Read Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw Online
Authors: Norman Davies
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #War, #History
Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (97 page)
‘Such a situation’, it concludes, ‘is provoking the acute discontent of Poles.’
56
In reality, the presence of such a large Jewish contingent in Berman’s notorious organization would not have aroused the same level of suspicion if the Communist authorities had not routinely denied employing any Jews whatsoever.
MEXICO
An ex-insurgent from Warsaw debates the Rising with a Soviet diplomat
I have lived in Mexico for almost half a century. In all that time, I haven’t met anybody who, on finding out about my involvement in the Rising and the AK, didn’t show an interest in one of the bloodiest battles of World War II. I regularly attended the extremely interesting lectures and monthly discussions at the Asociación Histórica de Militaria (Military Historical Association). In 1986, when Poland featured prominently in the Mexican press due to ‘Solidarity’, they asked me – as a member of the Mexican Group of the AK – to talk about the Rising but ‘without touching on the political aspects’. I accepted the invitation enthusiastically, and suggested giving a talk at a meeting on 6 August, a few days after the anniversary . . .
I had no idea that diplomats from the American and Soviet Embassies were going to attend. Just as I was preparing for my presentation, the Soviet military attaché came up to me and said: ‘I’m sure you’ll talk from a very different point of view to that held by the General Staff of the Red Army. I’d like to offer to you General Sergei Shtemenko’s book as a gift.’
For an hour and a half I lectured on the military situation before and after the Rising, the heroism of the AK soldiers and ordinary people, the bravery of the Polish and Allied air forces, as well as the lack of strategic and tactical help. I mentioned the reluctance of the Soviets to assist the Rising and Moscow’s ban on the landing of Allied aircraft . . . I also mentioned the Polish division that had successfully crossed the river, proving that the river could be crossed and that the Russians had no intention of doing so. When I finished, I was applauded generously.
The second half of the meeting consisted of a discussion, in which many questions were raised. Towards the end the Soviet attaché asked me: ‘Don’t you think that if the Poles had not been divided and had not had two governments, Warsaw would have been spared?’ I took this as an invitation to talk about political and historical issues. First of all, I made it clear that
there were not two governments
. In London we had a legal government recognized both by the Poles and by the rest of the world. The ‘Committee’ founded by the Soviet authorities in Moscow could not claim any right to represent Polish citizens. I pointed out how united the Polish nation had been during the uprisings of the nineteenth century, during the battle for independence in 1920 against the Bolsheviks, and during the whole Second World War. I added that I greatly admired the Polish forces abroad and the AK for their loyalty to the Allies. I then explained that the Polish people were sympathetic to the view of the government in exile, which had affirmed, contrary to the Kremlin’s
propaganda, that the Polish officers at Katyn had been victims of the Russians and not the Germans. Finally I said that the Polish people’s support for ‘Solidarity’ proved that they could unite against any enemy. I turned to the Soviet attaché and said, ‘I hope that now you have the facts, you will admit that I am right . . .!’ All eyes were on the diplomat. After a few seconds, the Russian became very red in the face. Finally he said: ‘From your point of view you are right.’
A few years passed. Poland contributed to the fall of the Communist bloc and of the Berlin Wall. I finally got round to reading the ‘dissertation’ by General Shtemenko. It contained nothing but lies about the Rising. I imagine that such lies can only be told by someone who has either a hammer and sickle or a swastika on their coat of arms.
Every year on Memorial Day I am invited to the American cemetery in Mexico. On one of those occasions I again bumped into my ‘friend’, the same Soviet diplomat. Dressed in Russian naval uniform, he came towards me, introduced himself as a financial attaché, and asked if I remembered him. I said I remembered him well and added: ‘Will you agree with me now about Poland’s unity and about the Rising?’ Quite unexpectedly he said: ‘Yes. In the past we had no access to the truth. Now things have changed, and I agree with you entirely.’
1
J. Skoryna
The first anniversary of the Warsaw Rising was seen by the UB with some reason as an occasion for vigilance. On the eve of the anniversary, four members of the ‘Warsaw Organization of the Home Army’ were picked up by security officers. Two had been trying to board a plane for Cracow, carrying two pistols and 150 copies of ‘anti-Governmental’ and ‘anti-Soviet’ leaflets. One of them, George Z., was a former employee of the Security Ministry in the city of Stettin. That same night, posters were pasted on street walls around the city carrying slogans such as ‘
DOWN WITH THE OCCUPIERS
’, ‘
LONG LIVE
[
PREMIER MICK
]’, ‘
DOWN WITH
[
BIERUT
]’, ‘
POLAND WILL WIN
’, and ‘
WE ARE FIGHTING
’.
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Investigations showed that the ‘
Bandgruppa
’ had been operating since January. It was commanded by a certain André, and was divided into two sections – Warsaw (west) and Warsaw (east). It was supposedly engaged in robberies and terrorist acts against the security organs and party members. On 24
July it had robbed a bank of 200,000
zloties
. The report finished ominously: ‘Measures are being extended to capture the remaining members of the Underground.’
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For many years after the war, no studies could be made of the murderous repressions which had overwhelmed the democratic opposition in Poland. Official sources passed over the events in silence. Foreign observers had few means of verifying the many rumours. Once Poland disappeared behind the Iron Curtain, Western public opinion lost interest. Two periods were distinguished. The first, which ran from 1944 to the end of the ‘civil war’ in 1947, was characterized by a very large number of victims who were eliminated systematically, but often in a summary, almost casual manner. The second, from 1948 to 1955/56, was characterized by a diminishing number of victims, who were finished off by the more formalized procedures of extended trials and judicial shows. Survivors of the Warsaw Rising figured prominently among the victims of both periods.
During the so-called ‘civil war’, the tactics of the Communist forces concentrated on destroying the infrastructure of Underground support by arresting suspected sympathizers and burning down their houses. They also made use of a series of ‘amnesties’ which promised their adversaries safe passage if they surrendered and laid down their arms within a given period. Many fighters were enticed out of the woods in this way, only to find that the amnesty was not what it seemed. As often as not, it was a prelude to rearrest. Recurrent arrest and retrial of the same defendant was a feature of the process.
Col. Wolf, the Home Army commander from Lithuania, for instance, was arrested on three separate occasions. Having escaped from a Soviet penal camp at Vologda, he returned home to Vilno in 1947 only to be rearrested there by the NKVD. ‘Repatriated’ to Poland, he was formally arrested by agents of the Security Office on 3 July. He survived four years of interrogation in the Mokotov Jail in Warsaw, without trial, before dying in the prison hospital in 1951.
Throughout the ‘civil war’ and beyond, therefore, oppositionists of one sort or another were brought to trial, sentenced, and removed from circulation. The culmination of this phase was reached in January 1947 when a major trial of the leadership of WiN was staged. The main defendant was Bear Cub’s deputy and successor, ‘the Chairman’, who had been the most prominent figure in the ex-AK Underground after Bear Cub’s death.
IRKA III
The widow of an insurgent falls victim to false charges of espionage
Three years passed [after my husband’s death in the Rising]. I was constantly on the move, a single mother contending with all manner of difficulties to support my two children. Thanks to my knowledge of languages, I managed to obtain a job in the visa department of the US Embassy. This was the cause of my later arrest in the largely fabricated case against Polish pilots who had served in the RAF . . .
As it subsequently transpired, the chief defendant in the case, Ladislas Sl., an acquaintance of ours, was almost certainly engaged in foreign intelligence. He was eventually executed. All the others, after years of cruel interrogation, were condemned to sentences from ten years to life, only being rehabilitated during the ‘thaw’ after Stalin’s death. They included many ex-RAF personnel [such as Skalski, Novicki, and Radomski] . . . We were victims of a system that was not interested in genuine offences, only in sowing terror.
My arrest occurred when I was caught in a so-called ‘cauldron’ set by the police in Ladislas Sl.’s flat. Security agents picked up everyone who called there over a period of some four weeks . . . When they found that I was employed by the American Embassy, they set up another ‘cauldron’ in my own flat; and I was immediately taken to the Ministry of Security to be interrogated by Col. Yatsek R. in person. ‘It’s hardly surprising’, he declared, ‘to see a landowner’s daughter working for the Americans and befriending a spy. But it would be a shame if a good-looking young woman should rot in prison for ten years and her children be put in an orphanage. I propose, therefore, that you be sent home by limousine without delay: but on one condition, that you visit our ministry from time to time to talk about matters which concern us.’ When he received no agreement, he sent me to the cells, saying, ‘A pity, but it’s your choice.’
I survived two years of interrogation without signing any false statements. There was only one military judge at my secret trial, and two bored assistants, but no defence lawyer. Two former RAF pilots were called as witnesses against me, although they had already dissociated themselves from their accusations, extracted by torture. Even so, just as the Colonel had promised, I was given ten years, ‘for abetting espionage’.
I spent the first three weeks in an isolation cell, where someone had written the entire Morse code on the wall. I learned it by heart. For the next seven years, in various prisons, I acted as a regular telegraphist tapping out messages to neighbouring cells. This system of communication was so widespread that we knew the names and
sentences of virtually all the prisoners . . . For three months, I ‘talked’ for hours every day with the commander of WiN, who was waiting to be executed . . .
The methods applied to prisoners who refused to confess followed a well-known pattern. For six months, I had a ‘stool pigeon’ placed in my cell, and was endlessly grilled about my experiences under the Gestapo in the Paviak in 1941 . . .
In time, all the successive stages of interrogation were imposed on me. ‘Intensive interrogation’ in my case lasted for eighteen months . . . I became so exhausted, I had to be revived by a series of injections administered by a German prisoner-doctor. I was given six weeks of so-called
stójki
or ‘standings’, with only two one-night breaks, kept at attention on my feet throughout the night after day-long questionings.
By way of conclusion, three colonels beat me unconscious with belts before leaving me naked on a cold and filthy cement floor, deprived of access to a toilet . . . I saved myself from being raped by a specially nasty warder by protesting I had VD. I then had to listen to the terrified screams of a woman in a neighbouring cell, who paid the price for my escape.
But those were just the physical tortures. For two years and a half, I received no word from my parents, spoke to no lawyer, and heard nothing of my children, who were four and five when I left them . . .
1
The regime struck another chilling blow in March 1948 when it caught up with Capt. Roman, an ex-insurgent and sometime soldier of the Anders Army, who has rightly been dubbed ‘the bravest of the brave’. There can be little doubt that Capt. Roman was collecting intelligence for the Government-in-Exile and that he had returned to Poland with the full expectation, if caught, of being treated as a traitor and a spy. He was tried and executed in the Mokotov Jail. ‘As a paid agent of Gen. Anders’ Intelligence Service,’ the court declared, ‘he organized a spy network on Polish territory, collecting information and sending it abroad,’ thereby ‘betraying state secrets.’
59
This was not too remarkable. Far more extraordinary were Seraphim’s earlier adventures.
Roman, aka Seraphim, real name Vitold Pilecki, was a Pole from the east, born on the shores of Lake Ladoga and educated in Lithuania. A pre-war cavalry officer, he was active in Underground conspiracy in Warsaw from 1939 onwards. (During the Rising, he commanded the company from ‘Valiant II’ which, almost alone, closed the east–west boulevard to German
traffic for the first two weeks of August in the area which came to be known as ‘Pilecki’s Redoubt’.) But his place in history had been secured earlier, in September 1940, when he succeeded in getting himself arrested by the Gestapo in order to see the inside of Auschwitz for himself. (His camp number was 4859.) Having set up the first Resistance cell inside the camp, he contrived to escape in April 1943, and wrote the first authoritative report of conditions there. His anti-fascist exploits earned him no mercy from the Communists. He has no known grave.
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A second trial, which began in October 1948, is usually known by the acronym START. In effect, it represented an act of collective repression directed against the Home Army’s former internal police unit. The prosecutors argued that the unit had been used for purely political purposes and, in particular, for killing Communists, Soviet partisans, and Jews. The chief defendant was none other than the legendary Maj. Kontrym, the ‘Samogitian’. After the war, he had been in Bergen-Belsen and in the 1st (Polish) Armoured Division. He, too, was shown no mercy, and was shot in January 1953 having been tormented for over four years.
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