World War II Behind Closed Doors (8 page)

In February 1940, while the Finnish war still raged, the Soviets began a series of mass reprisals and deportations in eastern Poland. There were to be four major waves of deportation from Soviet-occupied eastern Poland, each separately motivated. The first began on the night of 10 February 1940 and targeted in particular a group of people against whom Stalin had a personal grudge – veterans of the 1920 war between Poland and the new Bolshevik state, known as Osadniks.

On 2 December 1939 Beria had written to Stalin about the Osadniks in a document marked ‘Top Secret’. The report began with a history lesson: ‘In December 1920, the former Polish government passed a decree about the settling of so-called Osadniks in border areas of the USSR [Soviet Union]. The Osadniks were chosen exclusively from former Polish military personnel, received land in the amount of 25 hectares together with livestock and equipment and settled next to the Soviet border with Belarus and Ukraine’.
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Beria considered that the mere existence of these people in eastern Poland was a threat to the Soviet state. He claimed that they ‘represent favourable soil for all types of anti-Soviet actions’. And so his conclusion was simple: ‘We believe it unavoidable to deport them and their families…’. Just two days later he received authorization to carry out this action; all of the Osadniks were to be deported to the remotest reaches of the Soviet Union as forced labour on ‘forest developments’.
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The ‘most malicious’ of them were to be singled out and separately arrested.

Nikolai Dyukarev was a member of an NKVD unit in the eastern Polish [now Ukrainian] city of Rovno and was one of those charged with carrying out the deportations. ‘At the end of 1939 I was given this order to resettle the Osadniks’, he says, ‘and we started to count how many families there were…. I was young at the time, only twenty years old. I did not understand much of what was happening – I had my orders from Kiev’. But he knew enough to believe that the Osadniks ‘were our enemies. They
opposed the Soviet Union and they were our enemies – they supported Poland. We knew that local people hated them, they were rich, they had land, they had everything while other people were really poor’.

When conducting deportations, the NKVD technique was to move on their targets with maximum surprise and speed – but only after a great deal of secret preparation. Nikolai spent weeks visiting the Osadnik households in his area of operation in the guise of an ‘agricultural expert’. Invited into homes, he would question the inhabitants about the number of people in their family, the size of their land and the quantity of their livestock. Only when all these details had been collected were the NKVD ready to mount the mass deportation – with every Osadnik targetted on one single night.

The first that Wiesława Saternus knew of the NKVD operation was when, in the early hours of 11 February 1940, she heard a banging on the front door of the house in which she lived with her father, mother and three brothers and sisters. Her father had fought in the war against the Bolsheviks twenty years before and been rewarded with a patch of land in the district of Włodzimierz Wołyński – they were all, therefore, classed as Osadniks by the NKVD. Still half asleep, her father opened the door and let the soldiers in. ‘Two of them were very brutal, very aggressive’, says Wiesława. ‘They told my father when they pushed him inside to sit down on the floor and put his hands over his neck’.

The senior of the three men, whom Wiesława remembers as being less violent than the other two, announced that the whole family was to be ‘resettled’. Wiesława's grandmother was only paying a visit to the family and protested that she ‘shouldn't have anything to do with this’, but the NKVD officer said ‘that doesn't matter – get your stuff and you'll be resettled’. There was chaos in the house as Wiesława's mother hurriedly tried to pack what she could. The children were crying, and watched in terror as the soldiers searched their father to see if he was hiding anything in his underwear. One of the soldiers told her sister, Christina, to take a doll with her – one she had been given for Christmas – but she
pushed it away. ‘So he [the NKVD soldier] gave this doll to me’, says Wiesława, ‘and told me in Polish – I don't know how he learnt Polish – he told me, “Take this doll with you, because where you are going you won't have this sort of doll”. So I must have taken the doll because it was useful later when my mother used it [to barter] to get some food’.

The family were given just half an hour to pack up their belongings before being forced out of the house and on to waiting trucks. They were then taken to the local railway station and packed into freight cars: ‘Then they locked the wagons – it was very noisy. I remember that noise, like the knocking on the door at night. I will never forget it. It was like lumps of iron. And we knew then we had been locked in and we were in slavery’. This first deportation took at least 130,000 people – some estimates say nearer 200,000 – to the far north on horrendous journeys that could take weeks. Wiesława Saternus and her family ended up at a logging camp in Siberia. ‘The hunger was horrible’, she remembers, ‘and it's a strange experience, hunger. It can't be understood by anybody who hasn't experienced it. Real hunger damages a human being – a man becomes an animal’.

‘I was responsible for the deportation of one or two villages, I think’, says Nikolai Dyukarev ‘I don't know much about what happened to them. But it was very hard work [to organize the deportations]. It wasn't very pleasant. When I was young it was different, there were orders that had to be obeyed. But now I think about it, it's really hard to take the children away when they're really small and, when you come to think of it, it's not very good. I would rather not talk about it much. And, of course, I knew that they were our enemies, enemies of the Soviet Union, and they had to be “recycled”…. I regret it now, but at the time it was different’.

Behind all the actions of the NKVD, as far as Dyukarev and his comrades were concerned, was the almighty figure of the leader of the Soviet Union: ‘Well, Stalin was much like a god for everybody. And all of his words were the last word on any subject. You couldn't even think that it wasn't right. One did not doubt it at the
time. Every decision that was made was correct. That wasn't only my opinion – we were all thinking like that. We were building Communism. We were obeying orders. We believed’.

In parallel with the deportation of these ‘class enemies’ went the continual monitoring of the newly Sovietized population of eastern Poland to ensure their compliance with the new political order. There was no freedom of speech, no freedom of religion, no freedom of movement, scarcely any freedom at all. And, above all, the Soviet authorities were determined to eradicate any lingering sense of nationalism.

Galina Stavarskaya
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discovered personally how the new occupying powers would treat political dissent when, early in the Soviet occupation, she heard banging at the flimsy doors of her small cottage outside Lwów. The NKVD wanted to question her about the activities of a Ukrainian nationalist organization called AON – a political group that was now, of course, illegal. The NKVD believed that Galina, who was nineteen years old, carried messages for them. She was taken to prison in Lwów for interrogation: 'Three men were sitting there. They were strong-looking. They had big hands. Strong arms. And they asked me: “Are you in a secret organization?”

‘I said: “No”.

‘“Are you a member of that organization?”

‘“No”.

‘“What is your role in that organization?”

‘I said, “I am not in any organization. How can I have a role if I am not a member of an organization?”

‘Then they hit me from the right, then they hit me from the left and then they hit me in the head…. And they also kicked me in the back. They were healthy and well fed. They had, you know, very well-developed biceps’.

When her interrogators grew tired of using their fists, they started hitting Galina with rubber truncheons: ‘They were half a metre long… and they started using these sticks. On my neck I had a black scar, like a black stripe, and it would not heal. They hit me and I got those black scars. It was like being in hell…. It is very
painful to remember it. They beat me and beat me…. But I told them I would rather die than tell them anything’.

Galina pleaded with her interrogators, saying: ‘You know, I am somebody's daughter. I have a mother at home, a father, friends’. But to no avail. ‘They got pleasure from hitting me, it gave them pleasure…. They were sadists…. The things they called me. I was just a young girl who had never kissed a man’.

Eventually, as part of the torture, the interrogators yanked out Galina's hair: ‘They ripped it out…. How young I was then. My hair was so curly. I had fair hair’.

After her ‘interrogation’ she was taken to a cell and crammed in with others ‘like sardines in a tin’. Once in the cell ‘all the other girls helped me. One of them washed me. There was a nun there…. She was very religious and she had very gentle hands. She put her hands on me and comforted me’.

In between sessions of interrogation and torture, Galina slept in the only spare space in the crowded cell – next to the bucket that served as their toilet: ‘And we all just urinated around the bucket. Whoever was on cleaning duty had to clean it out. Natalia Shuhevich [a fellow prisoner] couldn't do it. She had only just had breakfast, and then she had to wipe up the urine and she vomited. And that was very tough’.

But whilst the suffering of the inhabitants of eastern Poland at Soviet hands is not generally known in the West, for a variety of reasons another related crime that the Soviets committed around the same time has penetrated the public consciousness. It is a mass murder that is collectively known – somewhat misleadingly – by one word: Katyn.

THE ATROCITY OF KATYN

On 5 March 1940 Stalin,
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along with his fellow Politburo members Voroshilov, Mikoyan and Molotov, signed in person a proposal from Beria that led to the murder of more than twenty thousand prominent citizens from eastern Poland, many of them
officers in the Polish army. The crime first became known to the world in April 1943 when the Germans, who had by then occupied the territory around the Soviet city of Smolensk in Western Russia, discovered a mass grave in a forest called Katyn (in fact one of three separate sites used by the NKVD to bury the bodies of their victims). This discovery was to haunt subsequent dealings between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union.

The crime of Katyn (the name of this one burial site where just over four thousand bodies were found became, confusingly, the name by which the entire crime was known) is significant for a number of reasons; not least because it was somewhat out of character for Stalin and his cronies. For whilst there had been isolated executions of selected groups in the Soviet Union before, certainly nothing on the scale of the extermination of an entire officer corps had ever been attempted. Until Katyn, the ‘normal’ way in which the Stalinist regime dealt with large groups that were considered dangerous was by deportation. The death rates in the various camps in the Soviet penal system (collectively known as the Gulag) varied, but could be as high as 20 per cent each year. The bulk of the Polish non-commissioned officers and ordinary soldiers captured by the Red Army in the autumn of 1939, for example, were sent to just such a fate.

Georgy Dragunov, as a Red Army officer in occupied eastern Poland, remembers how the deportations were ‘not surprising to us because we had seen all this before. I used to live not far from the railway tracks and in the 1930s I kept seeing trains full of people…. I took it as part of the norm – if there were trains full of people sent to Siberia from Moscow, why couldn't there be people like that in western Belarus [part of occupied eastern Poland]. We had been raised to believe that these were enemies of the people and that they had to be deported. Only now, with the benefit of hindsight, I know that these were the best people – but you have to live your life to understand it’. So if deportations were a ‘normal’ – indeed, an often accepted – part of life in Stalin's Soviet Union, why were these Polish citizens treated differently and murdered en masse?

NKVD documents reveal several possible reasons for the crime. First, the Soviet penal system was stretched almost to breaking point by the sudden influx of Polish prisoners of war in the autumn of 1939 – around a quarter of a million were captured. Indeed, it was such a problem that orders were shortly issued permitting the release of around a third of the captured soldiers. What is significant is that only the most junior ranks were allowed to return home – none of the officers was released. Instead, the latter were mostly incarcerated in three camps – Kozelsk (southeast of Smolensk), Ostashkov (in the Kalinin region) and Sarobelsk (near Kharkov in the eastern Ukraine). Imprisoned alongside the officers were a number of other prominent citizens, such as doctors, lawyers, academics and writers. The NKVD, therefore, was clearly continuing the policy – evident in the opening days of the invasion – of targeting in particular the Polish intelligentsia.

Life in these camps during the autumn, although hardly comfortable, was not particularly oppressive by Soviet standards. The prisoners were inoculated against various diseases such as typhus and smallpox and were allowed to write and receive letters. But an NKVD document of 1 December 1939
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shows that the Soviet authorities did not now consider these captured Poles as ‘normal’ POWs – they were categorized as ‘counter-revolutionaries’. As such, they were liable to investigation and subsequently ‘punishment’ for their ‘crimes’. NKVD interrogators were sent to the camps and proceeded to question the inmates over several months. They were seeing how cooperative the Poles were, and whether any might be prepared to become Communists. But for the most part the Poles remained obstinate – holding firmly to their traditional belief system, rooted in passionate Catholicism, that had been so dear to them in their homeland. As late as the first weeks of 1940, and after the NKVD had completed an assessment of each of the prisoners, it still appears that the assumption within the Soviet security forces was that the Poles would be sent, as normal, to camps within the Gulag system.
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But suddenly, by 5 March, the policy had changed to one of murder.