Cruel World (48 page)

This group had no food for two days. “On the third day they opened the car and half of the people were dead already, lying on the floors, frozen and starved from hunger and lack of air.” The dead were piled in heaps and covered with snow “so that it would not be seen that so many had died.”
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Other large deportations took place in April and June 1940. The April group consisted mainly of 66,000 family members of the 21,857 Polish
officers, policemen, and intelligentsia who had been executed at Katyn and other sites that spring. In June, whole families of Polish “refugees” who had fled the Nazis were sent off again to the remotest reaches of the USSR, which are remote indeed.

Deportations continued even as the Germans invaded the USSR in June 1941. By late summer the total number of deported Poles reached an estimated 400,000, among them many Jews who had been refused repatriation to the German-occupied areas.
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The deportations were not limited to Poland: all along the western Soviet borders “undesirables” such as landowners and small-time capitalists were sent to Siberia. The hardest hit were families in which the men were taken off to hard labor while the women, children, and elderly went elsewhere.

The conditions on the journeys, which often lasted for more than a month, varied greatly, being affected by weather, individual train commanders, and the ingenuity of the deportees. In the hours before their departure from Lvov in the summer of 1940, the “refugee” father of ten-year-old Janka Goldberger, who had fled east from Cracow when the Germans invaded, somehow managed to get himself appointed chief of his cattle car, and scrounged enough lumber to build platforms, which doubled the space available to its fifty-six passengers. He also installed a wide pipe in the floor for a latrine. The families were able to spread their bedding about on the platforms and Janka “thought it fun” when she first climbed into the car. Her “berth” was on the top tier, where it was hot and the air was bad, “but there were tiny barred windows which were sometimes un-shuttered.”
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On all the deportee trains, the Polish children, who had already noticed the extraordinary shabbiness of the Red Army when it had invaded Poland, were amazed at the conditions in the USSR: “Poverty peered out from people’s houses and faces. The people were poorly dressed. The houses were old and dirty … we saw very few cattle. The forests were devastated.”
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As Janka’s convoy rolled across the vastness of the USSR, boredom and lethargy set in. The deportees were let out briefly from time to time, but at stops far from stations, where the trains often spent the day so that they would not attract the attention of local populations. The guards were bored too, but normally kind to the children, whom they did allow to slip out at stations to buy food and get water. In less populated areas the deportees frequently went for days without stopping. On Janka’s train bread and soup were distributed once a day, but on many others the “Russians didn’t find provisions because they didn’t have any themselves.”
There was often no water, and the temperature ranged from raging heat to hideous cold. Cars with hole-in-the-floor facilities were luxurious. Janka and her peers were highly amused at the sight of people in other cars who were held by two strong men as they “stuck the relevant part of anatomy out of the door.” From time to time the train was stopped, and everyone was forced into log cabins for communal baths while their clothes were deloused. The adults were less amused. All feared death or torture at their destination. The guards, when asked what things would be like, said only, “You will get used to it. But if you can’t, you will die like a dog.”

As they moved east across the Volga and past the great cities toward Lake Baikal, things became more relaxed and even the adults were allowed to disembark at stations to buy or barter for food.
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This was not mere kindness. In a memo highly critical of the deportation operation, the Main Administration of Escort Troops in Moscow noted that “the convoy troops were obliged to feed themselves by forced requisitions at the railway station canteens,” as “food supplies were irregular.”
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After thirty-two days, the Goldberger family arrived at a “classical” concentration camp in Tynda. From here, jammed so tightly into trucks that they could not move, they were conveyed hundreds of miles farther into Yakutskaya Oblast, deep in the Siberian taiga, nearly 5,000 miles from Cracow and home.

From hundreds of railheads, other groups slowly moved toward similar destinations. The vast majority were women, children, and the old. Eleven-year-old Harold Olin, deported from Romania with his mother and grandmother, did the last stage of the trip to his new home via barge. For two weeks, the leaky, lice-infested vessel was pulled by a tugboat from Novosibirsk to Pudino, a small town “surrounded by quicksand bogs, which were impenetrable for most of the year … it was impossible to walk out of there, because there were no solid roads connecting to the mainland.” During the winter access to the area was by a single road across the frozen wasteland. From Pudino the families went on foot to villages with collective farms, the closest of which was some ten miles away.

Arrival at one’s destination, as was true in all such forced travel, brought no relief. Who does not dream of a bath, food, and warm shelter after a grueling journey? Memos to the Commissariat of Forestry notwithstanding, here, as in the German dumping area of Nisko, virtually nothing had been done to prepare for the “resettlers.” Harold Olin’s group of thirty was “forcibly quartered” in the few existing two-room log cabins of the collective workers who had been sent out a few years before. The latter, many of whom were exiles from the Ukraine, deeply resented this measure, as they
had had to build the cabins from scratch when they arrived.
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The Olins’ cotenants were another fatherless family of four. There was no plumbing, and in the winter the inside temperature seldom rose above 40 or 45 degrees. In another place, the deportees were simply “let off and ordered … to look for housing, so the people lived under open sky for a few days,” and in yet another “they stuck us in stables and Cossack mud huts, taking no interest in us and not even asking us about food.”
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Compared to these settlements, that of Janka Goldberger’s family was unusually good. Here latrines had already been prepared, water was plentiful, and a canteen was in operation. The new arrivals were required to finish building the huts they lived in and collect wood for the winter, but at least everything was new and clean. All ages participated in this work. The children gathered small branches and mud to insulate the walls. They needed no urging: the camp commander had made clear that if these tasks were not completed before the snows came, they would freeze to death.

Tasks such as building one’s own shelter had to be done in one’s free time, of which there was precious little. The “resettlers” had been brought all this way to work, and their duties often began within hours of their arrival. It was hard manual labor in sawmills and munitions factories, and on collective farms. Children as young as ten worked alongside their elders in order to earn enough to buy food. But there was not always enough work for the number of deportees, nor were most women and teenagers capable of performing much of it:

Illness, injury, or exhaustion meant lost work hours and less food. It was a vicious circle. Children picked berries in the forests and helped cultivate vegetable gardens in summer. Still, there was never enough to eat. Mothers in most camps, when not working, walked for miles to find locals with whom they could exchange their few possessions for food. But the inhabitants themselves were frequently so impoverished that they could provide little. In winter, the shopping trips could be fatal. One child later wrote this account:

The woman was found by farmers two kilometers from the village. Frozen in her sledge, she still held her small son in her arms.

Despite the ghastly conditions, many of the exiled children, like their counterparts everywhere, had happy moments. Some of the camps had schools for the younger ones with teachers who were kind, if frequently insistent on the rejection of religion and on other tenets of Soviet ideology. The children explored the forests, made makeshift skis and sleds, and fashioned fishing poles. Parents did their best to protect them from full knowledge of the high death rate. But as malnutrition and exhaustion, exacerbated by terrible hygiene conditions, set in, this became more and more difficult, and when the food ran out, death surrounded them all:

The death of a grandmother was one thing, the loss of brothers and sisters or the sole support of the family quite another. When the adults died or could no longer work, even very young children were forced to earn what they could by begging, shoveling snow, or working in the fields and forests.

Eleven-year-old Stanislaw K. lost his mother and a sister in the first winter. He and two other sisters were sent to a Russian orphanage, where he was brutally punished for praying by being “locked in an old toilet for two days,” during which time he was given no food. He escaped from the orphanage and managed to rejoin his older brother at his former camp, where he survived by stacking large pieces of lumber.
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He was lucky.
One source estimates that 20 percent of the children taken to Russia died.
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The deported Poles were saved from this slow annihilation by the German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941. A few days after the invasion, the USSR signed a pact of mutual assistance with the Polish government in exile and more than 300,000 Poles were suddenly set free. Release was all very well, but there was now no possibility of returning home.

Thousands of men managed to join Polish Army units being formed in the USSR and, along with several thousand children, were eventually evacuated to Allied-controlled areas in the Middle East. But many others remained in exile in the remoter areas of the USSR for three more years, in conditions little better than those they had endured in the deportee camps. Janka Goldberger, her family miraculously intact after four years in exile and another thirty-day train journey, finally arrived back in Cracow, itself also miraculously undamaged, in the summer of 1945. Here, for the first time, she would learn the details of the extermination of the Jews and realize that she owed her life to her exile in Siberia.
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By the summer of 1940 Western Europe, like Poland, had fallen to the Nazi war machine and tens of millions more human beings were under varying degrees of German sway. In Hitler’s grand vision of the New Europe, the former “Nordic” nations such as Holland, Denmark, and Norway would become integral parts of the Reich. The Germanic regions of Belgium and France were to be lumped together with these, while the rest would be carved up into new provinces (Himmler fantasized about a reincarnation of the ancient Duchy of Burgundy as an SS fiefdom) in which, once again, those of German blood were to be identified and, where necessary, extracted. The status of the rest of the French population was never precisely delineated by the racial agencies, but it seems to have fallen somewhere in between the “Nordic,” which must be preserved at all costs, and the “Slavic,” which was to be gradually eliminated.

These plans were not immediately revealed. Control of the vast conquered area was no easy task and would require local cooperation. In addition, Germany desperately needed the economic resources of the Western occupied lands and had to keep its workers contented enough to ensure maximum production and encourage them to volunteer for work in the Reich. The desirable elements in the Western populations, and especially their children, would, therefore, have to be won over gradually and then be integrated into the German mainstream. How this was done would depend on the racial makeup of each country, its political structure after surrender, and the inclinations of the German administrations, some military and some civilian, that would rule each subjugated nation.

Himmler could hardly wait to start work in the Nordic West. A highranking SS deputy was in place in Norway within weeks of its invasion.
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Himmler himself secretly toured Holland and Belgium as soon as they had surrendered, noting happily that “the people would clearly be a [racial] benefit to Germany.”
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By the summer of 1941, an SS genealogical office was busily digging up records and making lists of Huguenot refugees, the Walloon Reform community, and other subgroups of Netherlandish culture.
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