Bloodlands (29 page)

In the Warsaw district prisoners were held at the Pawiak prison, then driven to the Palmiry Forest. There the Germans had used forced labor to dig several long ditches, three meters wide by thirty meters long. Prisoners were awakened at dawn and told to collect their things. In the beginning, at least, they thought that they were being transferred to another camp. Only when the trucks turned into the forest did they understand their fate. The bloodiest night was 20-21 June 1940, when 358 people were shot.
⁶⁹

In the Radom district, the action was especially systematic and brutal. Prisoners were bound, and read a verdict: they were a “danger to German security.” As in the other cities, Poles did not usually understand that this was supposed
to have been a judicial procedure. They were taken away in large groups in the afternoon, according to a schedule: “3:30 binding, 3:45 reading of verdict, 4:00 transport.” The first few groups were driven to a sandy area twelve kilometers north of Częstochowa, where they were blindfolded and shot. The wife of one of the prisoners, Jadwiga Flak, was later able to find her way to the killing site. She found in the sand the unmistakable signs of what had happened: shards of bone and bits of blindfold. Her husband Marian was a student who had just turned twenty-two. Four prisoners who were members of the city council had survived. Himmler’s brother-in-law, who happened to be the man who ran the city for the Germans, believed that he needed them to construct a swimming pool and a brothel for Germans.
⁷⁰

Later groups from Częstochowa were taken to the woods. On 4 July 1940 the three Glińska sisters, Irena, Janina, and Serafina, were all shot there. All three of them had refused to disclose the whereabouts of their brothers. Janina called German rule “laughable and temporary.” She said that she would never betray “her brother or another Pole.” She did not.
⁷¹

On the way to the killing sites, prisoners would throw notes from the truck, in the hope that passersby would find them and convey them to their families. This was something of a Polish custom, and the notes would surprisingly often find their way to their destination. The people who wrote them, unlike the prisoners in the three Soviet camps, knew that they were going to die. The prisoners at Kozelsk, Ostashkov, and Starobilsk also threw notes from the buses as they left the camps, but they said things like: “We can’t tell where they are sending us.”
⁷²

Thus a difference between Soviet and German repression. East of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, the Soviets wished for secrecy, and barring some extraordinary accident they preserved it. West of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, Germans did not always want discretion, and were poor at maintaining it even when they so wished. So the victims of the AB Aktion were reconciling themselves, or trying to reconcile their families, to a fate they foresaw. The people awaiting death disagreed about the meaning of it all. Mieczysław Habrowski wrote that: “The blood shed on the Polish land will enrich her and raise the avengers of a free and great Poland.” Ryszard Schmidt, who had physically attacked his interrogators, wanted to discourage revenge: “Let the children not take revenge, for revenge breeds more revenge.” Marian Muszyński simply bade farewell to his family: “God be with you. I love you all.”
⁷³

Some of the people going to their deaths in the AB Aktion were thinking of family who had been taken prisoner by the Soviets. Although the Soviets and the Germans did not coordinate their policies against the Polish educated classes, they targeted the same sorts of people. The Soviets acted to remove elements that they regarded as dangerous to their system, on the pretext of fighting a class war. The Germans were also defending their territorial gains, though also acting on their sense that the inferior race had to be kept in its place. In the end, the policies were very similar, with more or less concurrent deportations and more or less concurrent mass shootings.

In at least two cases, the Soviet terror killed one sibling, the German terror the other. Janina Dowbor was the only female among the Polish officers taken prisoner by the Soviets. An adventurous soul, she had learned as a girl to hang glide and parachute. She was the first woman in Europe to jump from a height of five kilometers or more. She trained as a pilot in 1939, and enlisted in the Polish air force reserve. In September 1939 she was taken prisoner by the Soviets. According to one account, her plane had been shot down by the Germans. Parachuting to safety, she found herself arrested by the Soviets as a Polish second lieutenant. She was taken to Ostashkov, and then to Kozelsk. She had her own accommodations, and spent her time with air force comrades with whom she felt safe. On 21 or 22 April 1940, she was executed at Katyn, and buried there in the pits along with 4,409 men. Her younger sister Agnieszka had remained in the German zone. Along with some friends, she had joined a resistance organization in late 1939. She was arrested in April 1940, at about the time that her sister was executed. She was killed in the Palmiry Forest on 21 June 1940. Both sisters were buried in shallow graves, after sham trials and shots to the head.
⁷⁴

The Wnuk brothers, who hailed from a region that had once been in east-central Poland but was now quite close to the German-Soviet border, met the same fate. Bolesław, the older brother, was a populist politician who had been elected to the Polish parliament. Jakub, the younger brother, studied pharmacology and designed gas masks. Both married in 1932 and had children. Jakub, along with the other experts from his institute, was arrested by the Soviets and killed at Katyn in April 1940. Bolesław was arrested by the Germans in October 1939, taken to Lublin castle in January, and executed in the AB Aktion on 29
June 1940. He left a farewell note on a handkerchief: “I die for the fatherland with a smile on my lips, but I die innocent.”
⁷⁵

In spring and summer 1940, the Germans were extending their small system of concentration camps so that they could intimidate and exploit Poles. In late April 1940, Heinrich Himmler visited Warsaw, and ordered that twenty thousand Poles be placed in concentration camps. At the initiative of Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, Himmler’s commissar for the Strengthening of Germandom for the Silesia region, a new concentration camp was established at the site of a Polish army barracks close to Cracow: Oświęcim, better known by its German name, Auschwitz. As the AB Aktion came to a close, prisoners were no longer executed, but sent to German camps, very often Auschwitz. The first transport to Auschwitz was made up of Polish political prisoners from Cracow; they were sent on 14 June 1940 and given the numbers 31-758. In July transports of Polish political prisoners were sent to Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald; in November followed two more to Auschwitz. On 15 August began mass roundups in Warsaw, where hundreds and then thousands of people would be seized on the streets and sent to Auschwitz. In November 1940 the camp became an execution site for Poles. At around the same time it attracted the attention of investors from IG Farben. Auschwitz became a giant labor camp very much on the Soviet model, although its slave labor served the interests of German companies, rather than Stalin’s dream of planned industrialization.
⁷⁶

Unlike the Germans, who wrongly believed that they had eliminated the Polish educated classes in their part of Poland, the Soviets in considerable measure actually had. In the General Government the Polish resistance was growing, whereas in the Soviet Union networks were quickly broken and activists arrested, exiled, and sometimes executed. Meanwhile, a new challenge to Soviet rule from Ukrainians was in view. Poland had been home to about five million Ukrainians, almost all of whom now inhabited Soviet Ukraine. They were not necessarily satisfied by the new regime. Ukrainian nationalists, whose organizations had been illegal in interwar Poland, knew how to work underground. Now that Poland no longer existed, the focus of their labors naturally changed. Soviet policy had made some local Ukrainians receptive to the nationalists’ message. While some Ukrainian peasants had initially welcomed Soviet rule
and its gifts of farmland, collectivization had quickly turned them against the regime.
⁷⁷

The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists now began to take action against the institutions of Soviet power. Some leading Ukrainian nationalists had interwar connections with German military intelligence and with Reinhard Heydrich’s SS intelligence service, the Sicherheitsdienst. As Stalin knew, several of them were still gathering intelligence for Berlin. Thus a fourth Soviet deportation from the annexed territories of eastern Poland chiefly targeted Ukrainians. The first two operations had targeted mainly Poles, and the third mainly Jews. An action of May 1941 moved 11,328 Polish citizens, most of them Ukrainians, from western Soviet Ukraine to the special settlements. The very last deportation, on 19 June, touched 22,353 Polish citizens, most of them Poles.
⁷⁸

As a little Polish boy from Białystok remembered, “They took us under bombs and there was fire because people began to burn up in the cars.” Germany invaded the Soviet Union in a surprise attack on 22 June, and its bombers caught up with the Soviet prison trains. About two thousand deportees died in the freight cars, victims of both regimes.
⁷⁹

In purging his new lands, Stalin had been preparing for another war. But he did not believe that it would come so soon.

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in a surprise attack on 22 June 1941, Poland and the Soviet Union were suddenly transformed from enemies to allies. Each was now fighting Germany. Nevertheless, it was an awkward situation. In the previous two years, the Soviets had repressed about half a million Polish citizens: about 315,000 deported, about 110,000 more arrested, and 30,000 executed, and about 25,000 more who died in custody. The Polish government knew about the deportations, but not about the killings. Nevertheless, the Soviets and the Poles began to form a Polish Army from the hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens now scattered across Soviet prisons, labor camps, and special settlements.
⁸⁰

The Polish high command realized that several thousand Polish officers were missing. Józef Czapski, the Polish officer and artist who had survived Kozelsk, was sent to Moscow by the Polish government with the mission of finding the missing men, his former campmates. A sober man, he nevertheless understood
his task as a calling. Poland would now have a second chance to fight the Germans, and Czapski was to find the officers who would lead men into battle. As he journeyed to Moscow, to his mind came snatches of Polish romantic poetry, first the deeply masochistic reverie of Juliusz Słowacki, asking God to keep Poland on the cross until she had the strength to stand by herself. Then, speaking to an appealingly honest fellow Pole, Czapski recalled the most famous lines of Cyprian Norwid’s poem of desire for the homeland, written in exile: “I long for those who say yes for yes and no for no / For a light without shadow.” An urbane, sophisticated man from a nationally mixed family, Czapski found solace by understanding his own nation in the terms of Romantic idealism.
⁸¹