World War II Behind Closed Doors (9 page)

We know that Stalin felt passionately – in a wholly negative way – about Poland. And that predisposition to hate and distrust the Poles must have been fanned by the news from Beria in February that the Polish prisoners were, in his judgement, incorrigible. In addition, it is apparent from Stalin's subsequent statements in discussion with the Western Allies that he never had any intention of giving back to any future Polish state the territory the Soviet Union had occupied in the autumn of 1939. In such circumstances, the members of the Polish elite whom the Soviets held were considered particularly dangerous. Most of them had shown no sign that they would act in anything other than a disruptive – probably revolutionary – way if they were ever returned to Soviet-occupied eastern Poland.

Another factor that could well have been present in Stalin's mind was his increasing knowledge of the actions and mentality of the Nazis. There had been contact with the Nazis, now occupying western Poland, not only via the work of the border commission, but through the exchange of thousands of prisoners. Members of the Gestapo and the NKVD even met in Lwów in October 1939 to discuss matters of mutual interest, and subsequently Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, and Merkulov, Beria's deputy, met in Berlin in November 1940. Stalin would therefore have known of the repressive actions that the Nazis were carrying out in western Poland. In a wildly ambitious policy of ethnic cleansing, the Nazis were moving large sections of the Polish population around, deporting hundreds of thousands of people to the eastern portion of their part of Poland whilst incorporating other areas – such as Danzig/West Prussia and the area around Poznań, known to the Nazis as the Warthegau – into the Reich as part of Germany. In addition, the Nazis were confining Polish Jews to ghettos and identifying members of the Polish intelligentsia and removing them to concentration camps. Indeed, new research suggests that some actions – such as the arrest in November 1939 of Polish academics in Kraków by the Nazis, and similar arrests at the same time by the NKVD at universities in Lwów – were actually discussed and coordinated between Nazi and Soviet security functionaries.
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All of
which raises the possibility that Stalin and Beria had observed the radical way the Nazis were reorganizing western Poland and had decided as a consequence to act more radically themselves.

But whilst the precise influence of Nazi behaviour on Soviet mentality is unknown, what is certain from the available evidence is that the Soviets felt clear benefits could be derived from the elimination of the Polish leadership class. It must also have seemed a risk-free course of action – how could the crime ever be discovered? Indeed, if Beria had chosen another murder location further east, instead of the Katyn forest, the crime would never have been made public during the war – perhaps the details might still be secret even today.

So, no doubt secure in the knowledge that they were acting with impunity, Stalin and his colleagues signed the 5 March order. This called for the Poles to be cursorily ‘examined by special procedure’ and then shot if the investigation found them undesirable. The order extended not only to the slightly fewer than fifteen thousand Poles in the three camps, but also to around eleven thousand citizens of eastern Poland, many of Ukrainian or Belarusian descent, who had been arrested for ‘counter-revolutionary activities’ and were now held in prisons. The ‘examination by special procedure’ of the Poles in the POW camps was something of a sham. Almost all of them were condemned to die after their files had simply been read by a committee of three – Merkulov, Bashtakov and Kubulov. Fewer than four hundred of those Poles were spared the executioner's bullet – and virtually all of them had previously said, when asked by the NKVD, that they were prepared to stay in the Soviet Union.

Out of the eleven thousand held in the prisons, just over seven thousand were to be killed. Thus, in total, the Soviets' own figures – not revealed until the fall of Communism – reveal that 21,857 people were executed as a consequence of the 5 March directive.

But whilst it was one thing to give an order to kill thousands and thousands of people, it was quite another to be able to carry it out. And if Stalin and the Soviet leadership were entering new territory by ordering the murder of this number of foreigners so
swiftly, then the NKVD operatives were to be even more pressed in attempting to implement the command.

An insight into how the NKVD went about this gruesome task was gained in 1991 when a Russian military prosecutor interviewed General Dmitry Tokarev, former chief of the NKVD for the Kalinin region.
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He revealed that, together with two other NKVD colleagues, he had been called to a meeting in Moscow in March 1940 and told by Bogdan Kobulov, deputy head of the NKVD, that a decision had been taken by the ‘highest echelons’ that the Poles were to be shot. Tokarev then asked if he could stay behind after the meeting to have a private word with Kobulov. Once they were alone together, Tokarev claimed he said: ‘Never in my life have I ever taken part in such an operation!’ But he was told, angrily, by Kobulov that ‘we are counting on you!’

Tokarev then returned home and ordered preparations to be made in Kalinin prison for the killings – two rooms were lined with velvet in order to muffle the noise of gunfire. Each prisoner was first to be brought before an NKVD official who would check his name on a list – to ensure they were killing the right person. Next the prisoner would be handcuffed and taken to the adjoining room, where he would be shot in the back of the head. The body would then be removed and the process repeated.

The first transport of Poles from the nearby Ostashkov camp arrived at Kalinin prison in April. ‘I should tell you that the first night they brought three hundred people’, revealed Tokarev. ‘This was too much. The night was too short and we had to work only at night. Then they started to bring two hundred and fifty people a night’. A number of relatively junior NKVD operatives, including drivers and guards, were told to participate in the killing. One of them, Blokhin, wore a special outfit – a brown leather apron, leather gauntlets and a leather cap. ‘This made a horrible impression on me’, said Tokarev. Ironically, the Soviet killers used German pistols – Walthers – because they were more reliable than standard-issue Soviet small arms. But even the superior German weapons became worn out with so much use, and Tokarev remembered that the murderers had to take a ‘suitcase’ of spare firearms
with them. Tokarev revealed that the killing went on for about a month – always at night. Once all the Poles had been murdered in Kalinin prison, a banquet was given to celebrate the ‘achievement’. Tokarev claimed that he chose not to attend.

The killing of the Poles from Sarobelsk, the second of the three POW camps, in the Kharkov NKVD prison, followed broadly similar lines. Once again the murders took place at night, and each prisoner was shot individually in the back of the head. Their bodies were then driven away in trucks and buried – like those from Kalinin prison – in a mass grave in the nearby countryside.

But the killings of the Polish prisoners from Kozelsk camp were different. The remote forest of Katyn, which was to be their final resting place, was also the site of the murders. Nina Voevodskaya,
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who was eleven years old in 1940, remembers seeing the Poles held in train carriages in a siding next to Gnezdovo station, just a few miles from the forest of Katyn. She had been able to enter this forbidden area because her uncle, who was an officer in the NKVD, had said to her and her young sister: ‘If you want, I'll show you the Poles’. He escorted them past NKVD guards into the siding where there were several train carriages with ‘latticed windows – like barred windows’. ‘The Poles were waving hello to us from their train carriages’, she says. ‘They were young, dressed in military uniform. I can even now remember how handsome they were’.

Previous reports had suggested that all the Poles were taken immediately from the station to the forest during the night. But one of the prosecutors appointed by the Russian authorities in 1990 to examine the Katyn case confirmed
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the validity of Nina Voevodskaya's testimony – it now appears that occasionally the killers in the forest could not cope with the volume of people to be shot, so some of the Poles waited in the train siding at Gnezdovo station for a day or so, guarded by the NKVD. And whilst it might appear incongruous that the Poles appeared cheerful to Nina Voevodskaya, this also is consistent with the known history. The consensus amongst the Poles was that they were being taken to a work camp. And there were encouraging signs that they
were about to be better treated – each of them had been given food to eat on the train and had been inoculated against illness. And who would bother to give injections to people who were about to be murdered?

From Gnezdovo station the Poles were taken in batches by NKVD trucks into the woods. And it soon became obvious to the locals what was happening there. A Russian farmer, O. Kisseljev,
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told the Germans in 1943 that: ‘In spring 1940, for approximately four to five weeks there were three to four lorries daily driving to the forest loaded with people…. I could hear the shooting and screaming of men's voices…. In my area it was no secret that Poles were being shot by the NKVD’.

No one knows for sure why the Poles were killed in the forest of Katyn rather than shot first in the NKVD prison in the nearby city of Smolensk and then taken to Katyn for burial. But it might be that the presence of a perimeter fence – this had been a secure area for some years – and the fact that there was a small house in the forest that the NKVD could use as a base meant that, uniquely amongst the three murder locations, in this instance it was thought easier to murder the Poles by their graves.

THE APRIL DEPORTATIONS

At the same time as the Polish officers and intelligentsia were murdered at Katyn, Kalinin and Kharkov, their relatives back home in eastern Poland were targeted as well. Shortly after the 5 March order, Beria gained authorization for another NKVD directive – that the mothers, sisters, children and other relations of the murdered citizens from eastern Poland should be deported.

Boguslava Gryniv, whose father had been murdered as a consequence of the ‘Katyn’ order, and her family heard a rumour that they were to be sent away the night before the NKVD came for them. But her mother refused to try to escape, believing that she was to be taken to be reunited with her husband who had disappeared from prison some months before: ‘She immediately said,
“We are going to your father. This will demonstrate our love for your father”’.

Some time after midnight on 13 April 1940 they heard a knock at the door. It was an NKVD soldier. And he turned out to be – in the circumstances – a man of some compassion: 'Mother said: “We are ready, here we are”.

‘He said: “What do you mean?” He went into the storage room and said, “What's all this?”

‘Mother said, “It's ours”.

‘And he said, “Why are you leaving it?”

‘He found a large basket in there. He said, “Take this”. There was food, oats, everything in there. He opened the cupboards. He said, “Are these yours?” He didn't touch anything himself. He said, “Why aren't you taking this with you?”

‘You know, he actually made us take [all these things with us]. He looked around [and said]: “Where is your bed linen? Where is it? Take your bed linen”. He knew that we were being deported. You see, my mother was an idealist. We were going to suffer alongside my father. I am very grateful to this man who gave us that advice about what to take with us’.

One of the most striking aspects of testimony from deportees is the variety of attitudes they describe amongst the NKVD soldiers. Whilst Boguslava Gryniv was ‘grateful’ to the man who deported her and her family, Tadeusz Markow
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had quite the opposite experience. ‘We only took bread for breakfast because they told us we would be back for dinner’, he wrote. ‘They [also] told us if we put on our worst clothes they would release Daddy’. (A policy of deception which meant, of course, that the best food and clothes remained behind for the NKVD to plunder.)

In the town of Rovno in the far east of occupied Poland, near what had been the border with the Ukraine, another family was awakened by the NKVD that April. Nina Andreyeva,
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a schoolgirl, lived with her widowed mother. Her elder brother, a boy scout, had been arrested the previous autumn. Her story, like that of Boguslava Gryniv, is evidence of the far-reaching consequences of the Katyn massacres, and a reminder that it was not only Polish
officers and intellectuals and their relatives who were to suffer as a result of Beria's directive.

The NKVD had come for her brother in the night, six months before: ‘It was terrifying because my mother woke me up. There were strangers in the room in military uniform. Yurik [her brother] was standing there in his school overcoat and said goodbye to me. That was the last time we would see him. That was our goodbye’. Her mother desperately searched for news of her son, but all she learnt was that the NKVD had conducted a mass arrest – particularly targeting boy scouts – because a commissar had recently been murdered in a nearby park: ‘They were investigating if any one of the boys had participated in the murder. In short, they had arrested all of the boys for “re-education” – because they had been educated in the Polish way. And that meant they were the enemies of Soviet power’.

Like Boguslava Gryniv's family, Nina Andreyeva and her mother were given only twenty minutes to pack once the NKVD arrived to deport them. But unlike Boguslava Gryniv, they were taken away by NKVD soldiers who were less than honest. ‘Don't pack a lot’, they told her and her mother. ‘Don't bring anything valuable. Don't bring any gold. Don't bring any money if you have any’.

‘What was essential?’ says Nina. ‘Well, I took my doll’.