Black Earth(53)

Against this backdrop the Soviet NKVD could bring to occupied eastern Poland calm and order of a certain sort. Unlike members of the Einsatzgruppen, who in 1939 were killing for the first time and who did so to create the conditions for a German racial triumph, NKVD officers were experienced administrators of life and death whose task was to establish the basis of a certain model of statehood. NKVD officers, generally Russians and Ukrainians, were transferred in large numbers to the newly conquered eastern Polish territories in late 1939. Over the course of 1940, the majority of arrests and imprisonments in the entire Soviet Union was made in occupied eastern Poland, a tiny percentage of Soviet territory. The typical sentence was eight years in the Gulag; some 8,513 people were sentenced to death in individual cases.

Unlike the Germans, the Soviets had mechanisms for and experience with large-scale deportations. Rather than colonial fantasies, they had time-tested destinations: the vast network of prison camps and special settlements known as the Gulag. Soviet internal colonization was inscribed in tundra and steppe. On December 5, 1939, Stalin ordered preparations for a first wave of deportations, to target the Polish state apparatus and its influential supporters. Some 139,794 people were accordingly forced from their homes onto trains and sent to the Gulag, usually to Soviet Kazakhstan, in February 1940. Polish Jews were deported as capitalists to the Gulag in large numbers in April 1940 and then still larger numbers in June 1940 for expressing the desire to retain their Polish citizenship. In the months after the Soviet invasion, some 292,513 Polish citizens were deported to the Gulag in four major waves, along with perhaps another two hundred thousand in smaller actions or after individual arrests. In these four large actions, almost 60 percent of the victims were Poles (who were about 40 percent of the population in eastern Poland), just over 20 percent Jews (8 percent of the population), about 10 percent Ukrainians (about 35 percent of the population), and about 8 percent Belarusians (8 percent of the population).





One of the individuals who was apprehended and sentenced to the Gulag was a young writer from Kielce, Gustaw Herling-Grudziński. The accusation leveled against him by Soviet authorities was that he had illegally left Poland for Lithuania to fight against the USSR. He politely asked his interrogators to alter the charge to indicate that he had intended leaving Poland to fight against the Germans. They assured him that it amounted to the same thing. Herling later provided one of the most powerful accounts of life in a Soviet concentration camp, where hard-won solitude is the only substitute for impossible freedom, and where a personality integrated under entirely different conditions can be disassembled into its component parts. “There,” in the Gulag, “it has been proved that when the body has reached the limit of its endurance, one cannot, as was once believed, rely on strength of character and conscious recognition of spiritual values; there is nothing, in fact, which man cannot be forced to do by hunger and pain.” Herling became convinced “that a man can only be human under human conditions.”

From the Soviet perspective the most dangerous Polish group was the officer class. It represented a threefold threat: It was the leadership of an enemy army; some of its senior officers were veterans of campaigns against the USSR; and its reserve officers represented the Polish educated classes. The Soviets saw the Polish educated classes as the basis for the Polish political nation. The immediate aim of the arrest and elimination of such people was to make political resistance more difficult. The officers of the Polish army who surrendered or were captured were placed in camps, where they were investigated and interrogated individually. Then NKVD director Lavrentii Beria sent a troika that judged the group collectively. “Each one of them,” wrote Beria to Stalin, “is waiting to be released in order to be able to enter actively into the battle against Soviet power.” He recommended “the supreme punishment—shooting.” Stalin approved.

In April 1940, some 21,892 Polish officers and other Polish citizens were shot by NKVD officers in the Katyn Forest and at four other sites. Because the Polish army was an instrument of social mobility, many of the victims, about forty percent, were from peasant and working-class backgrounds. Because the Polish officer class was multinational, many of the victims were members of national minorities, including Jews. Henryk Strasman, a member of Irgun, was among those killed by a bullet at the base of the neck and buried in a mass grave at Katyn. Wilhelm Engelkreis, a doctor and reserve officer, was also murdered at Katyn. His daughter, writing later from Israel, recalled her childhood despair at the loss of her father. Hironim Brandwajn, a doctor, was murdered at Katyn; his wife, Mira, died two years later in the Warsaw ghetto without knowing what had happened to her husband. Mieczys?aw Proner was a pharmacist and a chemist and a Jew and a Pole and a reserve officer and a combatant. He fought against the Germans in the Polish army, only to be arrested by the Soviets and murdered in the same action. A few months later his mother was ordered to the Warsaw ghetto; two years later she was deported to Treblinka and gassed.