World War II Behind Closed Doors (10 page)

In common with the others snatched from their homes that April, Boguslava Gryniv, Nina Andreyeva and their families were bundled on board trucks and taken to the nearest railway station to be crammed on to trains to travel east.

The conditions on board were appalling. Boguslava and her mother had to travel in a railway wagon that had two floors built into it, with all the luggage downstairs and the deportees upstairs with their bedding. This meant that everyone was pushed together, unable to stand up. ‘Ever since then I have had thrombosis in my legs from having sat like that for several days’, she says.

‘It was very difficult. There was a bucket [for a toilet]. So you had to take some sort of sheet or blanket. Mother would hold it up and you would go behind it. It was very difficult to get used to
this. The second thing was, of course, the fact that we could neither wash nor change our clothes. And that was for two whole weeks…. And because what was happening was so emotionally unsettling, all the women began menstruating.

‘All the time we were in the wagon we all felt that some great injustice had been done to us. [We had always thought] nobody could touch your own house. A peasant once said: “Nobody will make me less than a peasant…”. They thought that if you had land, if you had a house, then it was yours and nobody could ever remove you from your property. When my father built our house, he said: “This is for my children and my grandchildren…”. And then suddenly all that was destroyed’.

As she looked around the train wagon, Boguslava realized that she was surrounded by representatives from the entire ethnic spectrum of eastern Poland – although most people were Polish Catholics, there were also Ukrainians and Jews. It was difficult for her to see what any of them had in common. She didn't know, of course, that they were all relatives of people who were in the process of being murdered.

It was the very old and the very young who suffered most on the trains. Nina Andreyeva watched as her neighbour's baby girl died and then the body was flung out of the door by the NKVD guard while the train was still moving. ‘It's hard’, says Nina, ‘to communicate what a terrifying situation it was’.

The April deportees were sent to a variety of remote places in the Soviet Union, including Siberia and Kazakhstan, although none of them was transported north to the same locations as the February deportees. Because whole families – including breadwinners – had been taken in February, many of them had been sent to forestry work camps. But since the April deportees were largely women and children, they found themselves dumped on isolated collective farms.

The train carrying Nina Andreyeva and her mother arrived late at night, after a journey of more than a week, at a remote station in northern Kazakhstan. Snow and slush lay deep all around them. There was nothing nearby but bleak forests and tundra. The
deportees were crammed once more into lorries and began their journey to their final destination. ‘We were driven off’, says Nina, ‘[but] we didn't travel for long. There was a lot of snow. And you know, in the spring the snow gets slushy. And the lorry got stuck in the middle of a field. And what fields they were! Those fields just went on and on in Kazakhstan. Somewhere in the distance there was a forest, and we saw wolves coming out [of the forest]. A pack of wolves’.

Nina and the rest of the deportees watched as the wolves attacked the lorry: ‘The lorry was high up, but all the same it was so terrifying. My mother wrapped us up in a rug we had with us and we hid from the wolves. People were crying. People were screaming. The driver dipped a rag in petrol. He lit it and threw it at the wolves’. After the driver threatened the wolves with fire, they dispersed – only to regroup and attack again. ‘That went on until morning’, says Nina. ‘It was terrifying’.

The next morning a tractor came to pull the truck out of the snow and they continued their journey to a remote collective farm – where there was another surprise awaiting them. There didn't seem to be any village in sight: ‘There were no dwellings there. And then smoke appeared…from here…from there…from over here. From all over the snow. And people began to crawl out of these dugouts’.

It was a shocking sight for Nina and her family, who were used to the relative sophistication of city life. But their arrival, already an immensely lowering experience, took another turn for the worse when the leader of the collective farm turned up on his horse: ‘He said [to the villagers]: “Don't take any of them in – they are enemies of the people. These are Poles – enemies of the people”’. As a result it looked as if the new arrivals would simply be left to die in the forest. But some of the Kazak villagers took pity on the deportees and gave them shelter in a barn, or on the floor of their earth dugouts.

But the woman who took in Nina and her family died a few weeks later of tuberculosis, so the leader of the collective farm turned them out into the cold once again: ‘And so my mother
went to the regional centre on foot. It was about seventeen kilometres, maybe even more, I'm not sure…. And they took her on as an auxiliary nurse at the hospital’.

As a result of the pittance she earned at the hospital Nina's mother was able to rent a dugout house, together with other deportees: ‘The house was terrible – twelve families lived in that house. We had a corner of the dugout and just the basket we had taken with us from home. That was where we slept – and we lived like that for three years’.

During the first winter, the mother of one of the deportees who shared the dugout with them died: ‘It was a very severe winter. The frost was so bad that you could not break the ground. We did not have a graveyard as such. The dead were simply taken out and buried in the snow. Wild dogs and wolves would eat [the bodies]. He [the son of the woman who had died] did not want to do that to his mother. He asked everyone, “Please don't take offence against me, but I do not want my mother to be torn apart by wolves. Let her lie here [until the ground thawed and she could be buried]. She is almost a skeleton anyway. She is like a piece of wood. She is already completely frozen, so she cannot decompose”. And so they laid her out in the corridor – she was placed on a bench. And we had to walk past her, me on the way to school and my mother on the way to work’.

Mostly women and children, these deportees had to try to survive in some of the worst conditions imaginable – and they lived with the added torment of not knowing what had happened to their husbands, brothers and fathers. In the Russian archive rests one scrap of handwritten paper which encapsulates the longing they felt to be a family again. It is a letter written by a little girl called Krissi Mykunstkoi to ‘Our kind dear father Stalin’. ‘I am currently lying ill’, she writes, ‘and I'm very sad because I miss my daddy whom I haven't seen for months. And I thought to myself that only you, the great Stalin, can return him. He was an engineer, and in the time of war he was called to serve and he was captured. He is currently in Kozelsk [prison] in the Smolensk region. We have been moved from Pinska [in eastern Poland] to
the Kazak republic… Here we have no family. My mother is very weak. Return us our father I beg you with all my heart’.
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Stalin, not surprisingly, never replied to the little girl's plea.

There are no definitive statistics of just how many people were deported from eastern Poland that April. New work in the Russian archives has produced a figure of just under sixty thousand, but many consider this to be extraordinarily low. The previous estimate of around three hundred thousand still seems, from other evidence, to be nearer the true figure.
⁹⁶

Nor are there exact figures of how many people died as a result of the deportations, although the consensus is that around a third of those who were expelled from eastern Poland that April subsequently lost their lives. But what the documents do reveal is the clear connection between the April deportations and the Katyn massacres. After the men had been killed, their families were to be thrown into the frozen wastes of the Soviet Union. These families had committed no offence – even in Soviet eyes – other than to be related to someone who had been murdered. It was obviously a crime of monumental proportions. A crime for which no one has yet been called to account.

ALLIED REACTION TO THE CRIMES

The deportations were no secret, with newspapers in the West carrying accounts of what was happening. ‘The Soviet authorities are transporting a large part of the population of Eastern Poland into inner Russia’,
⁹⁷
reported the
New York Times
of 15 April 1940. ‘The exiles get only fifteen minutes to leave their homes… even seriously ill persons are forced into the unheated emigration trains’. The article also talked about the night-time arrests of Poles by the secret police, the horrific conditions in Soviet prisons in eastern Poland and the fact that the region was being systematically robbed of machinery and equipment.

The British government too was well briefed on events in Poland. Sir Howard Kennard, the British ambassador to the Polish
government in exile based in London, wrote a report to Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, on 18 May 1940. Kennard records: ‘The policy of deportations is once more being carried out on a large scale
⁹⁸
…. The persons arrested largely belong to the intelligentsia and include the wives and families of Polish officers who are now abroad. It is further probable that many schoolboys have also been arrested…. A similar fate hangs over the remaining Poles of the landowning class in the northern parts of the Soviet occupation, and it is all the more terrible as these survivors are mostly women and children, the menfolk of the family being in the main either abroad or in Russian prisons and internment camps’.

Just over two weeks before sending this report, Kennard had warned his Foreign Office colleagues that the Polish government in exile was considering asking the British government to condemn the ‘atrocities’ taking place in Soviet-occupied Poland, in order to bring home the ‘indignation’ they felt at these ‘barbarous’ methods.
⁹⁹
Kennard said he had told them that he ‘thought that it would be extremely difficult to secure our agreement to such a declaration. In the first place the Soviets were not at war with us and, secondly, I felt we would be loath to make any such declaration at this moment’.

A senior Foreign Office official, Sir William Strang, replied to Kennard's note on 14 May, saying that ‘we quite agree with the line you took…. It is one thing for the three Allies to issue a joint declaration aimed at Germany, with whom we are all at war, and quite another for them to issue a similar joint declaration aimed at the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, with whom only the Poles have broken off relations’.
¹⁰⁰
The British government thus not only knew about many of the atrocities the Soviets were committing in eastern Poland, but was anxious to say nothing about them – whilst, of course, at the same time openly condemning the Nazis in western Poland for committing similar crimes.

It is not difficult to understand why the Foreign Office took this line, since it was essentially a continuation of the original policy established after the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland in September 1939. It was hard enough being at war with Germany,
the British government maintained, without antagonizing the Soviet Union as well. But what this attitude of official silence meant was that the bulk of the British population never properly grasped the parallel between Nazi and Soviet actions in Poland, and that the Soviet leadership in turn came to realize that they were unlikely to be called to account by the international community – even publicly censured – for the crimes they were committing in occupied Poland.

The British attitude was predicated on the belief that the Soviet Union was not an ally of the Nazis at all, but that the Soviets had merely entered into a pact not to attack the Germans. The reality, however, was different. The Soviet Union
was
an ally of the Nazis in all but name, not just providing raw materials to help fuel the German war machine, but even – and this was, for the Soviets, one of the greatest secrets of the war – offering military assistance as well.

SECRET MILITARY HELP TO THE GERMANS

From the autumn of 1939 German merchant ships could be openly seen in Murmansk harbour, in the far north of the Soviet Union, loading up with wheat to take back to the Fatherland. German sailors wandered freely about the city and relaxed in the ‘International Club’, a wooden house not far from the port area. As a result, and despite official disapproval, relationships developed between some of the Germans and local girls. ‘I think’, says Maria Vetsheva,
¹⁰¹
who was a seventeen-year-old in Murmansk at the time, ‘it's a usual thing that some seamen came and found girlfriends here’.

But whilst German merchant sailors were fraternizing with the Soviets in Murmansk, there was another, secret, form of maritime cooperation taking place far from the public gaze. It had its origin in a remark Ribbentrop had made during the September 1939 meeting with Stalin and Molotov.
¹⁰²
The German Foreign Minister had asked if the Soviets could provide a base in Murmansk for the
repair of U-boats and, in principle, this had been agreed. But from that moment the Soviet authorities were worried that the British – or anyone else – might discover that they were providing military assistance to the Nazis.

On 5 October Schulenburg, the German ambassador in Moscow, reported that Molotov had decided that Murmansk was not ‘isolated enough’
¹⁰³
for the German naval base; he was now suggesting the remote harbour of Teriberka on the north of the Kola inlet. Six days later the Soviets changed plans once again and offered the nearby bay of Sapadnaja Liza instead. It was shortly confirmed by the Soviet Naval Commissariat that the Germans could use this bay as a base for repairing and supplying U-boats and possibly other naval warships. For security purposes the name of the bay was not to be used in any message – it was henceforth to be known only as ‘Basis Nord’ (Base North). The German supply ship
Sachsenwald
entered Base North on 1 December 1939, the first of several vessels to be stationed there. Then, on the 9th, in a development that suggested an escalation in the extent of the military cooperation between the two countries, the Soviets asked ‘if German steamers going to northern Sweden could take food and fuel for Soviet submarines and then inconspicuously transfer them at sea’
¹⁰⁴
in order to assist the Soviet navy in its blockade of Finland. But four days later the Soviets apparently thought better of the idea and withdrew the request.