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Mark Paul
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Arrests, Executions, and Deportations Almost 13.5 million people resided in the eastern half of Poland seized by the Soviet Union in 1939. Of this number, approximately 5 million were ethnic Poles. There were also some 5 million Ukrainians, perhaps 2 million Belorussians, about 1.3 million Jews (not including at least 200 000 - 300 000 Jewish refugees from the German occupation zone), and much smaller groups of Russians, Germans, Lithuanians, and Czechs. But the terror and repressions that ensued did not strike at these various groups in equal measure. Moreover, collaborators from among the national minorities, very often Jews, played a prominent role in the assault on the Poles, the first and primary victims of the Soviet invaders. With the Soviet takeover of Eastern Poland in September 1939, there followed widespread arrests of Polish officials, and police and military personnel. Some 250 000 Polish soldiers were taken as prisoners of war. As of December that year, about 40 000 of them remained in camps under the watchful eye of the NKVD. Several thousand Poles, mostly soldiers captured in the September campaign, were simply executed on the spot. Between September 1939 and March 1941, according to Soviet sources, 92 500 Polish citizens were arrested in Polish territories incorporated into the Ukrainian and Belorussian Soviet Republics. By the end of June 1941, the number of people arrested had grown to 108 000. The largest group, by far, were ethnic Poles, who accounted for almost 45 percent of all those arrested. Ukrainians and Jews each accounted for about 22 percent of prisoners, and Belorussians 7.5 percent (these figures are in addition to the deportations discussed below). Some 14 600 Polish officers and officials, who had been
seized in September and October 1939 and held in prisoner-of-war camps
in Kozelsk, Starobelsk, and Ostashkov (transliterated as Kozielsk,
Starobielsk, and Ostaszkow in Polish), were murdered in mass executions
in Katyn, Kharkov, and Kalinin (now Tver), respectively, in April and
May of 1940. With the release of Soviet documents to the Polish government
in October 1992, it is now known that on March 5, 1940, the That Poles were the primary target of Soviet repression - certainly in the initial phases - is undeniable. Soviet documents indicate that over 97 percent of the prisoners, slated for execution in Eastern Poland in the early part of 1940, were ethnic Poles. Of the prisoners of war interned at Kozelsk, Starobelsk, and Ostashkov, about 95 percent were ethnic Poles (independent studies by the Katyn Family [Rodzina Katynska] in Poland concluded that 98.1 percent of the prisoners in these camps were ethnic Poles). A further indication of who was being targeted in Soviet-occupied Eastern Poland, is the ethnic breakdown for prisoners of war from the Polish army interned in the labour camp in Rowne, Volhynia. In April 1940, of the 12 707 internees, 78.7 percent were Poles, 17.4 percent Belorussians, 2.1 percent Ukrainians, and 1.1 percent Jews. Between October 1939 and June 1941, the Soviets exiled hundreds of thousands of civilians from Eastern Poland to the interior of the Soviet Union (mainly to Siberia, Kazakhstan and Arkhangelsk). There, they ended up in penal, or forced-labour camps or were dumped into remote settlements and (less frequently) kolkhozes. Based on the NKVD's own figures, a total of between 330 000 and 340 000 civilians were deported in four large waves of deportations in 1940-1941. If other round-ups and categories of people are counted, the total number of those deported and arrested rises, by the most conservative of estimates, to between 400 000 and 500 000. The breakdown for the three massive waves of deportations carried out in the first half of 1940 is as follows: at least 140 000 persons were deported on February 10 (of whom almost 82 percent were ethnic Poles, with Ukrainians and Belorussians each accounting for around 8 percent); 60 000 on April 13 (again, mostly Poles); and 80 000 on June 29 of that year. The first wave comprised above all interwar settlers, both military and civilian, and foresters and their families; the second wave targeted the families of those who had been arrested and deported earlier on, such as soldiers, policemen and "counter-revolutionaries"; the third wave consisted of refugees, mostly Jews, from German-occupied part of Poland. A final large-scale deportation of civilians took place the following year (1941), on May 21 (from "Western Ukraine"), June 14 (from the Baltic States), and June 19 (from "Western Belorussia"). The last of these deportations was cut short by the surprise German invasion on June 22. At least 40 000 people were affected at that time, including almost 4 000 Poles deported from Polish territories incorporated into Lithuania (the statistics for civilian deportees cited above are based on released Soviet records which may understate their number - they should be treated as the minimum of documented casualties. Polish wartime estimates ran higher and counted a million or more civilian deportees: 220 000 in February, 320 000 in April, 240 000 in June 1940, and between 200 000 and 300 000 in May-June 1941). Various other deportations, smaller in scale, resulted in the expulsion of an additional 50 000 civilians. Nor do these statistics include some 22 500 deported prisoners of war or the 80 000 - 90 000 people arrested for political reasons and detained in prisons in Eastern Poland, about half of whom were eventually deported to forced labour camps. While it is impossible to compute with certainty the number of Polish citizens who suffered deportation and other forms of repression, after an extensive analysis of all available sources, historian Daniel Bockowski estimates that approximately 750 000 - 780 000 Polish citizens found themselves in the Soviet interior as a result of the war. The harshest deportation by far was the one carried out in the winter of 1940, when temperatures fell to -40°C. Entire families were rounded up and driven to nearby train stations. People, especially children, froze in the unheated cattle cars onto which they were loaded and many died from diseases. After arriving at the places of their forced resettlement in the dead of winter, in one settlement half of the deportees fell sick and ten percent of the population died in the space of one month. Jan Tomasz Gross describes the harsh conditions in which the deportations took place:
Many of the civilian deportees, especially children - perhaps as many as one quarter of the total number - perished as a result of harsh conditions en route and in exile in the Gulag. The deportations were based in large measure on lists compiled by collaborators from among the local population, principally Jews and Ukrainians. These minorities, in their role as militia and in other official capacities, also helped to identify and track down their neighbours, who were slated for deportation. Although the later waves of deportations (from June 1940 on) included many Jews (around 70 000) and smaller numbers of Ukrainians (around 25 000), Belorussians (around 20 000), and Lithuanians, an absolute majority of those exiled to the Gulag - some 250 000 of the approximately 350 000 civilian deportees accounted for in Soviet sources - were ethnic Poles (as noted earlier, however, Poles constituted an overall minority in Eastern Poland). The vast majority of Jews deported to the Soviet interior were not targeted because of their political activities or their ethnic or religious status. The largest group were, in fact, some 43 000 refugees from the German-occupied part of Poland. They accounted for approximately 62 percent of Jewish civilian deportees. Thus only a small portion of the estimated 200 000 - 300 000 Jewish refugees from the German occupation zone fell victim to Soviet repressions. Many of them had registered for "repatriation" to the German zone at the German offices set up for this purpose, in accordance with the terms of the German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty. At the time, the Jews who registered for "repatriation" were not impressed by conditions in the Soviet occupation zone and were no longer terrified at the prospect of living under German occupation. Returning to their homes and families and safeguarding their economic interests was uppermost in their minds - the alternative of taking out Soviet citizenship, it was believed, would result in losing the property left behind in the German occupation zone. Some 1500 Jews were allowed to return to the German sector before the Germans put a stop to this charade. Quite unexpectedly, those Jews who had lined up to register, later faced deportation to the Soviet interior since the Soviets had taken careful note of them. It should be stressed that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were firm allies at that time and that the Jews, who indicated their readiness to return to the German zone, had no inkling that they would later become politically suspect. Ironically, since the vast majority of Jews deported to the Soviet interior survived the war and this proved to be their salvation from the Holocaust, pro-Soviet propaganda turned this unanticipated and unintended consequence into a "rescue" activity on behalf of endangered Jews. Many Jews were arrested for illegal border crossings and for engaging in illicit trade and other shady activities - which assumed enormous proportions in the Soviet occupation zone - and suffered deportation on those accounts. A much smaller number of Jews, the well-to-do capitalists and prewar political and social activists, were labelled "class enemies" and deported for that reason. Jews, who actually engaged in underground political activities or open religious-based protests directed against the Soviet state were a rarity. Indeed, Jewish memoirs referring to that period underline that virtually all political activity ceased. Wartime estimates of Jews constituting 30 percent or more of the deportees appear to be exaggerated. On the whole, Jewish deportees, especially in the first two waves of deportations, comprised only a tiny fraction of Polish ones. Moreover, only a small number of the Jewish deportees were prewar residents of the former eastern Polish territories - the majority were refugees from Central Poland. In the town of Kalusz near Stanislawow, for example, reportedly only two indigenous Jews, out of a population of 6000, were exiled. Local Jews were more likely to have made their way to the Soviet interior because of the military draft or as volunteers for industrial labour. The latter category also included many refugees from the German occupation zone. Since the vast majority of Jews, exiled to the Soviet interior, were young men and women, and since they were not deported in the depth of winter as entire Polish families were, their mortality rate appears to have been considerably smaller than that of the Poles. Political prisoners filled to overflowing the jails of occupied Eastern Poland, which held at least 100 000 prisoners at various times, and many thousands of them perished during the Soviet occupation. Soviet documents, made available to researchers after the collapse of the Soviet Union, confirm that in June and July 1941, on the eve of the German invasion, at least 10 000 political prisoners were massacred in jails in occupied Eastern Poland, often with unspeakable cruelty. Thousands more (30 000 - 40 000 by one count), many of whom were later executed, were evacuated with the retreating Soviet army. Understandably, Polish public opinion did not differentiate between cooperation with the Nazi and Soviet invaders - both of these enemies worked hand-in-hand in the destruction of the Polish state and its people and both were regarded as equally reprehensible. Although many Jews apparently regarded the Soviet Union as the lesser of two evils, it must be borne in mind that Nazi Germany did not implement the "Final Solution" until after Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. In the meantime, the Soviets had also struck a devastating blow to Jewish communal life and organizations in occupied Eastern Poland with tens of thousands of Jews also deported to the Gulag. Many Jews, who had come under Soviet rule, even those who were severe critics of prewar Poland and openly welcomed their country's downfall, sooner or later came to the belated realization, in the words of one survivor, that ...it was still better to be a Jew in democratic Poland than to live under the Soviets in equal fear with everyone else. They also came forward in droves to join General Anders' Polish Army and to be "repatriated" to Soviet-dominated Poland in 1944-1948 rather than remain under direct Soviet rule. Joining the Polish army or "repatriating" to Poland was, in most cases, seen as an interim solution, a way out of the Gulag and a stepping stone to Palestine (where many Jews deserted from the Polish army) or the West. Moreover, the "transformation" was by no means universal and many Jews continued to applaud the benefits of Soviet rule - right to the end. But that ultimate awareness (for many, but certainly not for all) is one that skips very important steps in the evolution of Jewish attitudes and in the analysis of what transpired in occupied Eastern Poland in 1939-1941. A significant portion of the Jewish population, with the passive acquiescence of the vast majority, had by that time openly embraced Soviet rule and declared themselves to be enemies of Poland. News of this reached the rest of Poland and made a strong impression there. In an exchange with Jewish-American publicist Abraham Brumberg, British historian Norman Davies was one of the first Western historians to deal with, among other topics, the Soviet invasion of Eastern Poland. Davies begins his discourse in The New York Review of Books (April 9, 1987) with rather obvious statements of principle:
Professor Davies continues:
Unfortunately, Polish historians were slow to amass the extensive documentation spread in countless sources, published and unpublished, to back Norman Davies' claim, which further played into the syndrome of denial on the part of Holocaust historians. For those familiar with those materials, however, there could be no doubt that his assessment was accurate, penetrating and balanced. The hundreds of testimonies gathered in this study attest to that amply.
POLISH-JEWISH RELATIONS UNDER SOVIET
OCCUPATION, 1939-1941
Last modified December 14, 2009 1:14 PM |
