Gulag (67 page)
Alongside General Gorbatov and a few other military men, there was another, much larger exception to the general rule against political amnesties. Despite what the NKVD had told them, the exile of the Poles to the outer edges of the USSR was not, in the end, destined to be permanent. On July 30, 1941, a month after the launch of Barbarossa, General Sikorski, the leader of the Polish government-in-exile in London, and Ambassador Maisky, the Soviet envoy to Great Britain, signed a truce. The Sikorski-Maisky Pact, as the treaty was called, re-established a Polish state—its borders still to be determined—and granted an amnesty to “all Polish citizens who are at present deprived of their freedom on the territory of the USSR.”
Both Gulag prisoners and deported exiles were officially freed, and allowed to join a new division of the Polish army, to be formed on Soviet soil. In Moscow, General Władysław Anders, a Polish officer who had been imprisoned in Lubyanka for the previous twenty months, learned that he had been named commander of the new army during a surprise meeting with Beria himself. After the meeting, General Anders left the prison in a chauffeured NKVD car, wearing a shirt and trousers, but no shoes.
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On the Polish side, many objected to the Soviet Union’s use of the word “amnesty” to describe the freeing of innocent people, but this was not the time to quibble: relations between the two new “allies” were shaky. The Soviet authorities refused to take any moral responsibility for the “soldiers” of the new army—all in a terrible state of health—and would not give General Anders any food or supplies. “You are Poles—let Poland feed you,” the army’s officers were told.
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Some camp commanders even refused to let their Polish prisoners out at all. Gustav Herling, still imprisoned in November 1941, realized that he would “not survive until spring” if he were not released, and had to conduct a hunger strike before he was finally let go.
20
The Soviet authorities complicated matters further by stating, a few months into the amnesty, that its terms applied not to all former Polish citizens, but only to ethnic Poles: ethnic Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Jews were to remain in the USSR. Terrible tensions erupted as a result. Many of the minorities tried to pass themselves off as Poles, only to be unmasked by genuine Poles, who feared re-arrest themselves if the identity of their “false” comrades was revealed. Later, the passengers on one Polish evacuation train, bound for Iran, tried to evict a group of Jews: they feared the train would not be allowed out of the USSR with “non-Polish” passengers.
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Other Polish prisoners were released from camps or exile settlements, but not given any money or told where to go. One ex-prisoner recalled that “The Soviet authorities in Omsk didn’t want to help us, explaining that they knew nothing about any Polish army, and instead proposed that we find work near Omsk.”
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An NKVD officer gave Herling a list of places where he could get a residence permit, but denied all knowledge of a Polish army.
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Following rumors, the released Polish prisoners hitchhiked and rode trains around the Soviet Union, looking for the Polish army.
Stefan Waydenfeld’s family, exiled to northern Russia, were not told of the existence of the Polish army at all, nor offered any means of transport whatsoever: they were simply told they could go. In order to get away from their remote exile village, they built a raft, and floated down their local river toward “civilization”—a town which had a railway station. Months later, they were finally rescued from their wanderings when, in a café in the town of Chimkent, southern Kazakhstan, Stefan recognized a classmate from his school in Poland. She told them, finally, where to find the Polish army.
24
Nevertheless, the ex-
zeks
and their deported wives and children did slowly make their way to Kuibyshev, the Polish army’s base camp, and to the army’s other outposts around the country. Upon arrival, many were overwhelmed by the experience of finding “Poland” again, as Kazimierz Zarod wrote: “All around us in every direction, Polish speech, familiar Polish faces! I myself met several old acquaintances, and there were scenes of jubilation and exultation as men and women greeted each other with hugs and kisses.”
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On the day of General Anders’s arrival, another ex-zek, Janusz Wedów, composed a poem, entitled “A Welcome to the Leader”:
Ach, my heart! Again you beat so strongly, so happily I had thought you had grown hard, died inside me ...
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Within a few months, however, the optimism had diminished. The army lacked food, medicine, equipment—everything. Its soldiers were mostly sick, tired, half-starved men, who needed professional help and medical care. One officer recalled the horror he felt when he realized that “A vast tide of human beings who had left the places to which they had been exiled or deported . . . were now flowing down into the starving districts of Uzbekistan, to surge round an army organization which was itself undernourished and decimated by disease.”
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In addition, relations with the Soviet authorities remained poor. Employees of the Polish Embassy, deployed around the country, were still subject to unexplained arrest. Fearing the situation might worsen, General Anders changed his plan in March 1942. Instead of marching his army west, toward the front line, he won permission to evacuate his troops out of the Soviet Union altogether. It was a vast operation: 74,000 Polish troops, and another 41,000 civilians, including many children, were put on trains and sent to Iran.
In his haste to leave, General Anders left thousands more Poles behind, along with their Jewish, Ukrainian, and Belorussian former fellow citizens. Some eventually joined the Kosciuszko division, a Polish division of the Red Army. Others had to wait for the war to end to be repatriated. Still others never left at all. To this day, some of their descendants still live in ethnic Polish communities in Kazakhstan and northern Russia.
Those who left kept fighting. After recovering in Iran, Anders’s army did manage to join the Allied forces in Europe. Traveling via Palestine— and in some cases via South Africa—they later fought for the liberation of Italy at the Battle of Montecassino. While the war continued, the Polish civilians were parceled out to various parts of the British Empire. Polish children wound up in orphanages in India, Palestine, even east Africa. Most would never return to Soviet-occupied, postwar Poland. The Polish clubs, Polish historical societies, and Polish restaurants still found in West London are testimony to their postwar exile.
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After they had left the USSR, the departed Poles performed an invaluable service for their less fortunate ex–fellow inmates. In Iran and Palestine, the army and the Polish government-in-exile conducted several surveys of the soldiers and their families in order to determine exactly what had happened to the Poles deported to the Soviet Union. Because the Anders evacuation was the only large group of prisoners ever allowed to leave the USSR, the material produced by these questionnaires and somewhat rushed historical inquiries remained the only substantial evidence of the Gulag’s existence for half a century. And, within limits, it was surprisingly accurate: although they had no real understanding of the Gulag’s history, the Polish prisoners did manage to convey the camp system’s staggering size, its geographical extent—all they had to do was list the wide variety of places they had been sent—and its horrific wartime living conditions.
After the war, the Poles’ descriptions of their experiences formed the basis for reports on Soviet forced-labor camps produced by the Library of Congress and the American Federation of Labor. Their straightforward accounts of the Soviet slave-labor system came as a shock to many Americans, whose awareness of the camps had dimmed since the days of the Soviet timber boycotts in the 1920s. These reports circulated widely, and in 1949, in an attempt to persuade the United Nations to investigate the practice of forced labor in its member states, the AFL presented the UN with a thick body of evidence of its existence in the Soviet Union:
Less than four years ago the workers of the world won their first victory, the victory against Nazi totalitarianism, after a war which was waged with the greatest sacrifices—waged against the Nazis’ policy of enslavement of all people whose countries they had invaded . . .
However, in spite of the Allied victory, the world is perturbed to a very high degree by communications which seem to indicate that the evils we have fought to eradicate, and for whose defeat so many have died, are still rampant in various parts of the world ...
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The Cold War had begun.
Life within the camp system often mirrored and echoed life in the greater Soviet Union—and this was never more true than during the final years of the Second World War. As Germany crumbled, Stalin’s thoughts turned to a postwar settlement. His plans to draw central Europe into the Soviet sphere of influence solidified. Not coincidentally, the NKVD also entered what might be described as its own expansive, “internationalist” phase. “This war is not as in the past,” Stalin remarked in a conversation with Tito, recorded by the Yugoslav communist Milovan Djilas. “Whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own social system as far as his army can reach.”
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Concentration camps were a fundamental part of the Soviet “social system,” and as the war drew to a close, the Soviet secret police began to export their methods and personnel to Soviet-occupied Europe, teaching their new foreign clients the camp regimes and methods they had now perfected at home.
Of the camps created in what was to become the “Soviet bloc” of Eastern Europe, those set up in eastern Germany were perhaps the most brutal. As the Red Army marched across Germany in 1945, the Soviet Military Administration immediately began to construct them, eventually setting up eleven of these “special” concentration camps
—spetslagerya—
in all. Two of them, Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald, were located on the site of former Nazi concentration camps. All of them were under the direct control of the NKVD, which organized and ran them in the same manner as it ran the camps of the Gulag back at home, with work norms, minimal rations, and overcrowded barracks. In the famine-wracked postwar years, these German camps seem to have been even more lethal than their Soviet counterparts. Nearly 240,000 mostly political prisoners passed through them during the five years of their existence. Of these, 95,000—more than a third—are thought to have died. If the lives of Soviet prisoners were never particularly important to the Soviet authorities, the lives of German “fascists” mattered even less.
For the most part, the inmates of the East German camps were not high-ranking Nazis or proven war criminals. That sort of prisoner was usually taken back to Moscow, interrogated, and put directly into the Soviet POW camps or the Gulag. The
spetslagerya
were meant instead to serve the same function as the Polish and Baltic deportations: they were designed to break the back of the German bourgeoisie. As a result, they contained not leading Nazis or war criminals but judges, lawyers, entrepreneurs, businessmen, doctors, and journalists. Among them were even some of the very few German opponents of Hitler, whom the Soviet Union—paradoxically— also feared. Anyone who had dared to fight the Nazis, after all, might also dare to fight the Red Army.
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The NKVD interned a similar sort of person in the Hungarian and Czechoslovakian prison camps, set up by the local secret police services, on Soviet advice, after the Communist Party consolidated power in Prague in 1948, and in Budapest in 1949. Arrests were carried out with what has been described as a “caricature” of Soviet logic: a Hungarian weatherman was arrested after reporting “an influx of icy air coming from the northeastern direction, from the Soviet Union” on the day that a Soviet division arrived in Hungary; a Czech businessman wound up in a camp after his neighbor accused him of referring to “that imbecile, Stalin.”
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Yet the camps themselves were no caricature. In his memoir of Reczk, the most notorious Hungarian camp, the Hungarian poet Gyorgy Faludy sketches a portrait of a system which seems almost an exact copy of the Gulag, right down to the practice of
tufta
and the starving Hungarian prisoners searching for wild berries and mushrooms in the woods.
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The Czech system also had a special feature: a set of eighteen
lagpunkts
, grouped around the uranium mines of Yachimov. In retrospect, it is clear that political prisoners with long sentences—the equivalent of the Soviet
katorga
inmates— were sent to these mining camps in order to die. Although they worked extracting uranium for the new Soviet atomic bomb project, they were not given special clothing or any form of protection at all. The death rates are known to have been high—though how high, exactly, is still unknown.
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In Poland, the situation was more complicated. By the end of the war, a significant proportion of the Polish population were living in a camp of some kind, whether a displaced persons’ camp (Jews, Ukrainians, former Nazi slave laborers), a detention camp (Germans and Volksdeutsche, Poles who had claimed German ancestry), or a prison camp. The Red Army set up some of its POW camps in Poland, filling them not only with German prisoners but also with members of the Polish Home Army, on their way to Soviet deportation. In 1954, 84,200 political prisoners were still incarcerated in Poland as well.
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There were also camps in Romania, in Bulgaria, and—despite his “anti-Soviet” reputation—in Tito’s Yugoslavia. Like the central European camps, these Balkan camps began by resembling the Gulag, but over time began to differ. Most had been set up by local police, with Soviet advice and guidance of some kind. The Romanian secret police, the
Securitate
, seem to have been working under the direct orders of their Soviet counterparts. Perhaps for that reason, the Romanian camps most closely resemble the Gulag, even to the extent that they carried out absurd, overambitious projects of the sort Stalin himself favored in the Soviet Union. The most famous of these, the Danube–Black Sea Canal, appears to have served no real economic function at all. To this day, it is every bit as empty and deserted as the White Sea Canal which it so eerily resembles. A propaganda slogan declared that the “Danube–Black Sea Canal is the tomb of the Romanian bourgeoisie!” Given that up to 200,000 people may have died building it, that may have indeed been the canal’s real purpose.
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