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Station 43
Audley End House and SOE's Polish Section
By Ian Valentine The History Press
Copyright © 2013 Ian Valentine
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-9537-8
CHAPTER 1
'Poland is Fighting'
It is easy to get embroiled in the understandably volatile and divided political opinion that still exists concerning British, American, Polish and Soviet relations during the Second World War. Nevertheless, it is important to attempt to look at the background to these views, as this is intrinsic to any document about Polish military involvement in the war. It is also easy to lapse into conjecture about events between the fixed historical dates. However, it is equally difficult to steer away from the vagaries of political double-dealings, polemics, incongruities and betrayal that occurred between the Allied political leaders, when so many Poles still have strong feelings about what happened to them during and after the war.
History can be approached on many levels. Historians draw on many discursive strategies: a fixed period of history can look very different between individual, social, cultural, political and ideological perspectives. An episode in war can be very different for two soldiers standing only yards apart. It is impossible to tidy these very different vantage points and bring them all together, as this leads only to historical reductionism and oversimplification. In this chapter, I am by no means attempting a comprehensive tract about Poland during the Second World War in so few words, only perhaps to express polarised issues about which many people of different generations still have very strong opinions. For instance, British soldiers at Audley End built up friendships with their Polish comrades in arms but could not march with them in any victory parade at the end of the war, a situation that many found difficult to accept. There was no date stamp to mark the end of the war for the Poles, a distinction discussed in the final chapter. Armistice Day marked the end of conflict for most servicemen and women in Europe (with the ensuing loss and bereavement that touched most people), but for many Poles the threat to their lives continued long after the war had finished, when they were tracked down by Communist Soviet–Polish security forces in their homeland. As this book looks at the wartime experiences of a few individual Polish servicemen who trained at Audley End, in what is inevitably a subjective account of the war at an individual and personal level, we should not lose sight of how the conflicts discussed below affected every Pole during and after the war, as well as all the other servicemen and civilians who were chained to political machinations that were out of their control.
Frontiers become ever fluctuating in the tide of history of many nations, changing with the direction of the prevailing political wind. Countries collide on borders like rifts in continental plates, and disputes about territorial ownership create conflicts and wars that still simmer and ignite today. Poland's borders have changed many times in its history. For many hundreds of years Poland has fought to maintain or regain its independence. The country has been geographically landlocked when it was once sprawling and vast. It has been partitioned and divided by neighbouring countries so that Poland geographically no longer existed. Between 1762 and 1796 Catherine II, Empress of Russia, agreed a series of partitions that resulted in the once independent Poland becoming a protectorate of Russia by 1795. On 24 October of that year Stanislaw August of Poland abdicated, and the country was partitioned for the third time among Austria, Russia and Prussia.
From 1795 to 1918, after the country had been partitioned three times, there were no 'indigenous' Polish people, only Poles who lived in Russia, Prussia (Germany) and the Habsburg Empire that later became Austria-Hungary. The partitions and the ensuing subjugation of the Poles created exiled communities in Europe. This subjugation created a strong distrust of the Germans and Russians in the collective Polish psyche. Stalin, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR, advocated overt suppression of the Polish language and culture, but the Polish contempt for the Russians was not always understood by Allied leaders during the Second World War, as cartoons in the newspapers of the day exemplified.
The regaining of territorial loss after the First World War was of great importance to Stalin, and the territorial dominance of the Soviet Union in Poland was central to this. Stalin's ruthless nature and his mistrust of other nations, combined with fear of invasion from the West, help to explain why Polish nationals were executed or imprisoned during the Second World War, despite fighting the common enemy, Germany. Russia has fought many wars, in the East against Japan, in the Crimea, but predominantly in the West. Napoleon's invasion, the First World War and Hitler's invasion, all were fought in the west, and these were the most costly to Russia. To control Poland would help to secure Russia's western border from attack.
The strategic importance of Poland to Hitler and Stalin was immense, and had been to others before them. Invading armies marching towards Russia would pass through Poland. Catherine II realised this and partitioned the country.
At the end of the First World War, Russia was wracked by internal revolution and was militarily weak. Poland was able to regain independence, and with it Russia lost control of an important buffer zone. Stalin's motivation was twofold: to have a buffer against future invasion from the West and the influence of capitalism, and to regain what had been lost during the First World War. In 1920 Poland was at war with Russia, with Poland's independence threatened again. The war, fought by many of the soldiers who passed through Audley End House during the Second World War, culminated in a Polish cavalry counter-attack at the battle of Warsaw that quelled the Red Army, but remoulded Poland's frontiers so that the Lithuanian, Byelorussian and Ukrainian communities were split. The end of the war also reinforced Soviet suspicion that the Poles were dedicated to overthrowing them.
In Germany at the beginning of the 1930s the popularity of the Nazi Party was growing. The word Nazi was drawn from Hitler's NAtional SoZIalist Party. In the Reichstag elections of 1930 the Nazi Party won over six and a half million votes. However, Adolf Hitler was originally prevented from taking his seat owing to his Austrian citizenship. On 30 January 1933 Hitler became Chancellor, nationalist feeling grew and in March the following year the Nazis built the first concentration camp, at Dachau near Munich.
Poland signed a non-aggression pact with Germany in 1934. This was unsettling, as it created the impression to other European neighbours that Poland and Germany were allies with common goals. Lying innate was the German aim to reclaim territory, and the German minority in Poland saw Hitler's rise to power as a step towards this.
By 1938 the threat of Hitler and Stalin was growing. Poland did not accept the German demand to reclaim the port of Gdask in Poland, annexed by the Germans and renamed Danzig. Gdask had a strong German population, going against the tentative appeasement of the 1934 non-aggression pact. After Chamberlain had maintained that Britain would support Poland's independence, Hitler revoked the peace treaty with Poland. In September 1939 Poland was forcibly occupied by Germany and the USSR, according to an agreement between Hitler and Stalin, which had been signed on 23 August 1939 by German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov. Hitler's main purpose was to ensure the Soviet Union's neutral stance in an attack on Poland. Reinforcing Poland's weakness within this political triumvirate, the 'sleeping protocol' to the pact was the partition of Poland between Germany and the USSR, tearing up Poland's independence once more.
Two decades of European diplomacy that had sought to prevent another war came to an end. The German invasion of Poland triggered a war that many thought would not last long. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain thought the conflict would be over by spring the next year. Hitler's Blitzkrieg (lightning war) raged through the heart of Europe. Divisions of Panzer tanks outnumbered the inadequate Polish forces and the Luftwaffe destroyed the Polish railway system. However, despite German strength, the Poles fought on but could not withstand Hitler's attacks into Poland from Slovakia and East Prussia. The Polish hope that Britain and France would save them never happened, as there were no military plans to support Poland. Whether this was because of tardiness, deliberation that Britain would not be successful in helping the Poles, or the sheer speed and military superiority of the German advance is unclear, but, whatever the reasons, similar feelings of betrayal because of inertia would be felt by the Poles in Warsaw in 1944.
The Red Army invaded Poland on 17 September, despite Poland's misplaced hope that it would offer the Poles military support against Hitler. The military defeat of Poland led to Polish prisoners of war in German hands and in Soviet camps, where the army officers were put into separate custody. The underlying secret pact between the Soviet Union and Germany was made flesh in the territorial sharing of Poland between the two powers. A further treaty expressed mutual responsibility for squashing Polish resistance. In February Stalin began deporting Poles to Siberia and eastern Russia, where the people who survived the journey worked as slave labour in camps such as the Pechora Lager in Siberia. Over one and a half million citizens of different ethnicities left their country. Polish citizens who were not deported were often put into prison camps in their homeland.
Poland was to suffer terribly under German occupation during the war, and endure a higher proportion of deaths than any other country. Six million Polish citizens were put to death in gas chambers and concentration camps, or executed on the spot. Hundreds of thousands were deported for forced labour. The Nazi intention in Poland was the complete 'Germanisation' of the country: cities, towns and villages were renamed in German; the Polish language was forbidden in public; members of the intelligentsia were murdered; Polish culture was denied; villages were razed to the ground for the least signs of resistance; and the Catholic Church was persecuted, resulting in priests being sent to concentration camps.
Recolonisation brought with it the Jewish ghettos and Polish resettlement in annexed regions. These Third Reich policies can be amalgamated into the one aim of Hitler: to annihilate the Polish nation so that the country no longer existed. Hitler's ideology tried to persuade those he made powerless that their powerlessness was inevitable. To take away a nation's language is to disempower it. His desire to 'civilise' condoned murder as a means to an end for eliminating people he saw as 'savages'. In July 1942 the Germans began to deport the remaining population of the Warsaw ghetto to their deaths in the concentration camps and gas chambers. In April the Jews in Warsaw had defended themselves for six weeks against German tanks and artillery, with thousands of deaths on both sides. M.R.D. Foot states that a Pole, Witold Pilecki, let himself get arrested so that he could find out what life was like inside Auschwitz. This he did, setting up a resistance organisation within the camp. He escaped, but failed to convince the Armia Krajowa about the horrors of life in Auschwitz. As the war progressed, couriers also brought information concerning the camps to the Allies, including Polish courier Elzbieta Zawacka, the only female occupant of Audley End House who parachuted into Poland.
Before the First World War the partitioning of Poland had also given rise to the subjugation of the Jewish population in the country. Anti-Semitism in Poland was not new (it can be said that anti-Jewish prejudice was prevalent throughout Europe, including the British Nazi Party, and anti-Jewish views were expressed by writers such as Rudyard Kipling and G.K. Chesterton). Part of the Jewish population in Poland was concentrated in the lands occupied by Russia. Catherine II hailed Russian Orthodoxy as the only true faith, thus restricting the largest concentration of Jews in Europe to their own settlement and forbidding them to journey beyond it. Persecution and the ensuing Jewish insurrection resulted in a large Jewish emigration before the First World War. After the Polish–Soviet War anti-Semitism heightened, often with its roots in religion. The Polish Communist Party was largely Jewish, which created a hatred of Jews and Russians alike. Between the wars the Depression badly affected the Jewish community, but Jews were often scapegoated as being catalysts to economic decline. Large numbers of Jews emigrated before the outbreak of the Second World War, those remaining coming under the Nazis' inconceivably evil solutions in their death camps.
Racial hatred has its roots in many facets of prejudice. Some experts argue that racial scapegoating deflects an unworthiness of self, a powerful force of prejudice, others that prejudice is caused by an unequal distribution of wealth – economic precursors to genocide. When individuals are prejudiced against the members of a group, they will often encode information consistent with their prejudice.
The Nazi propaganda machine exploited a negative representation of the Jews through their own media and language. The dominant Nazi discourse dehumanised the Jews as it dehumanised other faiths and races, and the more it was repeated the more it reinforced the prejudice. The Nazis knew that economic and other national deficiencies could be used in rallying ill feeling towards certain groups. The propaganda helped individuals justify their hatreds, and much of the German population began to view the Jews as Untermenschen, or subhumans.
Many other nationalities with different religions, prisoners of war and anyone deemed unacceptable to the Nazis also suffered or perished in concentration camps. Over eleven million people lost their lives in the Holocaust, in what was called the Endlösung, or Final Solution – the Nazi euphemism for mass murder. Six million of them were Polish and half of these were non-Jewish. After the war Polish literature reconstructed the experience of the death camps in literature, including Tadeusz Borowski's Proszee panstwa do gazu, a collection of short stories about the author's experiences in Auschwitz, beyond the sinister slogan above the camp entrance: Arbeit Macht Frei, Work Makes You Free.
Many of the Polish SOE agents would experience at first hand the suffering endured by men, women and children held in the camps. Incredibly, after the citizens of Poland had witnessed the genocide of the Jews during the war, a marked series of violent anti-Semitic attacks began in Poland in the years after the war had finished. Many Poles, often right-wing, saw the Jews as traitors who were Communists who had spent the time in the USSR during the war and worked in the secret police, or thought that most Jews were against maintaining Poland's independence. This is not to say that some Jews, of Russian and Polish origin, were free of blame in such activities. One source told me that her father had been in General Wladyslaw Anders's (Commander of the Polish Army) 1st Krechowiecki Lancers Regiment and had been tortured by a Jewish NKVD agent. The NKVD was the Narodny Komissariat Vnutrennich Dyel, People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the name used for the Soviet secret police. The NKVD man professed a hatred of Christians and a hatred of the priest with whom the woman's father shared a cell. This priest was tortured and murdered along with many other religious believers. Conversely, many Jews (and other nationalities) fought within the ranks of the Armia Krajowa (AK).
In the face of such cruelty to Jews undertaken by the Nazis, it is sometimes difficult to accept that some Jews were not always the victims – sometimes they were the perpetrators. One has to acknowledge and condemn any kind of torturer or murderer. It can be said that people behave badly, not because they are Jews, or Poles, or Christians, or Germans, or any other group, but because they behave badly as individuals. They would act that way under any banner. Post-war violence was often the result of victim lashing out at victim, but it is easier to view actions collectively in terms of faith or race, as ostensibly it is easier to explain. Consequently, one can say that dangers arise when the acts, or supposed acts, of individuals are grouped together under race or religion, a factor that Hitler exploited. One Polish woman maintains: 'There is also a great success story in Jewish–Polish relationships that has resulted in an indistinguishable common culture in parts: in humour, culture and values. There are areas of great affection and common ground between individuals, as in my family.' Another Polish source cites a different angle on the painful issue of reasons behind anti-Semitism in post-war Poland. The majority of Poles are fiercely patriotic, and for many their country is more precious to them than their lives. Some Poles felt that, although Jews had settled, lived and prospered in Poland, they are a nomadic people and had never identified with the country itself. This way of life often clashed with the Poles when many Jews sided with the invaders of their country, especially after the Second World War. Many Jews were Communists as there was terrible poverty in the shtetls, and Communism offered the chance of a better life. Some of these Jews did perpetrate many atrocities against political figures and intellectuals, causing a great resentment born of patriotism, not religion.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Station 43 by Ian Valentine. Copyright © 2013 Ian Valentine. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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