Wojtek the Bear [paperback] (23 page)

In addition, there was a puzzling lack of officers. Some 15,000 prisoners of war, most of them officers, could not be found. They had apparently left the three camps of Kozielsk, Starobielsk and
Ostaszków, but in spite of repeated Polish pleas to Stalin, the Soviet authorities seemed not to know where the missing officers had gone. Polish emissaries travelled about the Soviet Union
but could find no trace of them.

Sikorski, Anders and their colleagues began to suspect the worst. But it was only much later, when in 1943 the Germans found and excavated a mass grave in Katy
ń
Forest near Smolensk that
the truth began to emerge. The dead had all been shot, hands wired behind their back and then a bullet in the head, between April and May 1940. And the Katyn grave, containing some 5,000 corpses,
turned out to be only one of many. Secret Kremlin documents, which finally came to light after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, revealed that the killing of the 15,000 had been part of a
monstrous selective genocide of Polish elites – military, judicial, administrative – ordered by Stalin personally in early March 1940.

Meanwhile, the conditions in which the ‘Anders Army’ lived were becoming unbearable. The original plan had been for a Polish division to fight alongside the Red Army on the Russian
front. But as the Soviet authorities cut rations and demanded a reduction in the army’s numbers, Anders concluded that the only chance for his men and the civilian mass huddled around them
was to get out of the Soviet Union as soon as possible.

This was a hard decision. Crowds of starving, ragged Poles were still reaching the army in its new quarters near Tashkent in Uzbekistan, and evacuation would abandon
thousands of other refugees to their fate. Sikorski was at first against the idea, but on political grounds. He hoped that a free Polish army fighting alongside the Russians would give him leverage
on Soviet policies when the armies reached Poland. But Anders, anxious about the state of his men and more mistrustful of Russian intentions, knew that this plan was unrealistic. Stalin, who saw
all too clearly what Sikorski had in mind, agreed with Anders and allowed these troublesome aliens to leave.

The first contingent of Poles made their way down to the Caspian Sea in spring 1942. About 44,000 men and women, three-quarters of them soldiers, embarked on old steamers and were taken across
to the Iranian shore of the Caspian at the port of Pahlevi, where British military teams were waiting for them with ambulances, food and medicine. In the next few months, another 70,000 were
evacuated to Iran, a third of them civilians. Among them was a quiet non-commissioned officer named Lance-Corporal Peter Prendys – the man who was soon to adopt a Persian bear cub.

There are different figures for how many Poles were left behind. Some put it as high as a million. The Soviet authorities now blocked their movement south across the country, but small parties
of Poles, men, women and surviving children, continued to journey towards the deserts of Turkmenistan and the mountains which marked the Persian frontier. Some of them travelled all the way on
foot. A Polish mission left at Ashkhabad, on the Soviet side of the frontier, sheltered them and helped them to cross over to the city of Meshed, on the Iranian side.

At about this point, the ‘third path’ of the Polish soldiers forked into two branches. The Anders Army left the USSR for Iran in 1942. Out of the thousands of
Poles who remained behind, a new army was formed – this time under Soviet control. Its politics were set by a small group of Polish Communists in Moscow. But the gibe that this was a
‘Red Polish Army’ was not the full truth. Most of its officers and men were deportees who had survived the gulag and who joined the new force simply because they had not managed to
reach the Anders Army in time. They were determined to fight for their country, even under Soviet orders. Apart from the Stalin-worshipping propaganda they had to endure, the men of what became the
1st Polish Army were allowed traditional patriotic symbols and could attend Catholic Mass.

Their commander was the enigmatic General Zygmunt Berling. A conservative officer who had fought the Bolsheviks in 1920, Berling never forgave the army for censuring his conduct during a messy
divorce. He was captured by Soviet forces in 1939, and for obscure reasons agreed while still in a prison camp to collaborate with the NKVD. This was not at first known to General Anders, who gave
him a senior job organising the evacuation to Persia. It was only when Berling refused to leave Russia and began to organise the new army that Anders accused him of treachery, and in 1943 a Polish
court-martial sentenced Berling
in absentia
to death for desertion and for assisting the (Soviet) enemy.

In reality, Berling seems to have been a cynical maverick who took this course more out of dislike for the old Polish officer caste than from any Marxist–Leninist convictions. He had no
illusions about the Soviet Union and had no
respect for the Polish Communist group in Moscow. They in turn never trusted Berling.

The new formation became the Kościuszko Division, then the 1st Polish Army. In its first battle at Lenino, in 1943, Berling’s troops fought doggedly and suffered heavy losses. But in
the summer of 1944 the 1st Army was among the Soviet forces which arrived on the far banks of the Vistula as the Warsaw Rising broke out.

Stalin’s order to halt the advance was too much for the Polish troops. Some units – apparently with Berling’s approval – managed to cross the river and establish a
bridgehead on the other side, where they tried to make contact with the Home Army insurgents. But they failed to hold the bridgehead, and had to return. Shortly afterwards, Berling was recalled in
disgrace to the Soviet Union and relieved of his command.

By now, the 1st Army had grown to some 80,000 men. Once across the Polish borders, it had merged with the Peoples’ Army partisans, and general conscription in the ‘liberated
areas’ brought a flood of recruits. By the end of the war, the force numbered some 400,000 Polish soldiers who had fought their way across Germany, taken part in the triumphant storm of
Berlin in May 1945, and raised the red-white flag over the ruins alongside the Soviet banners.

After the war, the 1st Army became the official army of the Polish People’s Republic. But alongside Soviet security troops, the army had to fight two tragic and merciless campaigns within
postwar Poland. One, which approached the scale of a civil war, was the suppression of Home Army partisans still in the forests and fighting the new Communist regime. The other campaign was an
offensive against Ukrainian nationalist guerrillas in south-eastern Poland.
It ended in ethnic cleansing, as the local Ukrainians were driven from their villages and
resettled in the Western Territories – the lands newly acquired from Germany.

General Zygmunt Berling was eventually allowed to return to Poland, and much propaganda was made of his wartime victories. In reality, however, his contempt for some of the Communist leaders
meant that he was trusted only with insignificant civilian posts. The minister of defence was now Konstantin Rokossovsky, a loyal Soviet marshal with Polish family origins who took his orders
directly from Moscow and placed Soviet officers in command of all Polish army units. As a symbol of Poland’s helpless subjection to Stalinist Russia, he was hated and resented by the more
independent wing of the Communist Party. But it was not until October 1956, when Stalin was dead and Poland broke away from its day-to-day obedience to Soviet directions, that Rokossovsky was
finally sacked.

In Iran, the hordes of Polish soldiers and civilians emerging from the Soviet Union faced their British hosts with problems they had not expected. Nobody had foreseen the dire
physical condition of the evacuees, who often reached the safety of Iran only to die there. Neither had anybody realised how many of them would be civilian family survivors. They included some
13,000 children under the age of 14, many of whom were now orphans. Boys and girls alike arrived with shaven heads, wearing cut-down army boots on their skeletally thin legs.

The first priority was health: to overcome the years of undernourishment and the ravages of disease, above all, of typhus, tuberculosis and malaria. The next priority, agreed between the
British, the Polish government in London and
General Anders, was to separate the army from the civilians. The troops would be moved out of Iran into Iraq. From there they
would be transported to Palestine (at that time, still a British mandate). In camps near Haifa, they would be retrained, equipped with British weapons, tanks, vehicles and uniforms, and eventually
sent into battle as the 2nd Polish Corps, attached to the British 8th Army.

But the tens of thousands of civilians put the British in a dilemma. Although food was scarce in Iran, there was no home for the refugees to return to while Poland was under enemy occupation.
Neither could they accompany the troops to Palestine, apart from several hundred young women who volunteered to join the forces or the military nursing services. Even keeping the civilians in Iran
until the end of the war was thought undesirable. The country was under joint British, American and Soviet occupation, a delicate diplomatic balance which was already putting a strain on Persian
patriotic feelings.

At first, the civilians were housed in camps around Teheran. But several thousand children, almost all orphans or at least separated from their parents, were sent to Isfahan. There they were
well fed, resumed their education in improvised Polish schools and even learned to weave Persian carpets.

The rest, the British decided, would have to be removed to distant parts of the British Empire and Commonwealth for the duration of the war. This deeply upset the refugees, who still assumed
that they would return to a free Poland as soon as it was liberated. They wanted to remain as close as possible to their homeland, and to their husbands or sons in the Polish armed forces. But the
plans for dispersal went ahead, and the families were shipped off to Rhodesia,
Kenya or India, to Australia or New Zealand. A few managed to be sent to Mexico, where they
were at least close to relatives in the United States. They were to remain in these sunny places of banishment until well after the war ended, hoping that if they could not go home, they would at
least be reunited with the demobilised soldiers and airmen or with relations freed from the camps of Nazi Germany. Many of these families, unwilling to return to a Communist Poland, eventually
opted to stay and settle in the lands of their latest exile.

It was in April 1942, as the first Polish soldiers reached Iran and set out for new bases in Iraq and Palestine, that the men in one particular truck came across a boy selling a bear cub. Later,
they were to become organised into the 22nd Polish Transport Company (Artillery), and – much later still – they would go into battle. But at that stage in the war, almost the only Poles
fighting the Nazi enemy on the ground were the men and women in the resistance at home.

There was one exception. This was the Independent Carpathian Rifle Brigade, composed of men who had escaped into Romania in September 1939 and had then managed to reach the Middle East by ship.
They had joined the French forces in Syria, but after France’s surrender in July 1940, the French commanders at Damascus decided to stand by the Vichy regime and its cease-fire. Determined to
carry on the war, the Brigade marched out of Syria into British-controlled Palestine. There the Poles attached themselves to the British army preparing to defend Egypt against the Afrika Korps,
commanded by General Erwin Rommel.

They did not have long to wait. In August 1941 the
Brigade was landed in the besieged Libyan port of Tobruk. After five months of hard fighting against Nazi tanks and
dive-bombers, the Poles stormed a key German strong-point and effectively broke the siege, opening the way for the British 8th Army to relieve the defenders. From then on, the Brigade was almost
continuously in action until the end of the war in Europe.

Back in Iraq and Palestine, making a new fighting force out of the men who had crossed the Caspian was turning out to be a slow business. Physical fitness remained a problem, and there were
malaria outbreaks among the troops in some of the bleak desert camps in Iraq. Conversion to British weapons and equipment, and learning to work with 8th Army units who spoke only English, took
time, and it was not until the main force settled into camps in Palestine that training really gathered speed. Unlike the Carpathian Rifles, the Anders Army was not able to take part in the North
African campaigns, and only reached ‘combat readiness’ in late 1943, when the Allies had already landed in Sicily and the toe of Italy.

By then, Poland’s national future had grown much darker. In April 1943, the Germans had uncovered the mass grave of Polish officers at Katy
ń
, and had gleefully proclaimed Soviet guilt
to the world. The Polish government in London demanded a full Red Cross enquiry. In response, the Soviet Union claimed implausibly that Katy
ń
was a Nazi crime, accused the Poles of giving aid
and comfort to Nazi propaganda, and broke off relations with Sikorski’s government. Sikorski himself was killed in the Gibraltar air crash shortly afterwards. In November that year, the Big
Three at the Teheran conference – Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill – secretly agreed to move Poland
150 miles to the west, and to let the Soviet Union keep the
eastern Polish territories seized in 1939.

The Polish government’s refusal to give up these provinces – the homeland of most of Anders’s men – angered the British. Anxious not to damage the alliance with Stalin,
Churchill’s team thought the London Poles were being ‘selfish and unreasonable’. The soldiers training in Iraq and Palestine did not know all these details, but the general
suspicion that Poland was going to be sold out by the British and the Americans began to spread. Unlike their comrades in the West, these men knew the reality of Soviet rule all too well from their
own experience.