The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (26 page)

Finally, the discussions at Tehran foreshadowed the dark fate that awaited Poland. This country, partitioned by Stalin and Hitler in the notorious 1939 pact, and oc-

cupied by each of these predatory neighbors, had en- dured a horrible experience since then. The western part had come under a violent, genocidal Nazi occu- pation, while its eastern half had been “Sovietized”: 1,250,000 Poles in this multiethnic region were deport- ed to Siberia, the better to incorporate these lands into the Ukraine and Belorussia.
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Germany had overrun all of Poland in 1941, but as the tide of war turned, Stalin could envision the Soviet Union soon returning to Pol- ish soil. In Tehran, Stalin wished to secure recognition of his earlier land grab of Poland’s eastern lands as a fait accompli, although it had been obtained with Hit- ler’s connivance. Stalin clung to the ethnographic argu- ment that these seized eastern lands were not “Polish,” strictly speaking, as the people living there were a mix of ethnicities, including Ukrainians and Belorussians, and indeed Poles were in the minority. In any case, the line of partition that Hitler and Stalin imposed in 1939 closely resembled the line drawn up in 1920 by Brit- ish Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon, when he was trying to arrange a truce between then-warring Poland and Russia. The Curzon Line seemed logical in 1920; why should Britain object to it now?

Indeed, Britain did not object to it. Winston Churchill believed that he bore great responsibility for the fate of Poland. Britain, after all, had gone to war with Ger-

many in 1939 precisely over the Polish question, after Germany had invaded that sad country. The British prime minister had sheltered the Polish government- in-exile in London, and accommodated its leaders: at first, General Wladyslaw Sikorski and, after his death in July 1943, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk. Churchill, how- ever, understood the correlation of power all too well: only the Soviet Union could defeat Hitler in the East. If Stalin wanted 75,000 square miles of Polish soil as rec- ompense, he would take it. Thus, Churchill developed a formula in speaking to the London Poles: Britain want- ed a strong, independent Poland, but it was not wed- ded, nor would it fuss over, any particular frontier or border. Poland would be liberated by Soviet arms, and should be happy with whatever it got. The Poles in Lon- don argued that they could not accept the Curzon Line as their eastern border, and claimed that the borders of a sovereign state could not be rearranged without the permission of Poland’s internationally recognized government. They were, of course, wrong.
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During the dinner on the first night of the Tehran con- ference, Stalin took up the Polish question. Working from the premise that the eastern border question was really already settled, Stalin suggested some compen- sation for Poland in the west: he said Poland’s western border should be revised to reach the Oder river, thus

biting off a large chunk of eastern Germany. Churchill seemed to warm to this topic, calculating that such a handsome offer of German lands might bring the Lon- don Poles around to agree to the Curzon Line. Churchill, knowing full well that the Polish government-in-exile was dead set against losing territory in the east, none- theless agreed with Stalin about rearranging Poland’s borders, and produced three matchsticks, which he laid out on the table to indicate the way they might adjust the national boundaries. He told Stalin that “he would like to see Poland moved westward in the same manner as soldiers at drill execute the drill ‘left close.’” And so, with mere matchsticks, the three men shaped the future of millions.
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During this time, Roosevelt was noncommittal, and the reason became clear on the last afternoon of the conference. Just before convening the plenary session, Roosevelt met briefly with Stalin alone, and told him that “personally he agreed with the views of Marshal Stalin” about the revision of Poland’s borders, but that he had to consider the reaction of “six to seven million Americans of Polish extraction,” as well as people of Baltic origin, whose votes he did not wish to lose in the elections of 1944. As a consequence, he would not make any public statement about the Pol- ish issue at Tehran. Stalin now had FDR’s private assur- ance that the Polish issue would be settled in a way that favored Soviet interests, whatever the Poles themselves

might think.

With this valuable gift in his pocket, Stalin then went into the plenary session, the last of the Tehran meet- ing. There, Churchill tried weakly to extract at least one concession from Stalin in return for Britain’s support for Stalin’s land grab of half of Poland: that he treat with the London-based Polish government-in-exile. Yet these exiles, as Churchill knew, were staunchly anti- Soviet and deeply distrusted the Soviet Union; indeed, General Sikorski had led the most successful military offensive against the Bolsheviks in 1920. It was extremely unlikely that Stalin would have anything to do with them. Stalin continued to claim that these Poles in London were Fascists, and that they had pub- licly slandered the Soviet Union by suggesting that the Soviets had been involved in the murder of 8,000 Pol- ish army officers in the forests of Katyn (a crime Stalin continued to blame on the Germans, though he had in fact personally authorized the slaughter). Stalin—who had already won so much at Tehran, getting a com- mitment to launch Overlord, getting agreement on a harsh peace for defeated Germany, and getting Allied support for extending Poland’s western border to the Oder—knew also that he had Roosevelt’s acquiescence in settling Poland’s fate as he saw fit. Stalin therefore brushed off any notion that he could work with the

London Poles. Instead, he demanded Allied support for the Polish-Russian border that he and Hitler had delineated. Stalin told Churchill that “the Soviet Gov- ernment adheres to the 1939 line and considers it just and right.” When Foreign Minister Anthony Eden noted that “this was the line known as the Ribbentrop- Molotov Line,” Stalin shamelessly replied, “Call it what you will. We still consider it just and right.” There was some confusion about the precise contours of the bor- der, and a map of Poland was produced. In an impe- rial flourish, Stalin drew out a stubby red pencil and scratched away at it. He drew in thick red lines the new Soviet-Polish border, one that confirmed the loss of a huge chunk of eastern Poland to the Soviet Union, and also demarcated the division of East Prussia between Poland and Russia, too, with the valuable port city of Königsberg falling into Soviet territory.
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Churchill and Roosevelt remained sullen during this exchange, knowing that Stalin had run the table on them. In any case, with his army of millions, he could take by force whatever he could not win at the confer- ence table. Stalin had now the power, and the acquies- cence of the Allies, to shape Eastern Europe as he saw fit. For millions of Poles and Germans, Stalin’s swift red strokes on the map at Tehran wrote another chap- ter in the long nightmare of Eastern Europe, as a new

round of refugee columns, flight, expulsion, and death loomed. The session at which these matters had been settled had lasted a bit more than two hours.

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I

N THE SUMMER of 1944, the Red Army unleashed a gigantic offensive against the German forces along the German-Russian front—a line that ran from the Gulf of Finland and Leningrad through Belorus- sia, western Ukraine, and on down to Odessa on the Black Sea—a length of 1,500 miles. This was the great campaign that would finally break the back of the Weh- rmacht and open the way into Poland, Warsaw, and on to Berlin. This massive, multipart assault— Operation Bagration, named for a storied general who had fought Napoleon—revealed how far the Red Army had come since its collapse before the German onslaught exactly three years earlier. The attack was well coordinated be- tween air, artillery, tanks, and infantry; plans had been made to cross the marshy swamps of Belorussia using wooden bridges, logs, and brush-wood supplied to each tank; swift thrusts and encirclement—just what the Germans had unleashed in 1941—were now ad- opted by the Soviets. More astonishing was the sheer size of the operation: despite having lost well over 3 million POWs, the Red Army in 1944 fielded an army of

5,568,000 men and 480 divisions; the Germans, who at this moment were preparing to fend off the expected cross-channel invasion in the West, deployed on the eastern front 4,906,000 soldiers in 236 divisions. In Operation Bagration, the Red Army mustered 1,254,000 men, 2,715 tanks and 1,355 self-propelled guns, 24,000 artillery pieces, 2,306 Katyusha rocket launchers, 70,000 trucks, and over 5,000 aircraft. The Germans were powerful but could not match this sheer numeri- cal superiority along such a long battle line. Although they expected a Soviet offensive, the Germans were fooled by excellent Soviet counterintelligence into thinking the chief thrust would come farther south, or in the far northern Baltic front. The result was a catas- trophe for the Germans: a week after Operation Bagra- tion commenced, Soviet troops had surrounded Minsk, the first objective, and ten days later had taken Vilnius and were pouring through a huge gap in the German line into the Baltics. To the south, in a carefully timed delay, Soviet forces launched another major operation on July 13, throwing a million soldiers toward the Pol- ish cities of Lvov and Lublin; by the end of July they had reached the Vistula and were a few miles from Warsaw. In five weeks, the Red Army had cracked open the Ger- man line, expelled the Germans from Belorussia, taken 400,000 German prisoners, and completely destroyed thirty German divisions of Army Group Center. In-

credibly, the Red Army still had enough resources to commence yet another offensive, this one into Roma- nia against the German Army Group South, which col- lapsed in two weeks, leaving Romania no choice but to abandon its German ally and switch sides, which it duly did on August 23. Within another month, the Red Army was pushing into Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Hungary.
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Did these Soviet military victories augur liberation? Ilya Ehrenburg, the Red Army’s ardent propagandist, claimed they did. In May 1944, Ehrenburg recalled that fateful Sunday in June 1941 when the Germans had poured into Russia, “marching and signing, whistling and spitting…. They shot our children. Their tanks flat- tened our fields. Their bombs burned our towns. Their Führer howled, ‘ This is the end of Russia.’” But what had happened to these German soldiers? “ Their bones litter our soil. Their contemptible dreams are scattered to the winds.” Ehrenburg depicted this reversal of for- tune as a great victory not just for Soviet arms but for the cause of humanity. “ The campaign of justice has begun,” he wrote. “ The judges are marching west.” Of course, for Ehrenburg, as for millions of his fellow citi- zens, the verdict had already been returned; all that re- mained was punishment. “ We will draw the fangs from the reptiles. We will break their habit of fighting. The world looks with hope toward the Red Army. It brings

freedom.”
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In order to penetrate into the lair of the German “reptiles,” however, the Soviet Red Army had to pass through Poland, and for millions of Poles, what the Red Army brought did not look much like freedom. Instead, the passage of the liberating Soviets through Poland brought violence, repression, and occupation to this already divided, mutilated country. In the wake of the Allied agreements at Tehran, the Polish government- in-exile in London had watched with growing alarm as the Red Army continued to roll westward and across the prewar border of Poland. The London Poles had been pressured relentlessly by Churchill to accept re- ality: they were going to lose their eastern territories to the Soviet Union, he told them; they must bear up and accept this as the cost of liberation. Churchill told his Polish protégés that half a loaf was better than none; if they refused to accept it, then Stalin would proceed without them, and their entire country might soon be subsumed under Soviet domination. Poland then would be lost forever, “little more than a grievance and a vast echoing cry of pain.” Churchill told Polish Prime Minister Stanislaw Mikolajczyk that “his heart bled for them but the brutal facts could not be overlooked.”
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As Churchill himself put it during this same exchange,

“no one had ever accused the Poles of lack of courage.” Yet they were not only courageous but intransigent. The Polish government-in-exile felt it could not accept the partition of its own country by Soviet fiat because to do so would undermine its legitimacy with the strong Polish resistance movement—the Armia Krajowa, or Home Army. The Home Army was Europe’s largest and most powerful resistance movement. It had endured six years of German occupation and now felt itself to be on the cusp of freedom once again. It would not ac- cept a partition of the country without a fight. Prime Minister Mikolajczyk therefore resisted Anglo- Soviet pressure to accept the Curzon Line as Poland’s east- ern border. Instead, he and his London colleagues, in loose coordination with the Home Army commanders in Warsaw, envisioned a dramatic turnaround in Polish fortunes. They believed that the Polish internal resis- tance could rise up against the German occupiers just as the Red Army moved in to liberate the country, seize the levers of power and the capital city, and so pres- ent the Soviets and the world with a strong, national, and independent Polish government. Only such a bold gamble could forestall the partition of the country that Stalin desired. Of course, Stalin anticipated these manuevers. With the Red Army racing toward Warsaw, on July 21, 1944, Moscow announced the formation of a new Polish Committee of National Liberation: a