Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (83 page)

Even so, in a few cases, Home Army personnel went over to the NKVD as an act of deliberate choice. A few of them may well have done so in the hope of saving their skins. But some had more serious purposes in mind. Louise Z., for example, a nineteen-year-old courier, was sent by her superiors to infiltrate the NKVD ranks and to send back information
on their activities and intentions. She had crossed the river in early September, when the bridges were still open, and had gone to stay with her family in one of the suburban villages near Praga. After a few days, the Soviets duly arrived and she walked into the nearest NKVD post and asked for a job. The ploy was successful. The NKVD were happy to employ a harmless local girl who knew the neighbourhood and spoke Polish. They thought nothing of the fact that she appeared to have a boyfriend who rode up on his bicycle every other day for a spot of canoodling. Thus began an assignment that was to prove harder to terminate than to initiate.

After the Rising
, the central sector of the Eastern Front on the Vistula remained static until 12 January 1945, when Zhukov’s winter offensive raced across Poland. Before 12 January, therefore, districts west of the Vistula remained largely in German hands. After 17 January, almost the whole of Poland was in the Soviet grip.

The huge contingent of Varsovians who were not taken into permanent captivity, or somehow escaped, were left to their own devices. They were homeless, often penniless, and often with sick or under-age dependants. Those who could, made for the homes of friends or relatives, if possible in the mountains or in the far south, as far from the front as they could go. Many headed for the country villages, where there were hopes of food and shelter. Others crowded into the small suburban towns to the west of Warsaw, where reception centres were improvised and where they filled the schools and parish halls. At a stroke, all Varsovians who weren’t prisoners were refugees.

Military POWs from the Warsaw Rising who surrendered to the Germans at the Capitulation, were sent to a variety of
Stalags
and
Oflags
scattered round the Reich. They were not investigated by the Gestapo, and received a modicum of food, shelter, and warmth. In fact, they were in just about the safest place to be. Other Varsovians were struggling to survive either as forced labourers or in the concentration camps. Naturally, conditions varied. But generally speaking they were correct. POWs held in Sandbostel, for instance, recalled endless roll-calls, watery turnip soup, the delights of the
Latrinekommando
, and the constant cold caused by living through the winter in the tatters of summer clothes. But they also received Red Cross parcels, participated in educational courses, and even traded on the black market with the locals.
⁵⁶

As Germany’s labour shortage intensified, the camp authorities were increasingly tempted to bend the rules and to lease out their prisoners for agricultural or industrial work. In some instances, the prisoners were content to be kept occupied. In others, they were callously exploited. But they were not in the defenceless position of that of their compatriots who had fallen into the hands of the SS.

In the last months of the war, as the Reich was pincered from east and west, Polish POWs waited anxiously to see which of the Allied armies would reach them first. It could make all the difference between liberation and renewed captivity. Officers held at
Oflag
VIIA at Murnau in Bavaria, for example, were confident that they would be saved by the Americans, who duly arrived in April 1945. Soldiers held in camps in northern Germany were freed by the British. But the inmates of camps in Germany’s eastern provinces, such as Lamsdorf or Sagan in Silesia, were freed by the Soviet Army. For them, a straight jump awaited them from the Nazi frying pan into the Soviet fire.

It has to be argued, therefore, that the civilian evacuees from Warsaw had a harder ride than the POWs. The largest single contingent, variously estimated at anything from 30,000 to 60,000, was sent to Breslau, the capital of Silesia, which was beyond the range of Allied bombing and which in 1943–44 had been the recipient of several heavy industrial enterprises transferred from the Ruhr. The vast
Berthawerk
, for example, which had been built in the nearby town of Markstädt by Krupps of Essen, manufactured heavy artillery. The FAMO works produced rolling stock, and other establishments produced V2 engines, artillery fuses, and tanks. All of them were desperately short of labour. The shortage was being filled partly by work brigades from the local concentration camp at Gross Rosen and partly by foreign workers. Conditions were oppressive.

In January 1945, after Hitler ordered that Breslau be turned into a fortress to be defended to the last man, the Gauleiter expelled the great majority of German civilians but insisted that workers engaged in war production should stay. As a result, some 200–300,000 foreigners were forced to endure the ensuing Soviet siege, which lasted for nearly five months. Not a few men and women who had survived the hell on earth during the Rising were killed by the hell on earth of the Siege of Breslau.
⁵⁸

Nor did the entry of the Soviet Army herald anything resembling rapid relief. Mass looting, gang rapes, and licensed mayhem were the order of the day. Liberated Breslau, soon to become Wrocław, looked very much like liberated Warsaw – an ocean of rubble inhabited by a horde of desperate, damaged, grieving people.

Given Germany’s acute want of manpower, it is not at first clear why in October 1944 so many Varsovians should have been condemned to the concentration camps. They were not, in the main, Jews, and they were not, in the main, active insurgents. But the fact remains, tens of thousands of Varsovians were dispatched to Auschwitz and to other such hellholes.

One may presume that insurgents and civilians from Warsaw found themselves in Nazi concentration camps through one of two sets of circumstances. In the first place, some insurgent soldiers, who were captured before the October capitulation, especially after the fall of the Old Town, were shipped off to the camps as a form of punishment. They were supposed to count themselves lucky for this privilege, since most of their captured comrades, including the wounded, had been summarily shot. In the second place, roughly 12–15,000 Varsovians were packed off after the Capitulation either to Mauthausen-Gusen or to Ravensbrück, apparently for no other reason than that the SS wanted their share of free labour. [
ADMIRATION
, p. 481]

A well-known novelist and poet, Thaddeus B., was among a group of several hundred sent to Auschwitz in August 1944. A member of an AK unit, he was trapped by accident in a street roundup in Warsaw, and spent nine months in Auschwitz-Birkenau. His experiences were reflected in a number of searing post-war novels, including
Dzie
na Harmenzach
(1946) and
This way for the gas, ladies and gentlemen
(1976). Thaddeus B. belonged to the small number of former insurgents, who, having tasted the worst of fascism, was to be converted to the ideals of communism. But his work is mainly preoccupied with the problem of human suffering. Ultimately he could not take the strain. Like his fellow inmate, Primo Levi, he survived Auschwitz only to commit suicide six years later.
⁵⁹

Vatslava L. had been a Home Army cook during the Rising. She was transported to Auschwitz in October 1944, since she was regarded as a recidivist, who had been discharged from KZ
Warschau
on condition of her good conduct. She was the widow of an army officer who was taken prisoner by the Soviets in 1939, and whom she attempted to visit by walking in the winter snows of 1939–40 from Warsaw to Kozielsk in western Russia. (She was to learn that her husband had been murdered at Katyn.) Handed over by the NKVD to the SS during the currency of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, she passed two years in the Goose Street camp within KZ
Warschau
before her conditional release. Her brief service in the Home Army, therefore, formed but a brief interval between one concentration camp and the next. She survived the rigours both of Auschwitz and of the ‘Death March’ to the Hanover District which was carried out in the first weeks of 1945, but in Bergen-Belsen she caught typhus, and expired a mere ten days before the arrival of its British liberators. In all probability, she was buried alive in a ditch with other sufferers and killed with quicklime. This woman was totally innocent. She paid with untold anguish for the love of her family and her country. Nothing could be more painfully symbolic than the lot of her son who lost his father through the savagery of the Soviets and his mother through the savagery of the Nazis.
⁶⁰

The group of some 5,000 Varsovians sent to Mauthausen-Gusen in Austria entered what many regarded as the lowest ring of the KZ system. This was a place which could not formally be classed like Treblinka or
Sobibor as a death camp: its clients, who were put to work in the granite quarries, were subjected to the cruellest of treatments and enjoyed no such luxury as a rapid death. Mixed in with Jews and Soviet prisoners, the Varsovians were held in the open throughout the winter of 1944–45, suffering a horrendous depletion rate. Only a handful lived to tell the tale.
⁶¹
[
POW
, p. 486]