Wojtek the Bear [paperback] (22 page)

For the London government and the AK command, the outlook in the spring of 1944 was grim. It was now obvious that Stalin intended to set up a puppet Communist regime in Poland, or at least a
government which took its orders from Moscow. He would ignore the legal government-in-exile, and suppress its armed forces. As the Soviet armies blasted their way through the Nazi defences in
eastern Poland and headed towards Warsaw, Polish leaders adopted a new and desperate plan of action.

Operation Tempest was meant to be an all-out general uprising in the path of the Red Army. In one district after another, the retreating Germans would be overcome and the Soviet generals would
arrive to find a region of Poland already liberated and under the control of the London government. Unfortunately, Tempest was an almost complete failure. The Polish partisans fought valiantly and
often drove the Germans out, but the Soviet forces were under
orders to suppress them. In their moment of victory, the AK battalions were rounded up, disarmed and interned.
The Polish officials they had appointed in the liberated areas were arrested.

In late July 1944, Soviet tank patrols were seen in the Warsaw outskirts, on the far bank of the Vistula. At the same time, German civilians and officials in Warsaw began to evacuate the city.
General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, in command of the AK, now took a snap decision to order a general urban insurrection. His hope was to liberate Warsaw, so that the Soviet allies would enter
the free capital of Poland already under the authority of the legitimate government-in-exile.

What followed was one of the greatest tragedies in Polish history. The Warsaw Rising, almost the last of the mighty street insurrections of European history, began on 1 August 1944 and held out
against overwhelming odds until 2 October. Home Army and People’s Army soldiers fought side by side at the barricades. So did the civilian population. Small boys ran to fling grenades at
tanks. Schoolgirls running with despatches under fire died by the hundred. By the time that Warsaw surrendered and the survivors had been marched out to prison camps, some 250,000 people were dead
and almost the entire city was reduced to blackened ruins.

The memory of the rising later became a towering shrine of national self-sacrifice and comradeship, of martyrdom and betrayal. At the same time, it radically and perhaps permanently changed
Polish attitudes away from the Romantic tradition of revolutionary nationalism. Another rising like that, the survivors felt, and there would be no Poland left to die for.

Some historians have blamed Bór-Komorowski for giving the order to fight. But others say that the excitement in Warsaw had reached such a pitch that fighting would
have broken out within hours anyway. There were several reasons why the rising failed. One was that the German civilian evacuation of Warsaw was misleading; powerful armoured units were already
moving up to the city. Another reason, the decisive factor, was Stalin’s refusal to cross the Vistula and rescue the insurgents. The Soviet divisions which reached the river were ordered to
halt on the further bank, in full view of burning Warsaw, and – with the exception of some Polish units under Soviet command – made no attempt to cross. Stalin knew precisely what was
in Bór-Komorowski’s mind, and he was content to let the Germans do his dirty work for him. It was months after the Germans had crushed the rising that Soviet forces crossed the river
and resumed their advance. By then Warsaw was a ghost city of uninhabited ruins.

The Polish troops in Scotland, Italy and Normandy, like Poles all over the world, watched in agony as Warsaw fought and died. But there was little they could do. Some long-range aircraft,
Polish, British and South African, managed to reach Warsaw from airfields in Italy, but they suffered terrible losses and the supplies and ammunition they dropped often fell into German hands.
Predictably, Stalin refused to let the Allies use airfields in Soviet-held territory until it was too late. The British, for their part, refused to let the London Poles fly the Parachute Brigade to
Warsaw.

From the military point of view, that would have been suicidal madness. But there was political reluctance too. Both Churchill and Roosevelt knew that the Soviet Union
was carrying the main burden of a war now approaching its climax. They were determined not to let ‘Polish problems’ disturb their partnership with Stalin.

After the collapse of the rising, the Home Army in the rest of Poland began to disintegrate. A few groups retreated into the forests and carried on a hopeless guerrilla war against the new
Communist authorities. Within a few years, anyone who had fought in the Home Army fell under suspicion as a ‘counter-revolutionary’, and thousands were imprisoned. The parachute
couriers from Scotland were hunted down by Soviet military intelligence, and some – caught with their radios tuned to the Polish government in London – were tried and shot as
‘imperialist spies’. The true story of the Warsaw Rising, and the main role in the resistance played by the non-Communist Home Army, became forbidden topics.

From trenches in Italy, or from camps in Lowland Scotland, Wojtek’s friends watched this process in deepening despair. Although they did not know it, their country had already been
abandoned by Britain and America. At the Teheran summit in late 1943, Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed that Poland should remain under Soviet occupation when it was liberated and that the
new eastern frontier established by the Soviet invasion in 1939, leaving the cities of Lwów and Wilno (Vilnius) in Soviet hands, should become permanent. As compensation, Poland would be
given the eastern provinces of Germany. The whole country would be shifted 150 miles to the west.

The Yalta conference in February 1945 did little more than publicly confirm these decisions. Postwar Europe would be divided into ‘spheres of influence’ – with Poland left in
the Soviet sphere. Roosevelt and Churchill eagerly
accepted Stalin’s assurance that there would be free elections in Poland.

It didn’t escape the soldiers’ notice that Poland was invited to neither of these meetings, nor to the Big Three Potsdam Conference after the Nazi surrender. It was behind closed
doors that the ‘Victor Powers’ had dictated Poland’s political future.

General Sikorski had died in a plane crash at Gibraltar in 1943. His successor as prime minister in the London government was Stanisław Mikołajczyk, a peasant politician who tried
desperately but vainly to save what he could from the Yalta settlement. But the Communist-led Committee of National Liberation had now become the provisional government of Poland. In July 1945, a
few months after Germany’s unconditional surrender, Britain and the United States withdrew recognition from the London government-in-exile and transferred it to the Communist-led regime in
Warsaw.

At first, the new regime pretended to be an alliance of ‘progressive forces’ and Mikołajczyk felt able to join a coalition government in Warsaw. But the Communists controlled
the security police and within two years the opposition was being crushed by violence and threats. The promised free elections produced crudely faked results. Late in 1947, Mikołajczyk fled
Poland, hidden in the back of an American diplomatic car. The Communist monopoly of power soon became complete.

By now, Poland was being ruled by state terror. Veterans of the AK were still being rounded up and imprisoned. The Home Army commanders were kidnapped, taken to Moscow and tried on incredible
charges such as ‘collaborating with the Nazis’. Returning soldiers who had served in the
Polish armies under British command were treated as suspected traitors
and saboteurs.

The Polish troops in the West, by now demobilised and living in temporary camps scattered over England and Scotland, knew what was going on. The postwar British government hoped that they would
go back to Poland, but – in a rare act of guilt-driven generosity – promised to care for them if they preferred to stay.

It was a miserable choice that they all faced. Most of them longed to go home and help rebuild their beloved, shattered land. But there they would be rewarded by persecution, by the sadness of
life under foreign tyranny. On the other hand, what future could they have in a land whose language they hardly spoke, where they lacked friends, where their skills beyond manual labour and
soldiering seemed to count for nothing?

But for the men who lived with Wojtek in the camp at Winfield, the choice was a little easier. Before they came across that bear cub in the Persian hills, they had seen the real face of Soviet
Communism and had experienced on their own bodies its brutality, its callous indifference to human suffering, its hunger and its lies. If Poland were to become like that, it would no longer be a
country they could live in. These were the men who had travelled the third path, and they knew only too well what they were being offered.

The third path, like the first, began on 17 September 1939, in south-eastern Poland. But this path led eastwards, into the depths of the Soviet Union. A part of the defeated
Polish army was able to escape over the border into Romania and Hungary. But some 200,000 others were
captured by the Soviet invaders and became prisoners of war. Some
15,000 of them, mostly officers, were moved into three prison camps in Russia and Ukraine: Kozielsk, Starobielsk and Ostaszków.

All over the regions which had been Poland’s eastern provinces, Poles in responsible jobs – teachers, judges, police chiefs, mayors, editors – were arrested and imprisoned.
Under directions from Moscow, the local Communist Parties in what was now Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine filled the posts with their own Belorussian or Ukrainian supporters.

But this turned out to be only the first act in an immense programme designed to obliterate Polish identity for ever in this part of eastern Europe. In February 1940, the Soviet authorities
began the first mass expulsion of the Polish civilian population. Troops from the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB, as the political security force) herded Polish families to railway stations and
crammed them into unheated cattle wagons. From there, the trains set forth on journeys which could last many weeks, and which the old, the youngest children and the sick often did not survive,
until the prisoners were dumped in Arctic labour camps, at railheads near Siberian mines or on the empty steppes of Kazakhstan.

More deportations followed in 1940, until by early 1941 something like 1.5 million Poles – Christians and Jews, Communists and Catholics – had been driven into exile. For the gulag
empire, the life or death of these slave labourers was a matter of indifference. By the time that they were allowed to leave the camps, in the summer of 1941, between a third and a half of the
deported Poles were dead from hunger, exposure, exhaustion and disease.

As Aileen Orr makes clear, this had been the experience of Wojtek’s companions in Scotland. Their homes before the war had been in eastern Poland. They, and often
enough their families, had been among those deported to Siberia and central Asia. Somehow, they had survived. But Siberia was to be only a halting-place along the third path.

On 22 June 1941, the history of the world changed. That morning Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. With that order, Hitler set in motion a
chain of consequences which were to shape the lives of hundreds of millions of people for the next halfcentury.

In the longest term, Hitler created postwar Europe. On that day, he began a war which could only end in his defeat. That defeat, in turn, would inevitably bring about the destruction of Germany,
the arrival of Russian power in the centre of the continent and the partition of Europe into two hostile military camps. In this way, the Cold War – lasting roughly 42 years – was Adolf
Hitler’s legacy to those who survived him, and to their children and grandchildren.

The medium-term consequence was a reversal of alliances. The Soviet Union, until yesterday Hitler’s accomplice in the destruction of Poland, now became an enemy of Nazi Germany and
therefore the ally of Britain. Winston Churchill at once offered Stalin support. This put the Polish exile government in a painful position, but Sikorski decided he had to follow Churchill. In
July, the Soviet and Polish governments signed an agreement which granted an ‘amnesty’ to all Poles held in Soviet captivity, and allowed a
free Polish army to
be formed in the USSR to fight the Germans alongside the Red Army. The Nazi–Soviet Pact was declared null and void. But – ominously – there was no clear Soviet consent to restore
Poland’s pre-war frontiers.

The short-term result was to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of Polish captives. This was probably Sikorski’s main motive for the agreement. In London, a section of the exile
government tried in vain to unseat him; they were outraged by the word ‘amnesty’ (what crimes were the Poles supposed to have committed?) and deeply alarmed about the failure to get a
Soviet guarantee of the pre-war borders. But the need to save the prisoners overshadowed everything.

The gulag gates were opened. Very slowly – in many remote
lagers
and penal settlements, the camp commandants did not inform the Polish prisoners about their freedom for months
– the captives emerged and set out to find the places where the Polish army was setting up its tents and huts. For some, it was a chance to become soldiers and fight again. For others,
especially the civilian families, the army offered their only chance to find food, shelter and medicine. Their physical condition was shocking. Thousands died on the long, arduous journey towards
the first Polish bases at Totsk and Buzuluk in the Volga steppe, and thousands more who made it to the bases were too weak and ill to survive.

The commander of this army of walking skeletons was General Władysław Anders. Still pallid after months in the NKVD’s Lubianka prison, Anders told his officers that ‘it is
our duty to forget the past’ and to fight the common Nazi enemy ‘shoulder to shoulder with the Red Army’. This proved easier said than done. Stalin remained suspicious of this
foreign army on Soviet soil, and the equipment and
rations provided by the Soviet authorities were completely inadequate for the tens of thousands of men, women and children
arriving at the bases and begging for rescue.