Russia at war

by Alexander C Werth

  *

  There were two strange and, in some ways, pathetic figures at a press conference given by General Rola-Zymierski, the "Minister" of Defence of the Lublin Committee, later that day: two AK officers, Colonel Rawicz and Colonel Tarnawa, who said they had left Warsaw on July 29 on the initiative of "a strong minority" of AK officers inside Warsaw to establish contact with Mikolajczyk (who was then in Moscow), in a last-minute

  endeavour to persuade the London Government to use all its influence to call off the rising that was being prepared for August 1—for, on July 25, they had already received orders from General Bor-Komarowski to prepare and stand by. They claimed that it was clear that the insurgents could not possibly hold Warsaw unless they struck out at the very last moment, with the Russians practically inside the city. Unfortunately, it had taken the two colonels nearly a fortnight to reach Lublin, and it was then too late.

  Colonel Rawicz, a smart, dapper little man in a new uniform, but with a look of grief and bewilderment in his eyes, said that headquarters had given the order for a rising as soon as the Russians were twenty miles away from Warsaw; he and many other officers felt it would be folly to do it until the Russians had reached the Vistula bridges.

  "We did not think," he said, "that the Russians could enter Warsaw before August 15. But the man-in-the-street (and you know how brave and romantic our Warsaw people are)

  was convinced the Russians would be there by August 2; and with tremendous

  enthusiasm they joined in..."

  Rawicz was in a state of great emotion as he spoke about Warsaw and its destruction and there were tears in his eyes as he mentioned his wife and daughter, who were "still there", in that burning inferno. He reckoned that 200,000 people had already been slaughtered.

  It was all tragic, and a little mystifying. Had these two men really acted in good faith (I felt that they had) in their attempt to avert the disaster? Were they, as London was later to call them, deserters from the AK cause?

  *

  According to the History:

  At the beginning of September, with the Germans having now turned their main attention to our bridgeheads on the west side of the Vistula, we were able to concentrate

  sufficiently large forces which ... finally captured Praga on September 14. Thus, there was a considerable improvement in the Warsaw sector of the front, and there was now a good prospect of giving direct support to the Warsaw Rising. This was the task with

  which the 1st Polish Army [under General Beding] was entrusted. On September 15 it

  entered Praga, and began to prepare the forcing of the Vistula and the establishment of bridgeheads in Warsaw itself.

  After describing this operation, carried out with the help of amphibious vehicles, and supported by Russian artillery and aircraft, the History then goes on to say that between September 16 and 19, six battalions crossed the Vistula, that the Polish soldiers and officers fought heroically, but that they were helpless against the very heavy fortifications from which the Germans were able to prevent any extension of the bridgehead.

  Moreover, the insurgents failed to co-ordinate their actions with the Polish forces on the bridgehead. On September 21 German tanks and infantry attacked in strength, splitting up the bridgehead and inflicting very heavy casualties on the Poles. On September 23 the Poles had to evacuate the bridgeheads and return to the east bank of the Vistula, suffering very heavy losses.

  Such is the present Russian version of the abortive "Berling operation" undertaken (according to the "London" Poles) on Berling's own initiative and without Russian support. After its failure, Berling was recalled to Moscow "for further training".

  Quoting Soviet Ministry of Defence archives, the History then gives a long and impressive list of arms, food and other material dropped on Warsaw by the Soviet air force between September 14 and October 1, the eve of Bör-Komarowski's capitulation.

  There were altogether over 2,000 Soviet sorties over Warsaw.

  The History also dwells on the very heavy Russian casualties in the fighting in Poland during that period. Thus, between August 1 and September 15 the 1st Belorussian Front lost 166,000 men (killed and wounded) and the 2nd Ukrainian Front (in August only)

  122,000 men.

  Finally, when the position in Warsaw had become completely hopeless, says the History, the Red Army command proposed to the Warsaw insurgents, to fight their way across the Vistula under Russian artillery and aircraft protection; but only a small number of

  Warsaw fighters took advantage of this offer.

  In conclusion, the History quotes Gomulka's merciless indictment of the AK leadership in Warsaw who "committed a fearful crime against the Polish people by launching the insurrection without previous co-ordination with the Red Army command."

  Such is the present-day Russian—and Gomulka—version of the Warsaw tragedy. It

  evades the awkward questions of the Moscow radio appeals at the end of July to the

  people of Warsaw to "rise" (though it criticises the Swit broadcasts) and the Russians'

  refusal to let supply planes from the West land on Soviet airfields.

  [The Swit broadcasts were those of the "pro-London" Poles.]

  But the really crucial question is whether the Russians could have forced the Vistula at Warsaw in either August or September; and on this the Russian evidence to the contrary seems impressive, reinforced as it is by the opinion of General Guderian who wrote:

  It may be assumed that the Soviet Union had no interest in seeing these (pro-

  London) elements strengthened by a successful uprising and by the capture of their capital... But be that as it may, an attempt by the Russians... to cross the Vistula at Deblin on July 25 failed, with the loss of thirty tanks... We Germans had the

  impression that it was our defence which halted the enemy rather than a Russian

  desire to sabotage the Warsaw uprising.

  And then:

  On August 2 the 1st Polish Army... attacked across the Vistula with three divisions in the Pulawa-Deblin sector. It suffered heavy casualties, but secured a bridgehead...

  At Magnuszew a second bridgehead was established. The forces that crossed here

  were ordered to advance along the road running parallel to the Vistula to Warsaw, but

  they were stopped at the Pilica.

  Guderian clearly believes that there was a serious Russian attempt to capture Warsaw in the first week of August. He then goes on:

  The German 9th Army had the impression, on August 8, that the Russian attempt to

  seize Warsaw by a coup de main had been defeated by our defence, despite the Polish

  uprising, and that the latter had, from the enemy's point of view, been begun too soon

  [ Guderian, op. cit., pp. 358-9. (emphasis added.)]

  This is an important piece of evidence, which tallies, to an extraordinary degree, both with what was said in Moscow at the very beginning of August when the capture of

  Warsaw by the Red Army was expected "at any moment", and with what was being said in Lublin at the end of August, at the height of the Warsaw tragedy.

  The only conclusion this author, at any rate, has been able to reach is that in August and September 1944 the available Red Army forces in Poland were genuinely not able to

  capture Warsaw which Hitler was determined to hold. For Warsaw was on the Russians'

  shortest road to the heart of Germany.

  It might, of course, be argued that if the Russians had wanted to capture Warsaw at any price, that is, by transferring whole armies to the Vistula from other fronts at short notice (not an easy task), they might conceivably have captured it. But this would have upset their other military plans like steadily advancing on East Prussia, routing the Germans in Rumania, joining with the Yugoslavs and breaking into Bulgaria and Hungary.

  There is no question but that the Warsaw rising was a last desperate attempt to free Poland's capital from the retreating Nazis and at the same time to prevent t
he Lublin administration from gaining a foothold and establishing itself in Warsaw once the

  victorious Soviet army had entered the city.

  Once more in Poland's history this valiant struggle for independence was defeated by the overriding, although conflicting, great-Power interests of other states. Still, with Moscow determined, ever since the beginning of the war and especially since April 1943, to

  control the future destinies of Poland, Bor-Komarowski would have been eliminated one way or another by the Russians, as they managed a few years later to rid themselves of Mikolajczyk.

  The story of the end of the Warsaw tragedy, and of German bestiality under the

  leadership of the notorious SS Obergruppenführer von dem Bach-Zelewsky, assisted by

  equally notorious murder gangs like the Kaminsky Brigade, is well known, as is also

  Hitler's maniacal order of October 11 to "raze Warsaw to the ground".

  300,000 Poles lost their lives in Warsaw. When the Russians finally entered Warsaw in January 1945, more than nine-tenths of the city had been almost as completely destroyed as had been the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943.

  Chapter IX CLOSE-UP: LUBLIN—THE MAIDANEK MURDER

  CAMP

  It was a beautiful sunny day as we flew at the end of August 1944 from Moscow to

  Lublin over those hundreds of miles of Belorussian fields, marshes and forests that had been recaptured by the Red Army in the great battles of June and July. Belorussia looked more wretched and ruined than any part of the Soviet Union, apart from that terrible

  "desert" that stretched all the way from Viazma and Gzhatsk to Smolensk. There were scarcely any cattle to be seen outside the villages, most of which had suffered partial or complete destruction. This was mostly partisan country and, flying over Belorussia one realised once more how dangerous and precarious their life had been. Contrary to what is often believed, there are no immense forests in Belorussia stretching over hundreds of miles; there are mostly only patches of forest seldom more than five or ten miles wide.

  Even many of these patches were yellow—set on fire by the Germans, to smoke the

  Partisans out. A ferocious life-and-death struggle had gone on here for two years or more; one could tell that even from the air.

  Then we flew over Minsk, and it all seemed a shambles, except for the enormous grey

  Government Building. Minsk had also had its torture-chambers at the Gestapo

  headquarters, and its mass graves of slaughtered Jews. It was hard to grasp that, only three years before, it had been a prosperous industrial city.

  We flew on to Lublin, into Poland. The rural scene here looked very different. Outwardly at least, the country looked almost un-scathed by war. The Polish villages looked intact, with their white-washed houses and their well-kept and prosperous-looking Catholic

  churches. The front was not very far away from here, and we were flying low; children waved as we roared past; and in the fields there were many more cattle than in any part of the Soviet Union where the Germans had been; and most of the land was cultivated. We landed a good distance outside Lublin, and the villages through which we then drove

  along a terribly dusty road looked much the same as from the air—all fairly normal-

  looking, with a large number of cattle about, and the landscape dotted with haystacks...

  I was to stay several days in Lublin. The streets were crowded, which they seldom were in any newly-liberated Russian town; there was also great activity in the market place.

  Everywhere there were many Russian and Polish soldiers. Before leaving, the Germans

  had shot 100 Polish prisoners in the old Castle; but apart from a few burned-out

  buildings, the city was more or less intact, complete with the Castle, the Radziwill Palace and the numerous churches.

  Yet this first impression of normality was a little deceptive. The German occupation—

  which had now lasted five years—had left a deep mark on the people of Lublin, and the arrival of the Russians here had not set their minds at rest; far from it. And, for over two years now, Lublin had, as it were, lived in the shadow of Maidanek, the great

  extermination camp only two miles away. When the wind blew from the east it brought

  with it the stench of burning human flesh from the crematoria chimneys.

  At dinner on the night of our arrival with some of the local worthies and some of the

  "Lublin Poles"—among them Colonel Wiktor Grosz [A few months before, Grosz, as one of the leading lights of the Union of Polish Patriots, had tried to go to London to present to the British Government the "Moscow Poles'" point of view, but had been refused a visa. Grosz was a brilliant writer, and spoke excellent English. He was to become one of the chief foreign policy advisers of the "Lublin Committee" and was later to play a leading rôle at the Polish foreign ministry in Warsaw until his premature death only a few years later.] whom I had already met in Moscow—I sat next to Professor Bielkowski,

  who had, before the war, been Assistant Rector of Lublin University; he was one of the few Polish intellectuals who had survived the German occupation. Lublin University, he said, was closed by the Germans, and the Library looted; but he was given a wretched job in the Archives where he was expected to dig up books and documents to show that this part of Poland was urdeutscher Boden (ancestral German territory). "The whole thing was a mockery," he said, but would not go into any details on how the "research work"

  was conducted, or on what results it had produced. He had obviously collaborated in a small way to save his life. And he was ready to admit that he was one of the few Polish intellectuals to have escaped.

  "The Germans' policy," he said, "was to exterminate the Polish intelligentsia; and now that they are going to be thrown out of Poland before long, they want to make sure that our power of national recuperation is reduced to zero, if possible. In the last few days I have learned that the Germans have murdered dozens more of our professors—in

  addition to the thousands and thousands of our intellectuals who have already perished in their concentration camps." He gave a long list of names. "They wanted Poland to be an inert mass of peasants and labourers, without leadership and without any kind of national prestige."

  "And the clergy?" I asked.

  "Yes, I'll grant you, the Church has done its best to maintain a sense of national cohesion and consciousness in Poland; but there are going to be complications now: most of the priests are pro-AK and anti-Russian."

  "How are things here in Lublin?"

  "You'll no doubt see Maidanek tomorrow; that's one aspect of Lublin. For the rest—well, things are taking shape, but slowly. There is a lot of worry and uncertainty. People are obsessed with the idea of Warsaw burning and its people being butchered by the

  Germans."

  "What's the feeling among the Polish people about the Russians? "

  "Quite good," he said, "yes, quite good. Of course, I may be more pro-Russian than most Poles. I studied in St Petersburg; I like Russian people, and admire their great civilisation.

  But it's no use denying it: there's a terribly old tradition of mutual distrust between Poles and Russians. Now, for the first time, I think, a real attempt is being made by the

  Russians to come to a lasting understanding with the Poles. But we Poles have been

  kicked around so much that the idea of a Russo-Polish bloc takes time to sink in. And now there are plenty of poisonous stories going around about Warsaw. Quite unjustified, I think. I have talked to many Russian officers; they are very fed-up at having so far failed to take Warsaw... And there are other things, too. Our people want Vilno and

  Lwow to be included in Poland. I know we can't have Vilno, which has been promised to the Lithuanians, but the Russians are being sticky even about Lwow..."

  [Incorporated into the Soviet Union at the partition in 1940 and kept by her after the war.]

  He then talked about Maidanek, where over one-and-a-half million pe
ople had been

  murdered in the last two years—many Poles amongst them, and people of all kinds of

  nationalities, but, above all, Jews.

  "What," I asked, "has been the attitude of the Polish people to the massacre of the millions of Jews?"

  "This is a very tricky subject; let's face it," said the Professor. "Owing to a number of historical processes, such as the Tsarist government's Jewish policy of confining most of the Jews in the Russian Empire to Poland, we have had far too many Jews here. Our retail trade was entirely in Jewish hands. They also played an unduly large part in other walks of life. There's no doubt that the Polish people wanted the number of Jews in Poland reduced. They wanted part of them to emigrate to America, to Palestine, or perhaps to Madagascar; there was such a scheme before the war. But that was one thing," he added a little glibly. "What the Germans did is quite another thing; and this, I can tell you, genuinely revolted every one of our people... "

  During the next few days I spent several hours in the streets of Lublin talking to all kinds of people. Despite some bomb damage here and there, the city had preserved some of its old-time charm. On Sunday, all the churches—and there were said to be more churches

  per square mile in Lublin than in any other Polish city— were crowded. Among the

  faithful, kneeling and praying, there were many Polish soldiers. People were rather better dressed than in Russia, though many looked distinctly worn out and undernourished, and under great nervous strain. The shops were almost empty, though there was a good deal of food in the market place. But the food was dear, and there was much animosity against the peasants who were described as "a lot of bloodsuckers"; there were also many stories of how the peasants "crawled" to the Germans; a German soldier only had to appear in a Polish village, and the peasants were so scared they'd bring out roast chickens, and butter and eggs and sour cream... On the other hand, the Russian soldiers had been given strict orders to pay for everything and the peasants were not keen at all to give anything away for roubles.