Roger Moorhouse - The Devils' Alliance - Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941

Most needed no such encouragement. Many thousands would voluntarily follow suit across occupied Poland, finding no obstacles to their departure. As one Jewish diarist in Warsaw recalled, enthusiasm for the Soviet Union was—initially at least—widespread among the Jews. “Thousands of young people went to Bolshevik Russia on foot,” he wrote, “that is to say, to the areas conquered by Russia. They looked upon the Bolsheviks as redeeming Messiahs. Even the wealthy, who would become poor under Bolshevism, preferred the Russians to the Germans.” That enthusiasm could be short-lived, however. Some of the 300,000 Polish Jews thought to have fled to the Soviet zone would attempt to return after a few weeks or months, because of either homesickness or disillusionment with the poor conditions they found there.

Those Jews who remained in the German-occupied regions would soon find themselves confined to ghettos. Starting in Łódź, then spreading to Warsaw, Kraków, and elsewhere, ghettos, in the Nazis’ view, were a useful way to concentrate and isolate Jewish populations while their ultimate fate was still undecided. To the Nazi mind, ghettoization had the added appeal that unsanitary conditions and disease would reduce the Jewish population through “natural wastage,” a euphemism that would conceal countless horrors. Starvation spread, with the very young and the elderly most immediately affected. “Bread is becoming a dream,” one ghetto inhabitant wrote, “and a hot lunch belongs to the world of fantasy.” Typhus, too, was soon commonplace, spurred by poor hygiene. In the Łódź ghetto, for instance—which contained 163,000 people in the spring of 1940—only 294 apartments were registered as having a toilet, and less than 400 had running water. Those who endured the ghettos could scarcely have imagined that their stay was but a prelude to an even worse fate.

In the Soviet area of occupation, meanwhile, the NKVD was rolling out a “cleansing” procedure of its own, which—in addition to the “decapitation” process already underway—sought to screen Polish society for all those perceived to be potentially antagonistic toward Soviet rule. Again, this was a category that could be extremely elastic in interpretation. In addition to teachers, businessmen, and priests, the Soviets chose to arrest many whom they damned simply for their knowledge of the outside world, including philatelists, postmasters, and even Esperantists. Others qualified for arrest as what the Soviets called beloruchki , literally, “those with white hands,” meaning those who did not do manual labor. By a particularly vicious twist of fate, the families of those killed in the Katyn massacres were also rounded up, their names and addresses having been gleaned by the NKVD through intercepted correspondence with their doomed loved ones.

For those affected, the procedure was generally the same. Households were awoken in the early hours by an urgent hammering on the door and bellowed instructions in Russian from small groups of men, usually consisting of one or two NKVD noncommissioned officers along with a couple of Red Army privates and a local militiaman. While the property was searched for any incriminating evidence, the family held at gunpoint, the NKVD officer would read a prepared decree outlining the offense and the punishment—deportation. No details were generally given of the destination: some officers were deliberately vague or misleading; others might show a flicker of sympathy. One NKVD man tried to sooth a crying child by handing her a toy doll. When she refused it, he gave it to her older sister, saying, “Take it with you, there will not be dolls like that where you’re going.”

In most cases, instructions were then given on the procedure to follow—the time allowed for packing, for instance, or suggestions for what to take on the journey—although some NKVD men were more interested in looting valuables and persecuting their victims. In one case, a family awoke to the sight of a group of soldiers already inside the bedroom: “No one dared move because he would be killed on the spot. They tied daddy up with a chain, and the others searched for weapons and at the same time stole whatever was valuable. The oldest militiaman shouts that in half an hour we have to be ready to leave. They caught mummy, tied her up and threw her on the sleigh.”

Even when instructions were given, for many of those affected the details were lost in a haze of fear and panic. As one peasant woman recalled, “He tells us to listen [to] what he will read and he read a decree that in half an hour we must be ready to leave, wagon will come. I immediately went blind and got to laugh terribly, NKVD man screams get dressed, I run around the room and laughson keeps packing what he canchildren are begging me to pack or there will be trouble, and I have lost my mind.” One mother was so traumatized that her young son had to pack for her. When she arrived in rural Kazakhstan, she found that he had included his French dictionary, a recipe book, and some Christmas decorations.

Soviet practice was generally to deport households together, according to the names on the list that accompanied the NKVD officers. Thus, extended nonresident family were usually excluded and allowed to leave, as were occasional guests, but absent family members were actively sought. Teenager Mieczysław Wartalski was on the list, and though he had already made good his escape when the NKVD arrived, he returned to his family because he feared that his mother would not cope without his help, and he remembered his father’s parting instruction to take care of his brothers and sisters. All five of them would be deported together to Kazakhstan.

The NKVD were similarly conscientious and permitted few exceptions. In one example, a man pleaded in vain that his paralyzed father and infant son should be excused deportation; neither would survive the journey. One of the only digressions allowed, it seems, was when intended deportees were absent and NKVD officers decided to find replacements to meet their quotas. In one such instance, a young woman was snatched off the street to “replace” a teenage daughter who had run away when the NKVD arrived. The woman’s screams and protests were countered with the ominous reply, “Moscow will put it right.”

After collection, the deportees were taken to their local railway stations and packed into goods carriages. Conditions were atrocious as the primitive wagons were scarcely equipped for transporting human cargo: a few were fitted with wooden bunks and stoves, but most were simply bare carriages, with barred windows and no sanitary facilities beyond a hole in the floor. Confined 60 or so to a carriage, 2,500 per train, the deportees had little room to sit.

Once the trains were underway, supplies of water and food for the deportees were intermittent at best, particularly as the carriages were often only opened days into the journey. Water supply was consistently short, with those on winter transports forced to scavenge for snow, often blackened with soot from the locomotive, from the roof of the carriage. Those deported in summer did not even have that option. Food rations were similarly meager, being supplied on average every two to three days and consisting perhaps of a thin, indistinct soup, sour bread, or sometimes simply hot water, all of which had to be collected by child volunteers from each carriage. Occasionally, a train was better supplied. One deportee recalled that Soviet soldiers would walk along the train during a stop, attempting to sell ham, fruit, and the other goods, which, it was suspected, had been provided for the passengers’ benefit.

In such difficult conditions, exhaustion and disease took a hideous toll, mainly among the elderly and the young, and the primary task whenever the train stopped was often to remove the dead bodies. One deportee remembered seeing a Red Army officer moved to tears by the sight that greeted him when the doors of the train were opened. Another, from a winter transport, recalled the grisly sight of Soviet soldiers moving from one wagon to the next, with tiny corpses under their arms, asking, “Are there any frozen children?” In summer, meanwhile, the deportees would try to push the dead out of the carriage windows themselves for fear of spreading disease. Summer or winter, requests for formal burials were routinely refused, and the bodies were left where they fell or simply stacked, anonymously, beside the tracks.