Read Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw Online
Authors: Norman Davies
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #War, #History
Confronted with overpowering odds, therefore, many ex-insurgents and other Home Army people decided to disappear into hiding. Some built semi-permanent hideaways in barns or forest huts, much as fugitive Jews had done during the Nazi occupation. Others took off for the ‘Recovered Territories’ in western Poland, where they hoped to find anonymity among the flood of post-war refugees and ‘repatriants’. The Security Office was very well aware of the ruse. A major sweep codenamed ‘Action X’ netted many thousands in 1948 in Lower Silesia, including a large group of Wolf’s followers from distant Lithuania.
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Incongruously, therefore, the city prison of Vrotslav witnessed the last moments of not a few ex-Warsaw insurgents. L.Cpl. ‘Griffin’, for example, had a rich biography. A boy scout brought up in Warsaw, the son of a professional footballer, he had fought in the Rising in the Kampinos Group. Liberated in 1945 by the Americans from Stalag XIB, he promptly joined the US forces and served for several months in a tank battalion of the US Third Army. Ending the war in Czechoslovakia, he returned to Poland and joined WiN. His way out, when the pursuit heated up, was to join the People’s Army (LWP). His luck finally folded in August 1950. Charged with ‘anti-state agitation’, ‘espionage’, and the creation of a (non-existent) WiN cell, he was shot in the prison yard on 30 August 1951, aged almost twenty-five.
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Yet another group decided that the best policy was to seek protection
within the Communist apparatus. A number of ex-Home Army personnel figured after the war in the company of shady lawyers and policemen employed by ‘People’s Poland’. Such was Judge Yan H. and a senior military procurator, Maj. Cheslav L., whose legal practice continued in Warsaw untouched for forty years. The latter were eventually taken into custody at the start of the twenty-first century during enquiries into the death of Maj. Kontrym.
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Though the precedent for show trials of Polish democrats had been set in Moscow in June 1945, the home-grown stage of the phenomenon did not really start for some years. But, as Stalinism progressed into ever more irrational and purely terroristic realms, the machinery of repression widened its sights, targeting all and sundry, consuming the loyal servants of the state as well as its opponents. Once the formal dictatorship of the United Workers’ Party came into force after 1948, no one could feel safe. True to type, the new wave of terror began with the finger of accusation pointing at the regime’s own ranks. The first in a run of major trials of serving army officers began in May 1948. Known as the ‘Z-L Case’, it was directed against sixty soldiers from the towns of Zamost and Lublin, where the percentage of pre-war officers was unusually high.
One of the horrendous relics of this particular trial is a report dated 22 July 1948, written by a Soviet adviser who was working in the capacity of an investigator at the Chief Information Bureau. The report was filed to explain the demise of an obdurate prisoner, and it describes in detail the various methods which were unsuccessfully applied in order to extract a confession. The adviser was called Sergei Malkovskii. The prisoner who died was Lt.Col. Z., chief of staff of the 3rd Infantry Division.
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Malkovskii described interrogation as a duel. The investigating officer was aiming to extract a confession – in this case of association with WiN. The prisoner was trying to avoid confessing. But that was not how he put it. The officer, he said, ‘is fighting for his country, and its independence, and for democratic freedoms’. But the other, ‘the criminal’, ‘is fighting for the opposite aims, and is only concerned for his own person, perhaps for his life.’ There were three degrees of interrogation. At the first, the prisoner was simply questioned intensively. At the second, the interrogators applied ‘the conveyor belt’, where relays of officers kept up a nonstop barrage of questions and insinuations, if necessary for weeks on end. At the third, ‘interrogation of the third degree’ was used as a euphemism
for physical torture that would continue until the duel was either won or lost.
According to Malkovskii’s report, Lt.Col. Z. never wavered. He held out for a month under stage one, followed by ten days of the conveyor belt. Guided by the instructions of Anatole F., he was then subjected to the ‘third degree’ in the form of ‘combined treatment’, where one policeman posed the question and a second beat his heels and feet. This routine began on 13 July, but at two the next morning Malkovskii was woken in his bed to be told that the prisoner had fallen from the table on to the floor. Medical advice was called for. An injection was administered, but five days later, the prisoner was suffering from a high fever and a left leg that had turned completely black and was still not fit to resume. He died on the ‘National Day’ of ‘People’s Poland’, whilst the leaders of the regime were presiding at a grand parade. He had won the duel.
The case of Chairman ‘Basil’ came to court in November 1948. It was occasioned by the fact that the Communist Party was merging with the remnants of the broken Socialist Party, and hence that the genuine leaders of the Socialists had to be eliminated. Basil had seen the inside of Tsarist jails for his beliefs. He had been the Chairman of the Underground interparty council; he was one of the Moscow ‘Sixteen’; and he was a survivor of the Warsaw Rising. He was sentenced to ten years. He committed suicide in jail barely a year later.
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And so it went on: year after year, trial after trial, death after death: all behind the facade of a self-proclaimed progressive regime and of post-war reconstruction. Nothing encouraged the tale to be told. No one in the Soviet bloc was able to tell. Few in the West, even at the height of the Cold War, were interested. Repetitive accounts of secret torture and concealed killing became tedious. ‘After all’, as someone commented about Stalin’s crimes, ‘the killing was so boring.’
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The ‘Zoshka Case’ started on Christmas Eve 1948 with the arrest of ‘Anode’, a student of architecture who four years earlier had fought in the Zoshka Battalion. Within a month, Anode was dead. But it was the aftermath which marked a new stage in the escalation of repression. In one single night in February 1949, up to 5,000 people were arrested, all of them, like Anode, connected in some way with the scouting movement. They were much too numerous to be put on trial. The regime was moving into the realm of mass social terror.
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In 1948–49, the ‘Zhegota Case’ resulted in the secret trial and imprisonment of all the leading survivors of the Underground’s Council for Aid to the Jews. In other words, at the height of the campaign against ‘cosmopolitanism’, the security services took care to eliminate a group of heroic and dedicated Catholics, who were publicly identified as active opponents of the Holocaust. The Communist regime systematically repressed, and besmirched, a body, whose humanitarian and anti-Nazi credentials were impeccable. In Communist eyes, it was intolerable to leave highly regarded Catholic Resistance heroes at liberty.
IRKA IV
Imprisoned on false charges, a young mother faces the prospect of ten years in solitary confinement
Immediately after being sentenced, I was transferred to the so-called
‘ogólniak
’ or ‘general prison’ on Rakoviets Street. About a hundred women, politicals and criminals, were crammed into a large cell designed for twenty. I was depressed by the knowledge that I had no chance of an amnesty, yet cheered by access to things that had been banned during the period of my interrogation. We eagerly devoured the news from the Communist newspaper [
Trybuna Ludu
] and, on the principle of ‘know your enemy’, read any book available, including works by Marx, Engels, and Lenin. We also had the rare opportunity to meet very distinguished women from the wartime and post-war Underground, including the wives of leading figures from the AK, WiN, UPA, and PSL.
After six months, I was taken to Fordon Jail, [on the lower Vistula] to underground cell number 13. This is where ‘the most dangerous enemies of the Polish Republic’ were held. None of us enjoyed the right to work in the prison laundry or on the potato-peeling squad. So once every couple of weeks when a warder called for volunteers to scrub the kitchen and lavatory floors, it was a huge attraction . . .
The regulations allowed a daily fifteen-minute walk round the prison courtyard. We had to walk in Indian file, in silence. We were allowed one book per month from the prison library. Every morning, we received half a litre of black coffee and a chunk of black bread; and a bowl of soup twice a day . . . Three times a year, on New Year’s Day, May Day, and 22 July, we enjoyed a special feast of meat rissoles and cabbage or fish and salad.
My mother struggled to get permission for a visit, which would not be behind a grille. She came with my children, already aged seven and eight, and we met in a small room after a wait of several hours. I sat them on my knee in turn. They sang me songs and told me stories. When we were ordered to say ‘goodbye’, I lost sight of them as the warder tugged me away. My daughter Magdalena cried in the train all the way back to Warsaw.
Thanks to Mother’s efforts, the children were placed in an orphanage run by the Sisters of St Elizabeth. She took them home to her one-room flat every weekend, where she constantly told them of my love for them and of the possibility of remission. Their father had been killed in the Rising and their mother was a convict!
After two years in Fordon, we were woken up in the middle of the night, and we were driven off in an open lorry to an unknown destination. God forbid, not to the
Soviet Union. In two hours, we arrived at an isolation centre. On arrival, the governor told us that we were there because of the ‘solidarity of the enemies of People’s Poland’. (Solidarity, in that era, was a pioneering concept.) . . . All visits and correspondence were stopped. We were issued with small pieces of toilet paper, to prevent us reading the news on the scraps of newspaper that were issued elsewhere . . .
As best I could, I defended myself against mental breakdown. I walked for hours back and forth across my 3m x 2.5m cell, and at night, when the warders weren’t watching, I did gymnastic exercises. I composed a children’s book in verse about a family of rabbits, and learned it by heart. I also set myself various intellectual problems, such as the basis of free will. In due course, I was mortified to find that I had come to the same conclusion as Engels.
Several prisoners committed suicide. So we were put three to a cell. One of my companions was mentally disturbed and talked to no one. The other was a religious fanatic, preoccupied with her rosary until three in the afternoon; and then she would start recounting her rich history of erotic adventures . . .
One day, we heard church bells ringing and sirens blaring. Two months later we learned that Stalin had died . . . That event was to lead to the release of almost all political prisoners like me . . .
I have always regarded those seven years in prison as my ‘first university’. They taught me how to think . . . I also met some wonderful people of various nationalities and religions: Czechs, Ukrainians, Germans, Catholic nuns, Jews, Communists . . . I especially remember a Jewish woman, Anka G., a believing Communist, whose husband had taken his life. We learned that a person’s capacity for nobility, heroism, and compassion has nothing to do with ethnicity, religion, or education . . .
I was finally rehabilitated by the Supreme Court in March 1955.
1
Irena Bellert
The best-known member of Zhegota, ‘Teofil’, had worked during the Rising as a journalist of the Bureau of Information and Propaganda. He now spent eight years under sentence of death. Released in 1954, he was
one of the few to see the triumph of his lifetime’s ideals. Highly decorated by the State of Israel, he was imprisoned for a second time in 1981–83 as a Solidarity activist. But he emerged to become one of the prominent personalities of the Third Republic – Ambassador to Vienna and Berlin, and in 1997–2001 Foreign Minister. An unstoppable optimist and raconteur, he was still going strong at the start of the new millennium.
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Jacob Berman’s attitude to Zhegota is instructive. Although his own brother, Adolf, had belonged to the organization, he said that he had never heard of it until long afterwards, and he regarded it as an exception in Polish society as a whole, which in his view was ‘very anti-Semitic’. This comment dating from 1982 drew an understandable reprimand from his Solidarity interviewer:
[Mr Berman]! [Your] security services, where all or nearly all the directors were Jewish, arrested Poles because they had saved Jews during the [Nazi] occupation, and you say that Poles are anti-Semites. That’s not nice.
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Collective slander was a Stalinist speciality.
In August 1949, a Polish link opened up to the grand international ‘Field Case’. Earlier in the year, the American philanthropist and Communist sympathizer, Noel Field, had disappeared on landing at Warsaw airport. (Unknown to the outside world, he had been taken into custody by the ever diligent Light.) The ramifications of the affair gradually became apparent first when he was mentioned in Budapest in September as a source of information in the trial against the Party Secretary, Laszlo Rajk, and then in November when his friend and colleague, Alger Hiss, was found guilty of spying for the Soviet Union in New York. In an extraordinary web of suspicion and intrigue, Stalin’s campaign against the alleged ‘Zionist Conspiracy Centre’ in the Communist movement had become intertwined with Senator Joe McCarthy’s campaign against alleged Communist infiltrators in the USA. Field and his family were implicated in both ends of the plot.
Many brows started to furrow when Moscow ordered the immediate arrest of all party members who had ever been in contact with Noel Field. Berman’s own secretary, Anna D., figured on the wanted list: and he did not hesitate to hand her over. It emerged that the lady had served in the Warsaw Rising in the ranks of the People’s Army, and that after her time in a German POW camp she had made her way to Switzerland where Noel Field was running a Unitarian Centre for Refugees. In
Stalinist eyes, she was patently guilty as not charged. She spent five years behind bars, left prison in 1954, emigrated to Sweden in 1968, and died in Israel in 1974.