World War II Behind Closed Doors (41 page)

Kebire Ametova
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was still a young girl when the NKVD came to take her and the rest of her family away. Her father, ironically, was away fighting for the Soviet Union in the Red Army. But that meant nothing to Stalin or the NKVD. Nor did it matter that she had previously witnessed her mother helping the local partisans: ‘We prepared some food for some partisans who were passing by – I used to give them pies. At that time we weren't expecting anyone to come, so my mother invited them to sit at our table’. But then they saw Germans in the street outside, about to enter their house. Quickly, the partisans opened the window and climbed into the well in the garden. Kebire's mother hid them until the Germans had gone. If the partisans had been found, she would have been shot.

But on 18 May all that concerned the NKVD was that the family – Kebire, her mother, three sisters and brother – were on their list as Crimean Tatars. ‘Two middle-aged soldiers arrived’, says Kebire. ‘They told us that we were being thrown out of our house and had fifteen minutes to get ready’. Her mother ‘started to rush about and weep’ and tried to gather together whatever belongings she could: ‘Of course there was a lot of shouting and noise, that's for sure. There was shouting, noise and pain. And bitter tears…. We had some boiled milk on a three-legged stand on the floor. My mother asked them to wait so that she could give the children some milk to drink. But he [one of the soldiers] kicked it over with his foot and spilt it all. He wouldn't allow us to drink any milk’.

The NKVD soldiers then searched for gold – Tatars traditionally kept any wealth they possessed in the form of gold jewellery and concealed it somewhere in their house or garden. The Ametov family kept theirs hidden under the stove in the kitchen. The
NKVD failed to find it, so, no doubt disappointed, the soldiers carried away the Ametovs' sewing machine instead.

The family were taken to a nearby Muslim cemetery, which was used as an assembly area for all the families from the surrounding villages. The scenes were heartbreaking. ‘The noise and the shouting were indescribable’, says Kebire. ‘All you could hear throughout the village was crying. People lost their daughters, their sons, their husbands. The chaos was deafening and very frightening’. The families were confined in the cemetery for most of the day, and of course the children needed to go to the toilet – but their faith forbade them to desecrate the cemetery by using it in this way. Nonetheless, the NKVD refused to let anyone out to relieve themselves in the field next door. And so, adding to the humiliation of the day and much to their shame, ‘We children could not bear it. We did it all in our knickers, in whatever way we could’.

In the late afternoon the NKVD moved into the cemetery and started dragging people on to trucks to take them to the nearby station, where they were herded into freight wagons. The whole process was conducted swiftly and brutally. No care was taken to ensure that families were deported together: ‘They [the NKVD] threw [people's] things in one vehicle and the people themselves into another. They scattered everything around. They put children in one vehicle and the adults in another…. So when we were taken to the station, lots of people were running around like mad, trying to find their children…. As for us, our mother did not allow us to move away from her – she did everything herself and we just stayed in one place. And when they were loading us, they just took us by the scruff of the neck and threw us in a carriage… they flung us like kittens, grabbed us by the neck, kicked us. They treated us as cruelly as they liked – they did not take pity on one single child’. Many of the carriages had previously been used for transporting cattle, and were full of lice-infested straw. ‘The stench was indescribable’, says Kebire. ‘It was terrifying – a nightmare’.

As the train pulled away, they heard the noise of the abandoned dogs and cows in the deserted villages. Just hours earlier the Tatars had been celebrating the end of the conflict in the
Crimea and dreaming of a return to normality. Now they were being transported like animals to an unknown destination. And as she stared into the night through the slats in the freight truck, one thought obsessed Kebire Ametova. ‘I didn't know what we had done’, she says. ‘We were children – how could we know? Even today we still don't know what we were being punished for…. I have never considered myself to be guilty. What could these old people and children have been guilty of? What had we done in our lives that justified being given just fifteen minutes in which to get ready to leave?’

But however confused Kebire remains about the reasons why she and her family were so brutally evicted from their homes and deported, one emotion still boils within her – the desire for revenge: 'If I met that soldier [who evicted her and her family] I would cut him into pieces and hang him…. I would rip his medals from his chest and shove them in his eyes. Because he did things that he should not have done. He should have been fighting the war, not evicting innocent children…. I would knife that soldier – even though my blood pressure [today] is 220, I would still knife that soldier myself.

Eleven-year-old Musfera Muslimova
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was another child thrown with her family on to one of the deportation trains on 18 May: ‘Many people began saying: “Surely Stalin doesn't know about this? If Stalin knew [about it], this would never be happening”. And during the journey rumours began that Stalin had found out [about what was happening] and that we would soon be going back home again…. Stalin liberated us from the Germans, so there was a kind of trust in him’.

But if the mass deportation was designed to punish those Tatars who were guilty of collaborating with the Germans, then it was a failure. Many of the Tatars who were serving with the enemy simply retreated with their units, leaving large numbers of innocent people behind. And amongst those deported by the NKVD were around nine thousand Tatars who had been serving in the Red Army, together with over seven hundred Tatar members of the Communist Party.
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Not surprisingly, the apparently illogical nature of the deportations has led some who have studied the subject to suspect a hidden motive.
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The key to understanding the action, so this theory goes, was the Soviet attitude to Turkey. Stalin made no secret of his desire to exercise greater influence over the Dardanelles, which linked the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. This narrow sea lane was historically controlled by Turkey – a country that, much to the irritation of the Allies, remained neutral during the war. The Soviets wanted to place military bases in the straits, as well as to occupy nearby Turkish territory. The persecution of the Tatars, with their historical links to the Turks, was – it is speculated – part of the growing anti-Turkish movement within the Soviet Union. Subsequently other nationalities, such as the Chechens and Ingush, were deported supposedly for similar anti-Turkish reasons.

It is an interesting theory – but almost certainly mistaken. The deportation of the Tatars in fact fits a broader pattern of mistreatment of ethnic minorities within the Soviet Union – one that has nothing to do with the undoubted Soviet desire to put pressure on Turkey. For example, on 28 December 1943, over four months before the deportation of the Tatars, the NKVD deported just under a hundred thousand Kalmyks. Descended from nomadic Mongols who had settled the steppes hundreds of years earlier, the Kalmyks lived south of Stalingrad in a bleak landscape stretching to the Caspian Sea. Like the Tatars, they were accused of collaborating with the Nazis; were deported en masse; and the deportation order encompassed people who could not by any logic be considered ‘collaborators’. Aleksey Badmaev,
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for instance, had fought in the Red Army on the Stalingrad front and received awards for bravery. In January 1944 he was in a military hospital recovering from wounds received in battle when he was ordered to report at once to the railway station. He was then immediately sent north to a labour camp in the Ural Mountains. There he watched as other Kalmyk soldiers in the camp died of hunger and disease. It all seemed crazy. ‘Of all people’, he says, ‘I know very well that we were short of soldiers at the front, and to take these people
away was beyond stupidity. And secondly, the deportation of the whole nation was a crime. To punish one innocent person is enough of a crime, but to deport the whole of the people and to doom them to dying of extinction – well, I don't know what to compare it with’.

The deportation of the Crimean Tatars was therefore part of an overall policy of punishment – one that removed entire ethnic groups from their homelands and banished them to labour camps and collective farms in the furthest reaches of the Soviet Union. The exact number deported in these various actions may never be known, but it certainly exceeds a million and may be closer to 2 million.

And far from there being any Machiavellian reason behind the deportations, the motivation was a plain and simple desire to suppress dissent and take revenge. And in the process it was immaterial to Stalin and Beria whether the innocent suffered along with the guilty. ‘If Stalin had begun to sift things’, says Vladimir Semichastny,
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a post-war head of the KGB, ‘and to discover who was guilty and who wasn't guilty, who fought at the front, who worked in the Communist Party organizations and so on, it would have taken twenty years. But the war was on, and if Stalin had begun to investigate he might not have finished until now. This was Stalin's way to tackle problems…. To send away a million people meant nothing to him’.

It was impossible, of course, for the Soviet authorities to hide from the West these massive population shifts. But, just as with the Katyn massacres, this was not a subject that either the British or the Americans thought it fruitful to pursue. But there was one group of people who had been victims of Stalin's deportation policy but who were impossible for the West to ignore – not least because at the same time as the Crimean Tatars were being deported to Uzbekistan, they were helping to win for the Allies one of the fiercest and most brutal battles of the war.

THE POLES AND MONTE CASSINO

As we have already seen, Churchill was anxious about the progress of the Allied action in Italy at the time of the Tehran Conference. For this attack on the ‘soft underbelly’ of Axis Europe was not going to plan. The greatest problem the Allies faced was simple – geography. The harsh reality that the Allied troops had learnt in the months since the September 1943 landing at Salerno was that the terrain as they advanced north towards Rome was ill suited for an invading army. The combination of steep-sided mountains and swift-flowing rivers meant that progress was painfully slow. ‘Taking one mountain mass after another gains no tactical advantage’, wrote Major General Frederick Walker, commander of the American 36th Division, in his diary for 22 December that year. ‘There is always another mountain mass behind with Germans on it’.
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The Allies were discovering the accuracy of Napoleon's judgement: ‘Italy is a boot. You have to enter it from the top’.
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A German propaganda leaflet of the time sums up the difficulties faced by the Allies. Above the caption ‘The mountains and valleys of “Sunny Italy” want to see you’ it depicts a series of mountains with salivating mouths and pointed teeth preparing to gobble up Allied troops – and the largest and most dramatic of the mountains is labelled ‘CASSINO’.
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The monastery of Monte Cassino, founded in the sixth century by St Benedict, stood on a high peak above the small town of Cassino. The mountain was a crucial part of the German defence line south of Rome – the Gustav Line – and before they pushed on north towards the capital the Allies wanted to remove the enemy from this defensive position. It would prove to be one of the most difficult and bloody tasks faced by the Western Allies in the entire war.

The problem of the geography of southern Italy – which so massively favoured the defending Germans – was exacerbated by Churchill's impatience. He had placed much personal political capital behind the invasion of Italy, and now saw it being – in his view – squandered. He was immensely disappointed by the failure
of the Allied landing at Anzio, north of the Gustav Line, on 22 January 1944. This operation, for which Churchill had obtained extra landing craft after much badgering at Tehran, had been intended as a thrust on Rome from behind the German lines. But it had become bogged down as the German defences swiftly regrouped. Churchill famously said of the Anzio operation that he had hoped ‘we were hurling a wild cat on the shore, but all we got was a beached whale’.
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All of which meant that the pressure on the Allied armies to make progress in the advance on Rome was immense. But taking Monte Cassino presented enormous problems. One of the most insidious was psychological. Even though the monastery had been declared sacrosanct by the Germans, and the Nazis claimed that no Axis troops were occupying it, the high walls still presented a seemingly impregnable barrier to the troops below. There was also a fear that the Germans might place artillery spotters inside the monastery – something that Allied intelligence suggested they had already done (although subsequent investigations showed that the Germans had kept to their promise and not placed troops inside the building).

So, in one of the most controversial military actions of the European war, on 15 February 1944 the Allies bombed the monastery of Monte Cassino. ‘We assumed that it wouldn't be bombed’, says Joseph Klein,
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then a twenty-three-year-old German paratrooper, ‘because after all it was the oldest monastery in Europe…and we were totally surprised when aeroplanes flew towards the monastery…. We could already see that when the bombs were released that they would hit the monastery. We couldn't believe it. We were flabbergasted. We never thought it possible. Because [even though] the Germans had this reputation of not being pious – that these Christian people would do this? We'd never have believed it!’