Poland

TWENTY-ONE

The Cost of Victory

It is a grim irony that although it had been a member of the victorious alliance, Poland was the ultimate loser of the Second World War. It lost its independence and almost half its territory—in defence of which the war had been declared. According to the Bureau of War Reparations, it also lost 38 per cent of its national assets, a gigantic proportion when compared with the figures for France and Britain: 1.5 and 0.8 per cent respectively. These assets included the majority of its cultural heritage, as museums, libraries, palaces and churches had gone up in smoke. But the real losses were far greater than that, and the consequences more lasting.

Nearly six million Polish citizens had been killed, a proportion of one in five. The proportion among the educated elites was far higher: nearly one in three for Catholic priests and doctors, and over one in two for lawyers. A further half a million of Poland’s citizens had been crippled for life and a million children had been orphaned. The surviving population was suffering from severe malnutrition, while tuberculosis and other diseases raged on an epidemic scale. Another half a million Polish citizens, including a high proportion of the intelligentsia, most of the political and military leadership, and many of the best writers and artists, had been scattered around the world, never to return. In all, post-war Poland had 30 per cent fewer inhabitants than the Poland of 1939. But these figures give only a pale picture of the real harm done to Polish society: the Second World War destroyed not only people, buildings and works of art. It ripped apart a fragile yet functioning multiracial and multi-cultural community still living out the consensual compact that had lain at the heart of the Commonwealth.

There had been no lack of suppressed tensions before 1939 between the ethnic Poles and the various minorities, and indeed between some of the minorities, but there had been remarkably little violence, and this had been limited to fringe groups of the kind that exist in any society. Toleration, albeit sometimes grudging, was the norm. It was inevitable that these tensions would be aroused by the advent of war, and that not only the German minority would openly declare for Germany against Poland and their Polish neighbours. Ukrainian nationalists in south-eastern Poland greeted both the Germans and the Soviets with open arms, while further north many Lithuanians, Belorussians and communist Jews received the invading Soviets as liberators.

These fissures were exacerbated by the elimination or removal of local elites, the closing down of schools and other communal institutions, the brutalisation which is the constant companion of war and the banditry that thrives under wartime occupation. Communities were further torn part by the massive deportations carried out by both occupying powers.

Both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were determined to destroy Polish society. They therefore imported onto the multiethnic and socially diverse territory of Poland methods of racial, social and political manipulation they had developed in their own countries. It was these that tipped the realities of the war in occupied Poland into a circle of hell far below that reached in any other country.

The Germans’ first priority was to decapitate Polish society through the removal of all political, intellectual, spiritual and social leadership. The second was to divide it up into its racial components. All Polish citizens of German origin were classified as Germans and granted commensurate privileges. Polish citizens with German-sounding names who looked the part were encouraged to declare themselves to be Volksdeutsch and claim the same privileges. The Jews were segregated and destined for extermination. Ukrainian and Belorussian nationalists were encouraged to come forward and define themselves against their Polish neighbours.

When, in 1941, the Germans moved into the eastern areas of Poland hitherto under Soviet occupation, they used the same techniques to implement ethnic cleansing, thereby unleashing not only an orgy of horror, but also a self-perpetuating spiral of hatred and violence. What made their behaviour so deeply destructive in the long run was that in these areas the Germans were generally admired and considered to be more advanced and civilised than the Poles, and certainly than the Russians, and this lent them an authority that passed a civilising mantle to any local they chose to employ.

In the Generalgouvernement, the Germans generally removed all Jews from the community and took them to special camps for extermination. East of the Ribbentrop-Molotov line, they played on residual anti-Semitic feelings among the peasants and got locals to do the dirty work for them. The well documented case of Jedwabne, a Polish village occupied by the Soviets in 1939, provides a useful example. The invading Soviets had been warmly greeted by young Jewish communists, some of whom were then involved in the provisional administration and the ‘Sovietisation’ of the area. All Polish landowners, priests, teachers, doctors, policemen, postal and state functionaries had been murdered or deported by the Soviets, along with many humbler pillars of the community. When the Germans came, they encouraged the remaining inhabitants to take their revenge on the entire Jewish community, who were duly rounded up in a barn and burnt to death.

The picture was even uglier in south-eastern Poland. Soviet occupation had completely decapitated civil society, making it easier for extremists and criminals to operate, leading to a great deal of low-level violence between the Polish and Ukrainian communities. When the Germans crossed the Ribbentrop-Molotov line in 1941, Ukrainian nationalist activists came out into the open. The Germans armed them and gave them the task of murdering all the Jews in the area, which they carried out with enthusiasm. The lesson they learnt from this was that the easiest way of dealing with undesirable elements in their midst was to wipe them out, and they turned their weapons on their Polish neighbours.

In 1942, OUN, which had now superseded the more tractable UNDO, created the Ukrayinska Povstanska Armiya (UPA), which set about cleansing Volhynia, where Poles and Ukrainians had hitherto cohabited amicably. Over the next year it would kill up to 60,000 Poles, mostly peasants living in out-of-the-way villages, in bestial ways refined on the Jews. They also liquidated Ukrainians with communist or Polish sympathies.

Young Poles who managed to survive ganged up in partisan units and fought back, some even joining the German police special battalions in order to get hold of arms. Soon a regular civil war was raging between the Ukrainians and Poles of the area, tacitly encouraged by the Germans, who preferred to see both groups butchering each other than engaging in partisan warfare against them. The battle lines were often unclear. Both communities spoke each other’s language fluently, and since some bands on both sides often posed as partisans of the opposing side in order to winkle out alien elements, they sometimes ended up murdering their own kith. German policy changed after the defeat at Stalingrad, and they began recruiting Ukrainians into the SS Galizien Division, whose principal task was to act against Polish partisans and selfdefence groups in Galicia.

By this stage, OUN had moved on to dreams of an independent Ukraine and saw neither the weakening Germans, nor the seemingly exhausted Russians, but the Poles as the main enemy. The Polish-Ukrainian fighting carried on throughout 1943 and intensified in 1944 as deserters from SS Galizien brought manpower, arms and German military skills to one side, and the AK attempted (with limited success) to organise the disparate Polish units into a more coherent force on the other.

At this point, the Soviets entered the fray once more. Both Stalin and his Polish communist acolytes had shed their earlier internationalism and saw the future in terms of discrete ethnic political units. Stalin’s preferred means of achieving this was mass resettlement.

In September 1944, after it had been occupied by the Soviets, a huge operation was put in train to remove all Poles and Jews from territory east of the new Polish frontier and resettle them in Poland, and to uproot all Ukrainians living to the west of it and transplant them to Soviet Ukraine. Virtually the entire population of the city of Lwów would eventually be moved into the ruins of the former German city of Breslau (now Wrocław). In all some 780,000 Poles and Jews were moved in this way, a trip which sometimes involved weeks in cattle trucks which were shunted onto sidings and repeatedly redirected before they were allowed to spill their human loads in some depopulated area. Those who did not register for ‘repatriation’, feeling no great national loyalty and wishing only to remain where they had always lived, were harassed by the NKVD or attacked by UPA fighters. Similar arrangements with regard to Lithuania and Belorussia yielded comparable numbers, most of whom were resettled in Pomerania or the areas newly acquired from Germany. Not surprisingly, since the area taken over by the Soviet Union amounted to 47 per cent of Poland’s pre-war territory, the 1,500,000-odd resettled in Poland did not account for the whole Polish population of the area, and at least as many remained behind.

The same went for the Ukrainians and Lemkos (a small Ruthene nation inhabiting the eastern Carpathians) whose homeland was to remain in the new Poland. According to arrangements made by Stalin, they should have been resettled in Soviet Ukraine, but they had no wish to go, and they were supported in this by fighters of the UPA and the remnants of the SS Galizien division, which had been forced out of Soviet Ukraine and were now operating in south-eastern Poland. Attempts to implement Stalin’s plans led to a running battle beginning in late 1945 between them and NKVD and Polish army units under Russian command, in the course of which half a million Ukrainians and Lemkos were deported and some 4,000 killed. But the action was by no means conclusive, and early in 1947 the Polish army launched Operation Vistula to deal with UPA and the remaining Lemkos. As the Soviet Ukraine no longer wanted them, some 150,000 of these were resettled, family by family, in distant parts of Poland. The UPA was defeated and forced to withdraw into Soviet Ukraine, where it went underground.

The massive scale on which people were being shunted about and resettled, a process which normally involved brutality at the outset, followed by rape and pillage by bandits of one sort or another along the way, and hostility from the host community at the other end, had a profoundly traumatic effect on all those involved. Communities which had been uprooted and split up lost their sense of identity and disintegrated into embattled family groups. Resettled on farms or in houses that had belonged to others who had been murdered or deported, they felt no empathy with the alien landscape and no real sense of ownership, only a fear of potential consequences. With no local leadership of any kind (surviving landowners were not allowed to come within fifty kilometres of their former estates) and a constant prey to lawless militia, soldiers and criminal gangs, they did not constitute communities, only masses of fearful families and individuals.

As they tried to rebuild their lives against a background of civil war and political terror, all felt an overwhelming sense of powerlessness, which bred resentment and even hatred of any ‘other’, along with a desire for revenge for all the wrongs they had suffered. Anyone living through those times witnessed hideous acts of revenge in the final stages of the war. Wartime informers and representatives of the new order were tortured to death by former AK soldiers. AK soldiers were subjected to all the refinements of Soviet interrogation by UB operatives. Volksdeutch families fleeing west before the Red Army were murdered in horrible ways, often burned alive, by Polish peasants and Jews who had come out of hiding or German captivity. One of the ugliest and most eloquent examples of the degree to which humanity had been degraded occurred in the town of Kielce on 4 July 1946.

Some 300,000 Polish Jews survived the war, and their return home from concentration camp, hiding or deportation in the Soviet Union was often traumatic. When they had been removed by the Germans, their houses had usually been occupied by the poorer, and often criminal, elements of the local community, and their reappearance met with resentment and sometimes violence. They encountered the same fear and suspicion as all other displaced groups, and in their case resentment was heavily tinged with the anti-Semitism prevalent in provincial towns such as Kielce.

On 3 July a nine-year-old boy who had gone to visit relatives in the country for a couple of days without telling his parents re-appeared and in order to avoid punishment told them that he had been kidnapped, pointing out a house in which he had supposedly been held. This happened to be the home of several Jewish families. The parents reported the matter to the militia, which sent three armed patrols to investigate. The militia’s appearance outside the house drew a crowd of onlookers, and rumours began to circulate that Jews were kidnapping Polish children. When the militia entered the building they began confiscating arms, and for reasons unknown shot a couple of the inhabitants. They then evacuated the house and the inhabitants found themselves pushed out into the street, where a by now threatening crowd was howling abuse. A detachment of a hundred soldiers had turned up to control the crowd, but stood by idly, along with the militia, while the crowd attacked the Jews. The head of the Jewish community was shot by one of the soldiers when he tried to get help from the militia headquarters only a hundred metres away, where the local commander and his Soviet superior ignored the events. Wild rumours flew around town, and more Jews and their homes were attacked. By the end of the day, over forty Jews and two Christians had been killed. News of this, along with instances of aggressive anti-Semitism elsewhere, caused many of Poland’s surviving Jews to opt for emigration.

The creators of the People’s Republic of Poland liked to stress that it was a truly Polish state and to represent it as a kind of socialist reincarnation of the Piast kingdom. The Poland of 1952 was certainly more ethnically and religiously homogeneous than it had been at any point since the days of the Piast dynasty. But the process that had led to this had not given rise to a new Polish society, only to a profoundly damaged mass of individuals, many of them reduced to a feral day-to-day existence. And those in power did nothing to bring anything resembling a normal human society into being.

All the active elements which had survived the war, such as the Church and various social organisations, and including even the nationalist right-wing parties and members of the aristocracy, readily involved themselves in the process of rebuilding the country. This manifested itself as much in the spirit of piety with which the shards of its cultural heritage were rescued and the meticulous rebuilding of historical city centres as in the recreation of pre-war social and cultural institutions. But it soon became clear that those in power had no intention of allowing Polish society to reconstitute itself: a new social order was to be imposed from above, along lines dictated by the Central Committee of the Party, enforced by its own cadres and Party-directed organisations such as the Association of Polish Youth (ZMP), the trade unions, cooperatives, and so on. Not only were groups or organisations outside the ambit of the Party harassed and censored, their access to both information and publication was severely limited. Even where they were permitted to publish papers or periodicals, they were only allowed miserly allocations of paper. The same was true of independent publishers, which withered before being eliminated in 1947. All information and the possibility of disseminating it was gradually brought under the sole control of the Party.

The Sejm, theoretically the expression of the will of the people, was entirely dominated by the Party, since the Party decided whose names appeared on the list of candidates. So while the Sejm nominated the Council of State, the Council of Ministers, the legislature and the holders of all major offices, it was the Party that dictated the choice. For the purposes of window-dressing, a small group of Catholic deputies was allowed to stand and be elected, but while they were listened to during debates, in which they served as a kind of bad conscience, they were otherwise ignored.

Many young men and women had joined the Party hoping to change the world, and after it had consolidated its grip on power in 1947 many more signed up, since this represented the only possibility of achieving anything. But, having eliminated all opposition, and securely hemmed in behind the Iron Curtain by socialist neighbours, the Party embarked, at the end of 1948, on a purge of its ranks, ostensibly to weed out ‘nationalists’ and ‘deviationists’. The white-collar element were adept at keeping their heads down, while factory-floor idealists could be tripped up only too easily. As a result, the purge removed significant numbers of its blue-collar members. By the early 1950s the Party, whose membership never rose much above 1.3 million, or 5 per cent of the population, during this period, was in large measure made up of bureaucrats of one sort or another. By 1955 only one in five workers belonged.

By contrast, over 90 per cent of them belonged to the Catholic Church. This had come through the war morally enhanced by its uncompromising stand against the Germans. Thousands of priests had been sent to concentration camps or shot, and no trace of collaboration tainted the hierarchy’s reputation. It was led by redoubtable cardinals such as Adam Stefan Sapieha, Archbishop of Kraków, Augustyn Hlond, Archbishop of Gniezno, and Stefan Wyszyński, who succeeded him as Archbishop of Gniezno and Primate of Poland.

As soon as it had consolidated its power, the Party set about undermining this alien body within the new order. In 1949 the Church’s property was nationalised and its charitable institutions taken over by the state. Religious instruction was forbidden in schools and chaplains were banned from prisons and hospitals. In 1953 a number of priests were put on trial charged with spying for the United States, receiving sentences of death or imprisonment. Later that year Primate Stefan Wyszyński himself was imprisoned.

Another element which did not fit the socialist model were the peasants, who still made up over half of the population. In 1944 their support had been assured by grants of land taken from confiscated estates: over a million families acquired land in this way. But within a couple of years many of them were forced into collective farms on the Russian model, of which there were 10,000 by 1954, mostly in the territories transferred from Germany to Poland in 1945. The remaining private farmers were squeezed by the imposition of compulsory quotas which they had to deliver at fixed prices, usually below the cost of production. Force was used to collect the quotas and a newly imposed land tax from the unwilling farmers, and tens of thousands of them were imprisoned. In these conditions, agriculture lagged in productivity and the countryside became increasingly pauperised.

Similar techniques were employed to eliminate small traders, private businesses and manufactures, and self-employed artisans. They were heavily taxed, starved of raw materials and excluded from markets. This was perverse, since they provided a valuable resource in the dire post-war economic climate.

The advancing Germans had done extensive damage in 1939, and when they retreated they dynamited everything they could. In the wake of the advancing Soviet armies came special units whose job it was to dismantle and remove anything that could prove useful back in the Soviet Union, including entire telephone exchanges and tramway installations, thereby reducing the country’s infrastructure to nothing.

The fact that it was necessary to start from scratch favoured the socialist penchant for a command economy based on central planning. A three-year plan (1947-49) was followed by a six-year plan (1950-55). The State Economic Planning Commission issued rigid directives which turned out to be unworkable in local conditions of which the planners were entirely ignorant. The commission did not encourage initiative or even questioning by factory managers, so there was little these could do except muddle along by cooking figures and bribing inspectors. Since it was known that factory managers concealed their real resources so as not to be caught out under-fulfilling the quotas they were set, the planners found themselves ignoring reports and estimating the possibilities themselves. The whole process of economic planning, from investment to costs and prices, was therefore carried out at a largely theoretical level and was as often as not based on guesswork. Since each factory hinged on the performance of a dozen others, and since a further dozen depended on its own performance, and since each of these had preordained supplies, capacity and output all calculated from figures which bore scant relation to reality, the results were often ludicrous.

Much of the planning defied common sense. New factories were built hundreds of miles away from existing industrial centres, coalfields or manpower pools. The planners had a weakness for monumental projects that would be seen and smelt for miles around. This went hand in hand with ideological dictates: the Stalinist city and steelworks of Nowa Huta were purposely located as a counterbalance to Catholic, traditionalist and academic Kraków.

The results were low productivity in factories, which were inefficiently managed, on collective and state farms, where low motivation and under-investment undermined attempts at raising yields, and particularly in coalmines, where the authorities resorted to using forced labour of military conscripts in an effort to boost output. The scale of growth was nevertheless impressive, and the economy emerged rapidly from the ashes of war. But the cost was borne entirely by the people, in low wages, long working hours and poor conditions, and high prices of everything from food to shoes and clothing.

It was no coincidence that the six-year plan, which ended in 1955, brought Poland’s economy into line with the Russian cycle of five-year plans. The pattern of Poland’s industrialisation had been dictated by the Soviet Union, which wanted the economies of its satellites to mesh with its own and which had forced Poland and the others to refuse Marshall Aid in 1947. All the members of the Soviet bloc were bound together into the Comecon by a set of rigid trade treaties which made them interdependent and worked in Russia’s favour. In addition, some $US5 billion-worth of coal from the fields acquired from Germany was given to the Soviet Union between 1946 and 1955 as war reparations, at a time when coal was virtually Poland’s only means of acquiring foreign currency.

It was Soviet demands too that burdened the Polish economy with the obligation to maintain a huge army and police apparatus, and to pay the keep of the Russian armies stationed in Poland. The economy was viewed as one of the fronts on which the battle for socialism was being fought, and when a machine broke down or productivity fell, it was blamed on ‘imperialist saboteurs’, agents of the London government or ‘hooligans’. Miners, factory workers and collective-farm workers were continually bombarded with paranoid propaganda representing the Soviet bloc as a peace-loving brotherhood of nations threatened by capitalist warmongering and aggression, and the conflicts in China and Korea were made to loom large in their everyday work.

The sort of industrialisation that was implemented in post-war Poland usually has the effect of drawing people from the country-side into the towns, where they soon turn into a rootless proletariat. In Poland the process was so rapid and on such a large scale that it backfired. By 1970 no less than 63 per cent of the entire bluecollar workforce had come from the country. In 1968, 22.3 per cent of industrial workers, 28 of construction workers and 31.7 of transport workers still lived in the country and commuted to work, while 10 per cent of industrial and building workers and 15 of transport workers were also part-time farmers. Instead of creating a socialist urban proletariat, the rapid industrialisation had the effect of ruralising the workers of the cities. This helped keep them within the ambit of the Church, which was stronger in rural parishes than in the cities, particularly the new industrial centres, where there were no churches.

Trade unions were set up to control the workers, which they did on the one hand through a programme of elaborate rituals ranging from May Day parades to banner-waving rallies and ceremonial deliveries of finished products, and on the other by meticulous monitoring of their attitudes, friendships, private vices and opinions. The personnel manager in any factory was an officer of the UB, and Party members in the workforce were expected to inform on their comrades. Workers accused of ‘crimes’ that were difficult to disprove were also blackmailed into spying on their colleagues.

In addition, the Ministry of Public Safety had paid informers everywhere—over 70,000 of them by 1954. By that date the register of ‘criminal and suspicious elements’ in the population contained nearly six million files, covering one in three of the adult population. The criminal justice system was geared not so much to delivering justice as to protecting the social, economic and political order, and as a result there were some 35,000 political prisoners behind bars by the mid-1950s. These were mostly people whose outlook, education, independence of mind and leadership potential classified them as elements to be weeded out so that those left at liberty could be more easily manipulated and moulded.

Since the essential precondition for creating the desired new socialist citizen was the elimination of the family unit as a formative influence, women were obliged to work and to place their children in crêches, where the process of indoctrination began. It was followed up in nursery, primary and secondary schools. Textbooks, particularly on history, were rewritten and new subjects, mostly dealing with Marxism or the history of Russian communism, found their way onto the curriculum. The children were obliged to join the Scouts or the Pioneers, and later the Union of Polish Youth (ZMP), which ensured that they were fully occupied outside school hours, and took them off to summer camps or winter sports during the holidays. These organisations fed them with a stream of propaganda, taught them to distrust their parents, and inculcated socialist principles and the virtues of collective action. The process of indoctrination did not end with school. An Institute of Social Sciences turned out new cadres of teachers and experts who subjected every field of study and endeavour to Marxist theory.

Censorship was omnipresent, and even some of the works of classic authors such as Mickiewicz and Słowacki were banned. Translations of books from ‘imperialist languages’ such as English were halted, and the market was flooded with translations of Russian socialist literature. Adults had to endure lectures and courses so that they too might understand the class struggle and Marxist economic theory, and everyone was expected to belong to at least one progressive organisation, such as the Polish Women’s League or the Polish-Soviet Friendship Society.

Culture played a major part in the process. Outside a handful of showcase examples, what was left of Poland’s heritage, particularly the built environment, was wilfully neglected or destroyed, including tens of thousands of country houses.

In 1947 the Party’s Central Committee issued guidelines on which themes should be addressed in art and literature, denouncing the ‘anachronistic ideal of falsely interpreted “artistic freedom” ’, and in the following year called for a new literature and art of Socialist Realism. The members of the Writers’ Union were taken on factory visits while their weekly organ New Culture hectored them on Marxist theory. Painters and sculptors were encouraged to turn out representations of workers wielding hammers, soldiers marching forward with their jaws resolutely stuck out towards the new socialist dawn, or steelworkers holding a discussion on the Korean War during their lunch break. Musicians were not exempt. Andrzej Panufnik, prize-winning composer and conductor of the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, was twice nominated as State Laureate and even awarded the Order of the Banner of Labour for his works. But in 1952 his new Heroic Overture was labelled ‘formalistic’, ‘decadent’ and ‘alien to the great socialist era’. Party activists demanded that the scores be burnt and his music was banned from performance for the next thirty years.