POLAND: HERE IS THE RECORD

By Ann Su Caldwell

Distributed by the Polonia Media Network

Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, beginning World War II. This writing was published in 1945 by the Michigan Committee of Americans for Poland in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It not only presented an accurate picture of pre-war and wartime history, but an insightful prediction of the future. It was reintroduced in 1999 by Polonia Today as Polonians around the world commemorated the 60th anniversary of the invasion.

Part 4

POLISH-SOVIET RELATIONS: 1941-1944

A new chapter in international relations was opened when Germany attacked Russia in 1941. For Poland this move had special significance. In 1939-1940 Soviet authorities had deported some 1,500,000 Polish citizens to remote districts of the USSR and, disregarding international law, had held totalitarian-style elections in Soviet occupied Poland, as a result of which all that area had been incorporated into the Soviet republics of the Ukraine and White Russia. I was in Romania at the time and know from accounts given by Poles who escaped from Poland after those elections just how farcical they were. Documentation of that event is easily obtainable.

These two actions on the part of the USSR and all the attendant results might have been regarded by the Polish Government as sufficient cause for refusing to have anything to do with the Soviet Union until the latter government manifested willingness to atone for past actions, even though Poles and Russians now were fighting a common enemy.

However, General Sikorski's government chose to be magnanimous and in July, 1941, signed the Polish-Soviet pact establishing diplomatic relations, providing for the release of Poles held in the USSR and the organization of a Polish army in that country, and declaring that "Soviet

German treaties of 1939 relative to territorial changes in Poland have lost their validity."

PROMISE OF RUSSO-POLISH PACT UNFULFILLED

Theoretically the outlook seemed promising. Strained relations between Poland and Russia appeared to be easing. Britain and America were pleased and hailed unanimity of purpose: the defeat of Germany. Poland, according to the hopes of the Polish Government, had received recognition of its rightful boundaries, obtained the promise of release of the surviving deportees, and regained a reservoir of army strength (according to the Soviet army paper, Red armies had taken 181,000 Polish prisoners of war).

Hopes were not to be fulfilled. Ambassadors were accredited and received, but from the moment of the Polish officials' arrival in the USSR obstacles cropped up in the path of everything they tried to do, as I know from conversations with persons who were a part of that establishment. The Polish embassy was given no assistance in locating the deported, who had been scattered over North Russia, Siberia, and Kazakstan. On the contrary, there were instances of Poles in forced labor camps being moved to still more remote regions, knowledge of the Polish Soviet pact being kept from them.

In consequence, no more than 620,000 of the deported were located by the Polish delegates. Of these 271,323 reached Polish headquarters. But because of obstructionist tactics by the USSR, including denial of Polish citizenship to many thousands of deportees from Eastern Poland, only 140,000 had been permitted by the Soviet Government to leave Russia before diplomatic relations

with the Polish Government were broken, bringing to an end all army recruiting and relief work by Polish governmental agencies.

MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE OF POLISH OFFICERS

From the time of the arrival of the Polish officials in the USSR they had sought in vain to locate some 8,300 Polish officers known to have been Soviet prisoners; but Soviet authorities had repeatedly denied all knowledge of them. The Polish Government traced these men to certain prisoner of war camps and traced their removal, but whither, it could not discover. The disappearance of these thousands, plus other groups with them making a total upwards of 10,000, remained a mystery.

To the frequent written and verbal demands of the Polish Government for explanation of the mystery, the answer was always the same: that all the prisoners of war had been released and since that time the Soviet authorities knew nothing about them. During these many months the Polish Government had established the fact that the lost men were not in German prisoner of war camps and that they had not returned to Poland. Stalin's suggestion, in the course of a conversation with General Sikorski in December, 1941, on this troublesome topic, that the men had escaped and made their way to Manchuria, was not accepted. Thousands of men in Polish uniform could not possibly have made their way unnoticed across all Russia.

KATYN MASS GRAVES INCIDENT--SPRING, 1943

Early in April, 1943, the Germans announced the discovery of mass graves of Polish soldiers in the Smiles

area, and got together a medical commission, composed of men from countries friendly to Germany and of one Swiss member, which examined and reported, going into great detail. Their evidence made the Russians guilty of the mass murders.

Then, on April 15, the Soviet Information Bureau in Moscow published a statement saying that Polish prisoners of war who had been at work on fortifications in the Smolensk sector in 1941 had been captured by the advancing Germans. This was something the Soviets had not hitherto revealed, and the Polish Government through its Minister of National Defense turned to the Soviet Government with a request that the International Red Cross, a Swiss institution that is international in its field of labor, be permitted to investigate and report.

After reciting in detail the history of the Polish effort to locate the officers and men, the request concludes thus:

"We have become accustomed to the lies of German propaganda and we understand the purpose behind its latest revelations. In view, however, of abundant and detailed German information concerning the discovery of the bodies of many thousands of Polish officers near Smolensk, and the categorical statement that they were murdered by the Soviet authorities in the spring of 1940, the necessity has arisen that the mass graves discovered should be investigated and the facts alleged verified by a competent international body, such as the International Red Cross. The Polish Government has therefore approached this institution with a view to their sending a delegation to the place where the massacre of the Polish prisoners of war is said to have taken place."

The Soviets indignantly refused permission for such an investigation and used the occasion to accuse the Polish Government of collaboration with the Germans, and to sever diplomatic relations. The unwillingness of the Soviet Government to entrust this matter, of such great importance to the Poles from the humanitarian as well as the military viewpoint, to an international body strengthens rather than weakens the supposition of their guilt.

DESPITE GRIEVANCES, POLES BACK ALLIED UNITY

Unwilling to jeopardize the unity among the United Nations, the Poles did nothing further, declaring their readiness to resume friendly relations whenever the Soviets were willing to meet the reasonable terms they asked, chief of which was permission to evacuate the families of Polish soldiers from the USSR. They would leave the boundary question until after the war.

Meanwhile, the "Union of Polish Patriots," sponsored by the Soviets, had come into existence in Moscow, and a Polish army to fight beside the Red Army was being trained by Red Army officers, although its commander was Colonel Berling, a Polish prisoner of war who had been won over by Soviet propaganda conducted in prison camps. Wanda Wasilewska, president of the "Patriots," had become a Soviet citizen in the first year of the war. Through their press and over the Moscow and Kiev radios, Wasilewska and Berling and the insignificant few around them carried on a continuous campaign against the Polish Government and General Anders, commander of the Polish troops which had left Russia. What they did not say was that Marshal Stalin himself was responsible for that army's departure from the USSR. Stalin did not want nationally-minded Poles with ideas of their own in important posts, but only persons who would take orders from Moscow.

HOME ARMY BACKS GOVERNMENT-IN-EXILE

After General Sikorski's death in an airplane crash in July, 1943, Polish-Soviet relations underwent no change for nearly a year. Premier Mikolajczyk, Sikorski's successor, hoped that the Kremlin would be conciliatory and said and did nothing which might offend. The Polish underground regime loyally backed the Government-in-Exile in London. Even when the Lublin "Committee for the Liberation of Poland" was set up and approved by Moscow, with the prospect of its being transformed into a Soviet-recognized Polish puppet government, Mikolajczyk did not protest.

The Polish premier's willingness to conciliate and compromise suited Britain and America, which did not want the "perennial Polish problem" coming into the limelight. They wanted to keep the Russians fighting Germans. Who knew what might happen if the Poles insisted on their nation's rights?

USSR AND THE POLISH UNDERGROUND

When Red armies reached the Polish-Soviet frontiers, driving the Germans back across Poland, the Polish Home Army-the underground-was ordered by the Polish Government to come out in the open in the area's where the

Red armies appeared and cooperate with them. This order was obeyed, with the result that while Home Army help was accepted as long as the battle was on, immediately thereafter officers were imprisoned, executed or deported to the USSR and their men given the choice of being incorporated into the Red Army or General Zymierski's Polish Army (Berling had disappeared from the scene some time ago), or suffering the same fate as their officers.

The information here summarized reached the Polish Government-in-Exile through established underground channels. It contained dates and names of places and officers and troops involved. Yet the Polish Government still was so desirous of doing nothing to spoil a possible rapprochement or embarrass Britain and America that it ordered a continuation of its policy of cooperation with Soviet troops, although it meant the certain sacrifice of men who for years had been devoting themselves to the struggle against Germany.

Such was the situation up to the date of the Warsaw uprising of 1944.