Black Earth(119)

In 1943 and 1944, some Jews were fighting alongside the Soviets against the Germans in the marshes of what had been remote Polish borderlands; others, sometimes their neighbors, had been deported to the Gulag, then had made their way with a Polish army through India and Iran to Palestine, where they would fight the British in the deserts of what would become the State of Israel.

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Both the Soviet Union and Poland claimed the territories where Jews lived and died, and the Soviets were intent on overwhelming not just the Germans but any forces that supported Polish independence. All organized attempts to rescue Jews had to become politicized, since from a Soviet perspective any organization, regardless of purpose, was either pro-Soviet or anti-Soviet. In the Stalinist understanding of reality, there was no society as such and no space for independent action. Anything that took place had to be seen not as an element of a complicated reality but as a reflection of the basic conflict between the proletariat and its global capitalist oppressors—which meant, in practice, the Soviet leadership and those it deemed hostile at a given moment. People who rescued Jews on a large scale, regardless of their own personal sentiments, were inevitably classified one way or the other. Those who lived under Soviet rule usually understood all of this.

One such person was Tuvia Bielski, a shopkeeper and miller’s son from prewar Poland’s major stretch of forests and swamps in the northeast, in what is today western Belarus. Bielski was a Polish citizen who had performed military service in the Polish army between 1927 and 1929. He first experienced Soviet rule during the German-Soviet invasion of 1939, when eastern Poland was annexed to the Soviet Union. Bielski moved then to the city of Lida and worked for the Soviet trade apparatus. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Bielski tried to defend Jews from mass murder. He and his brothers established a family camp in the Naliboki Forest in early 1942. Like other family camps, this was a Jewish initiative; but, as elsewhere, the leaders had to come to an arrangement with the Soviet partisans. Bielski convinced local Soviet partisans that he was one of theirs, and in late 1942 he and the men who protected the family camp were formally subordinated to Soviet command. The price of this was that Bielski and his men took part in Soviet operations against the Polish Home Army.

The Soviet Union had invaded eastern Poland in 1939 as an ally of Germany and arrived in eastern Poland again in 1944 as an enemy of Germany. Stalin explained to his British and American allies that the Soviet Union would treat the lands gained by alliance with the Germans as if they had always been Soviet. The Soviet forces that arrived in these lands, now for a second time, had amnesia among their ammunition. The previous Soviet invasion of Poland and the associated destruction of the Polish state in 1939 were to be completely forgotten. The arrival of Soviet forces in prewar Polish territory in 1944 was to be a liberation from fascism, nothing less and nothing more.

This powerful myth could admit no objection. Moscow’s actual responsibility for inviting the Nazis into eastern Europe was to be purged from Soviet history, distributed instead among the enemies of the moment, people deemed to be potential opponents of Soviet power. Since the populations that fell under Soviet rule in eastern Poland had been Polish citizens before 1939 and had therefore experienced a Soviet occupation between 1939 and 1941, everyone was in some sense suspect, because their lives contradicted the political line. Bielski himself was a Zionist who named his family camp “Jerusalem.” Zionism was a risky allegiance, and one that he would not have mentioned to his Soviet comrades. Fighting on the same side as the Soviets, against the Germans, was not enough to be on the right side of the story. The fact that Bielski was willing to use his men in actions against Polish forces, whatever he personally thought about it, was likely a necessary demonstration of his loyalty. Bielski had played chess with the local commander of the Home Army. His actions were no doubt dictated by his correct understanding of what the Soviets expected.

Although the Polish army, unlike the Red Army, had never engaged in combat as a German ally, the Soviets had no trouble seeing the Poles as fascists. In the Stalinist world of discourse, a “fascist” was not a Nazi or someone who had helped the Nazis; a “fascist” was someone who was deemed by the Stalinist regime not to be working in the interests of the Soviet Union. As a general rule, the Red Army would allow the Poles to engage in combat against the Germans, and then disarm them and give them a choice between subordination to Soviet command or the Gulag. In some cases, Polish soldiers, and especially Polish officers, were simply murdered. After the Red Army had reached Berlin and defeated the Germans in May 1945, it returned to the forests of northeastern Poland for a separate operation against the remnants of the Home Army. After the clearing of the Augustów Forest in June 1945, some 592 Polish men were executed. About forty thousand Polish men were sent to the Gulag at war’s end, seventeen thousand of them on accusations of having served in the Home Army—which was the largest underground organization in Europe to resist the Nazis from the beginning of the war to the end.