be thrashed to a pulp. But those whose outward appearance had to be safeguarded could be treated to more refined torments. Interrogations were customarily done at night under bright lights. The interrogated were prevented from sleeping properly during the day, often by being forced to stand in flooded cellars where they could neither sit nor lie and where their sodden feet would swell. Women would be sexually assaulted or humiliated. Men were beaten on the kidneys where the pain was excruciating but the damage invisible. All could be starved, dehydrated, poisoned, drugged, electrocuted, needled, singed, racked, dazed by ultrasound, bloated by forced drinking, or psychologically broken by false promises. In the end, once the required confessions and undertakings had been obtained, the human wreck could be rendered presentable if necessary by a few solid meals, hot showers, and a comfortable bed. Individual experiences varied. But persons who had the misfortune to experience both Nazi and Stalinist captivity were apt to consider the latter the more dreadful.
This last topic deserves intensive research. Survivors report a marked difference in the psychological environment. The SS made no secret of the fact that they regarded their victims as mere animals who had no right to live. They were cruel and ruthless in the extreme; but at least they made their prisoners’ predicament abundantly plain. The NKVD and its disciples, in contrast, specialized in psychological disorientation. They were seeking to rid the world not of inferior blood, but of polluted minds. As a result, they devoted more time to their prey, endlessly asking them questions, alternately promising them relief or threatening them with pain. Within a relatively short time, they were confident of reducing the majority to a state of cowed, quivering confusion with no hope of a quick death. Particularly relevant is the incidence of prisoners who were held for years for the purposes of interrogation but were never brought to trial.
Stalinist trials had little to do with justice. In essence, they were rituals whose course was determined in advance and where the outcome was frequently murder. Verdicts were often handed to the judges by party officials before the court had convened. Prominent cases were determined by discussions in the Politburo. Charges were wrapped up in impenetrable ideological drivel. Prosecutors were assured of results. Defence lawyers were considered a disposable luxury. If appointed, they were nominated by the same authorities that appointed the judges. Witnesses were thoroughly rehearsed, often after being tortured in parallel to the accused. They would normally be convicts hoping to gain reprieve for a convincing performance. Inconvenient evidence was simply ignored. Judges were
judged by their superiors on subservience not on judicial competence. Lenient sentences were unusual: commutations were rare.
Thousands upon thousands of lesser figures were judicially processed
in camera
. They were fortunate to receive a perfunctory hearing. They had no means of demanding a lawyer’s presence or of persuading the lawyer, if present, to contest the charges. They usually settled for writing a plea for mercy. Sackloads of such pleas have been found in the archives – unopened.