in Germany as slave laborers is hard to estimate, but historians suggest that close to 3 million of them were at some point employed in the German war economy.18
Political prisoners and prisoners in concentration camps constituted another large group of people deported to Germany from Polish lands. Arrests and deportations were often elements of mass actions against the Polish population, including those in November 1939 and the mass deportations to concentration camps that took place in 1942 and 1943. Until the end of the war, both civilians and members of the Polish underground fell victim to this manifestation of Nazi terror. Victor Bik, for example, was arrested in January 1944, at the train station in Częstochowa while seeing off a friend. For the next three weeks he was brutally interrogated and tortured at Gestapo headquarters and then transported to the concentration camp in Gross-Rosen. “As soon as our transport arrived,” he remembered later, “even before the door of the boxcar opened, one could hear barking dogs and loud ‘barking’ commands of waiting SS guards, who marched us to the camp, about two miles from the railroad station.” What followed was his “induction to the existence in the concentration camp”:
About 250 of us were assembled to the big hall. . . . For the last time I heard my name before becoming just a number. This was call to shower room or should I say to another form of torture station. Stripped of everything, each of us underwent the assembly kind of processing, executed by the inmates under ever present supervision of SS guards. First step cutting hair . . . and of course, shaving of all private parts. No change of razor blade, who knows for how many victims. I received rather harsh treatment because I was perceived as “grosse bandite” on account of my blue and black back and buttocks from torture by Gestapo the day before. Next, actual shower consisting of a burst of very hot water followed by a burst of ice cold water and naked step outside and wait in the formation by five until column of one hundred was moved to the next barrack. It was winter: February 1944.19
In the fall of 1944, after the collapse of the Warsaw Uprising, about sixty-eight thousand Poles from Warsaw were placed in German death camps. Among them was Tadeusz Gubala, a soldier of the Home Army, who, by a lucky accident, was captured in a group of civilians. He was transported to Bergen-Belsen and made to work together with other prisoners on the railway in Lehrte during frequent bombing raids by the approaching Allies.20 Two other young powstańcy (insurgents), Jerzy Bigosiński and Tadeusz G., surrendered along with thousands of other soldiers of the Home Army after the uprising and were imprisoned in POW camps in Fallingsbostel and Sandbostel, respectively. They were only fifteen and sixteen years old, and throughout the war they had actively served in the Szare Szeregi and the AK resistance.21
Including those Poles who served out sentences in German prisons, the total number of Polish citizens deported to concentration camps in Germany and Austria was greater than two hundred thousand. In the last months of the war, the retreating Germans imposed even more inhuman conditions and treatment on tens of thousands of Polish prisoners, who were either immediately killed or transported (often on foot or in overcrowded cattle cars) to the territory of Germany, with the intention to eliminate eyewitnesses of Nazi terror.22
A special category of people forced to leave Poland as a result of the Nazi occupation were those whom the German authorities had decided to subject to the Germanization process. They included families from the ethnically mixed territories of Silesia, Pomerania, and Kashubia, who were transported to the Reich and resettled under special supervision, far from any Polish slave labor communities. Some seven thousand young Polish girls were selected for Germanization and placed in German homes between 1941 and 1942. Finally, the Germans deported about two hundred thousand Polish children to the Reich with the intention of Germanizing them.23
The living and working conditions for the Polish population in Germany differed. Most Oflagen introduced harsh discipline and very limited food rations; the Oflag in Sandbostel became particularly famous for its lack of food and the near starvation of the prisoners. Polish officers had only very restricted religious privileges, but, in compliance with the 1929 Geneva convention, they were allowed to develop limited forms of culture and education, such as the publication of internal bulletins and the establishment of libraries, amateur drama groups, sports teams, or educational courses. The clandestine resistance movement led mainly by the Home Army penetrated many Oflagen, which resulted in the creation of small underground organizations.24
Slave laborers faced much hardship and oppression. Most were hungry and mistreated on a daily basis, deprived of any rights or protection. They worked to exhaustion and experienced repeated physical punishment and abuse. Laborers could not marry, worship freely, establish schools, travel, or engage in any economic activity. Arbitrary German laws subjected them to public execution for many transgressions, including sexual relationships with Germans. The sharpest measure of cruelty was the separation of infants born to Polish women workers in order to Germanize them or to kill the weaker ones through lethal injection. The same fate also awaited seriously ill adult individuals. About one hundred forty thousand slave laborers from Polish lands and several thousand newborns perished in Germany during the war; many of those who survived remained either ill or crippled for the rest of their lives.25
Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Flossenburg, Gross-Rosen, Mauthausen, Neuengamme, Ravensbrück, and Sachsenhausen were among the largest concentration camps in Germany and Austria, and held more than two hundred thousand persons born in Poland. The inhuman treatment and cruelty that Holocaust victims experienced in the concentration camps defy imagination. Systematic extermination of the prisoners was intertwined with their unscrupulous use in the German war economy, without any regard for human life. Despite those brutal conditions, some prisoners created small secret organizations within the camps, specializing in passing information and keeping up the spirits of their fellow prisoners. Others engaged in the so-called szkoła chodzona (walking school), when university professors and other teachers orally passed on their knowledge to students during walks.26
Civilian refugees also fled Poland through various channels. The majority of those persons who were temporarily out of country at the outbreak of the war remained abroad. A large number of refugees followed the retreating Polish army and government officials to Romania and Hungary in September 1939. Some—a majority of them young men determined to join Polish military forces in the West—managed to leave occupied Poland through the so-called green border, that is, by illegally crossing into Romania and Hungary. Finally, a small number of civilians were able to leave the country at the very outset of the occupation, or even later, with false passports.27
In order to survive, civilian refugees sought any available jobs. Young men usually joined the Polish army in the West; some Poles in France and Spain established very successful intelligence networks, working for the Allies; and others joined foreign resistance movements, for example, in France, Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, and Albania. Others worked for different units of the Polish government in exile, for the press, or in schools. Professionals and artists tried to continue their occupations. For example, Irena Koprowska, a Polish physician, found temporary employment as a doctor in an insane asylum in France. Irena Lorentowicz, a painter, interior decorator, and stage designer who had been on a scholarship in Paris at the outbreak of the war, worked in Portugal, painting furniture for wealthy families. Others accepted any available jobs, used family resources salvaged from Poland, and called on friends and business connections in European countries.28 Many of the Polish refugees in western Europe fled before the advancing German army and immigrated to Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Uruguay. For some, the South American countries became a permanent home; a large group of them, however, gradually arrived in the United States.
Wherever a Polish exile community took shape, the refugees strove to establish some kind of organization that included cultural and political institutions, a press, book publishing, and schools. In Hungary, Romania, France, Switzerland, and Great Britain, the refugees published newspapers and literary journals, created theater groups, revived political parties, and taught Polish children and youth in networks of elementary and high schools.29
