World War II Behind Closed Doors (44 page)

In July 1944 the Soviets approached Lwów, a city they had first seized in September 1939 in agreement with the Nazis. ‘In 1944, when the Red Army came for a second time, it was, of course, worse’, says Anna Levitska, then a teenager living in the city. ‘Because we already had an idea of what the consequences might be, because of all the arrests there had been in 1939 and 1940…. So of course it was terrifying’.

Anna recalls one old man coming up to her and her family in 1944 and saying: ‘This is the second time [the Soviets have come]. It was better the first time’.

‘Why?’ they asked him.

‘Because the first time, they came and they went. But this time when they come there is no way they will be leaving’.

Vyacheslav Yablonsky
⁸²
was part of the great Soviet assault on Lwów that summer. But he was no ordinary soldier: as a member of an elite NKVD squad he had a very specific role. Together with two dozen other members of the secret police, and a squad of Red Army soldiers, he entered Lwów just before the Germans retreated from the city. Travelling in American Studebaker trucks they plotted a route via the back streets of the city to the Gestapo headquarters. The location was familiar to the Soviets, since the German secret police had merely taken over the old NKVD headquarters – a building that in turn had previously housed the Polish secret police and before that the Austro-Hungarian intelligence agency (today, the same building is used by the Ukrainian police).

The task facing Yablonsky and his comrades was straightforward, but considered vital. They had to capture the Gestapo headquarters before the Germans left, and steal intelligence
information that their superiors hoped would reveal just who had been collaborating with the Nazis.

They arrived just as the Germans were packing their files into trucks. The Soviet force scaled the wall surrounding the Gestapo headquarters, shot the German guards and prevented the trucks from leaving. Hurrying into the building, they made straight for the cellars, where they knew the intelligence files were stored. While the remaining Germans, panic-stricken, sought to escape, the NKVD swiftly made the building secure and started examining the files they had found. They then immediately sought out anyone whom the German documents had named as an informer. Yablonsky also relied on pro-Soviet informers to tell him who had been collaborating with the Germans or was simply ‘anti-Soviet’: ‘We got to know about the dangerous people from these other people [informers]. They told us that somebody hated Soviet power and was a threat to us and then we would arrest him… they could be saying bad things about us or just thinking we were bad’. Once arrested for the crime of ‘saying something bad’ about the Soviet occupation, Yablonsky recalls, the ‘normal’ sentence was ‘about fifteen years of forced labour’.

‘Now I think it was cruel’, he says. ‘But at that time, when I was young, twenty-two or twenty-three years old, I didn't…. Now I understand that it's cruel because I'm older. I don't think it was a very democratic time. Now you can say anything, but at that time you couldn't. At that time most things were censored and nobody could say anything bad about the Soviet Union. So we all thought it was normal at the time’.

Despite feeling now that Soviet policy was ‘very cruel’, Yablonsky looks back on his years as a member of the NKVD in Lwów with affection. ‘I'm proud of it. I feel I was doing the right thing. I felt that I was alive. I was starting. I was learning something. I loved my country and I felt it was right. We won such an incredible war. I'm proud of the Soviet Union and I'm proud I was part of it and brave enough to go through the war and not let my country down’.

It was clear that Soviet soldiers like Vyacheslav Yablonsky
believed they were reclaiming Lwów as part of Soviet territory – and they never intended to give it up again; and it was members of the underground Polish Home Army who were some of the first to learn this dispiriting truth. These were volunteer soldiers who had remained hidden under the Nazi occupation, waiting for the moment to strike back, and they played an important part in the battle for Lwów. Around three thousand soldiers led by Colonel Władysław Filipkowski had supported the Red Army during the fierce fighting that lasted from 23 to 27 July
⁸³
But once the battle was won the Soviet authorities arrested the officers and then forced the ordinary soldiers to join units of the Red Army.

In parallel with the elimination of the underground Polish Home Army, the Soviet authorities immediately sought to reestablish the institutions of control that they had created during their first occupation. ‘In 1944 they set up their rule again’, says Anna Levitska. ‘They organized schools according to their own system. It was obligatory that every student belonged to the Young Communists. And, of course, there were no religious classes. Just those lectures on atheism. And studying the history of the Communist Party was obligatory. The fundamentals of Marxism and Leninism – those were the main subjects’. And as she saw the Soviet hold on eastern Poland strengthening, Anna didn't just blame Stalin and the rest of the Soviet leadership for her plight. ‘We felt betrayed’, she says, ‘because we had hoped that the West would react differently…. We were even hoping that England and France [would help us], but that didn't happen’.

On 26 July 1944, while the battle for Lwów still raged, at Perugia in Italy General Anders was presented to King George VI. The British monarch had flown to Italy under the pseudonym of ‘General Collingwood’ in order to congratulate Allied forces on their progress. During dinner he listened to the regimental band of the II Polish Army Corps, and remarked that he found one song particularly attractive. He asked what the song was called and was told that it was a particular favourite of theirs: ‘And if I ever have to be born again, then let it happen only in Lwów’.
⁸⁴

5
DIVIDING
EUROPE

THE WARSAW UPRISING

It was not just eastern Poland that was within Stalin's grasp as a result of the summer offensive of 1944, but the rest of the country too – territory that even he did not claim as part of the Soviet Union. And although not seeking to incorporate western Poland into the Soviet Empire, Stalin still wanted to exercise ‘influence’ over this land. As a result, this was a moment of immense potential conflict.

The Soviets persisted in their mantra that they wanted a ‘friendly’ Poland and still – as a result of the controversy over Katyn – refused to recognize the Polish government in exile based in London. Now they moved to install their own tame administration in western Poland. On 28 July 1944 they transferred from the Soviet Union to Chem in Poland a collection of little-known Polish politicians who were prepared to collaborate with them. This group, officially called the Polish Committee of National Liberation but later known as the Lublin Poles (the committee moved to the Polish city of Lublin in early August 1945), had declared in a ‘manifesto’ issued in Moscow on 2 July that they were in favour of a variety of leftist policies such as nationalization, as well as a ‘fair’ border with the Soviet Union (which actually meant the Curzon Line). And as far as they – and their Soviet masters – were concerned, they were now the de facto government of ‘liberated’ Poland. Nikolai Bulganin, a leading member of the Soviet State Committee of Defence, was sent from Moscow to be Stalin's representative to the Lublin Poles, and effectively the
puppet government reported to him. Accompanying Bulganin was Ivan Serov, a senior member of the NKVD who had masterminded the deportations from eastern Poland during the Soviet occupation between 1939 and 1941; his task was to ‘help’ the Poles administer the newly liberated territory.

Of course, the imposition on Poland of a regime controlled by Stalin was not something that either the Western Allies or the official Polish government in exile could accept. And the situation was further complicated by the presence on Polish soil of four hundred thousand members of the Polish underground – the Armia Krajowa or Home Army – who owed their allegiance to the government in exile in London. Stalin's attitude towards this underground resistance force had been made plain at Tehran, where he had dismissed them as bandits. And the stance of the Red Army on the ground had already been demonstrated in Lwów, where the soldiers of the Home Army who had helped the Soviets liberate the city from the Germans had been subsequently disarmed. This kind of persecution was clearly part of a broader pattern. Also in July, for example, the Home Army units that had helped the Soviets capture Vilno were disbanded, the officers arrested and the men sent off to join collaborating Polish units within the Red Army
¹

It was against this background that the focus of all the various competing parties now turned to the fate of the capital, Warsaw. What would happen here, when the population of Warsaw rose up against the German occupiers in the summer and early autumn of 1944, would expose to the world the tensions and conflict within the West's relationship with Stalin and the Soviet Union that Churchill, Roosevelt and their respective propaganda machines had tried so hard to hide.

In the process, a number of myths would grow up around the Warsaw Uprising. The most prevalent of them was that the Poles had been lured into insurrection by direct blandishments and promises of assistance from the Soviets.

But although it is certainly true that radio broadcasts were made under Soviet auspices that encouraged the people of
Warsaw to believe that liberation was near, it is not the case that this was a direct attempt by the Soviet military to agree to a joint attack on the Polish capital with the Home Army. The appeals were much less specific. On 29 July, for instance, Radio Moscow announced that ‘the hour of action has already arrived’ for Warsaw, and that ‘those who have never bowed their heads to the Hitlerite power will again, as in 1939, join the struggle against the Germans, this time for a decisive action’. And a broadcast from the PKWN Soviet-authorized radio station the following day announced that Soviet forces were approaching and were coming ‘to bring you freedom’.
²
But this fell far short of a direct instruction to the Home Army to rise up in Warsaw in a coordinated way and link up with the advancing Red Army. So far, it was all just encouraging rhetoric.

The Home Army in Warsaw, together with the Polish government in exile in London, faced a difficult political dilemma. They knew that if they did nothing, and the Red Army liberated Warsaw before they could rise up, then the Soviets would be in a still more dominant position when it came to any post-war negotiations. After all, wouldn't the Home Army have then shown the very ineffectiveness that Stalin had always said characterized them? But, on the other hand, if the Home Army rose up long before the Red Army arrived, then they would be annihilated by the Germans. The timing of any rising was thus crucial.

What was obviously important, therefore, was to try to coordinate any rising with the imminent arrival of the Red Army. But the distrust between the two sides was so great that this was the one thing that the Polish government in exile did not feel able to do. On 26 July the leader of the Poles in London, Prime Minister Stanislaw Mikołajczyk, authorized the Home Army in Warsaw to ‘pronounce the Rising at a time to be determined by you’. But this was an instruction that went directly against the advice of the Polish commander-in-chief in London. He had said that ‘Insurrection without a fair understanding with the USSR and honest and real cooperation with the Red Army would be politically unjustified and militarily nothing more than an act of despair’.
³

Nonetheless, the commander of the Home Army in Warsaw ordered 'W hour – the launch of the uprising – to take place (without notifying the Soviets beforehand) at 5 p.m. on 1 August. He was aware that not only were the Red Army closing on Warsaw, but that on 27 July the Germans had called for a hundred thousand Polish civilians to surrender themselves and help build the defences of the capital. The Home Army, not surprisingly, was suspicious of this German order and urged people not to come forward. It thus made sense to senior figures in the Polish resistance to start the uprising at this moment. It was a gamble. And it wouldn't pay off.

Zbigniew Wolak
⁴
was one of the first to start fighting. He was nineteen years old and a unit commander in the Home Army. His father, a major in the regular Polish army, had died in 1939 and his mother had been killed in a Nazi concentration camp. For the previous two years he had worked as a porter at Warsaw central railway station, and during his free time he had trained with the Home Army. Now he and his colleagues had heard how the Soviets were oppressing other members of the Home Army elsewhere in Poland, and it was this news that, in his mind, predominantly dictated the timing of the rising. At seven o'clock in the evening of 1 August, Zbigniew and his unit emerged on to the streets in the suburbs of Warsaw, wearing headbands with the colours of the Polish flag – white and red. ‘Just imagine’, he says, ‘after four years of occupation we come out on this fragrant August day full of people, the women with children, people going back home from work, and all of a sudden there's sixty-four armed insurgents in the street. In a moment they would start dying’.