action, instead of manning a weak forward line that was certain to be broken. This, however, would have been ‘at variance with our natural aspiration – and with our military traditions and hopes of becoming a great Power’.
On 29 September the Modlin army north of Warsaw surrendered to the Germans, who took 30,000 prisoners. Organised resistance petered out, the Hel peninsula falling on 1 October; the last recorded engagement took place at Kock, north of Lublin, on the 5th. Hundreds of thousands of men fell into German hands, while many more struggled to flee. Young flier B.J. Solak was moved to encounter an air force colonel sitting beneath a tree, tears pouring down his face. Feliks Lachman was one of many Poles whose thoughts reverted to their recent reading of Gone with the Wind. Fleeing his home, he mused: ‘Desolate as was the Tara estate, Scarlett O’Hara was going through fire and water to the place where she knew she belonged. We had left, once and forever, men and things that formed the social, intellectual and emotional environment of our life. We were moving in a vacuum, aimlessly.’ After an air raid on the city of Krzemieniec, Adam Kruczkiewicz saw in the street a hysterical old Jew, ‘standing over the corpse of his wife…uttering a string of curses and blasphemies, shouting “There is no God! Hitler and the bombs are the only gods! There is no grace and pity in the world!”’
A few Polish cavalry units made good their escape into Hungary, where they surrendered their arms. At the barracks of the 3rd Hungarian Hussar Regiment, exhausted fugitives were moved to find themselves greeted by the unit’s officers, led by the elderly Colonel von Pongratsch, drawn up in full ceremonial uniform. A few days later, when the Poles left to face internment, the bewhiskered veteran embraced each one before bidding them farewell. Such old-world courtesies were welcome, because they had been banished from the pitiless universe of which most Poles now found themselves inhabitants.
Gen. Władysław Anders led his exhausted and depleted unit eastwards to escape the Germans. The men sang as they urged on their emaciated horses amid a throng of refugees and military stragglers. Then they met the Red Army, and Anders sent a liaison officer to the local Soviet headquarters to beg safe passage to the Hungarian border. The Pole was stripped of all he had, and threatened with execution. Russian guns began to shell the Polish positions. Anders ordered his men to split into small groups and find their own way into Hungary. He himself, badly wounded, was captured along with many others. A Russian officer told him complacently: ‘We are now good friends of the Germans. Together we will fight international capitalism. Poland was the tool of England, and she had to perish for that.’
Regina Lempicka was one of hundreds of thousands of Poles arbitrarily arrested by the Russians during the months that followed, then shipped to Kazakhstan. Her grandmother and baby niece died of starvation during their exile, while her soldier brother was shot. The family experience in Russian hands, she wrote later, became ‘a ghastly dream’. As one group of Polish soldiers was marched over a border bridge by Red Army guards, a prisoner said bleakly: ‘We enter Russia. We shall never return.’ Tadeusz
Around 1.5 million Poles, mostly civilians evicted from their homes in the forfeited east of their country during the months that followed, began an ordeal of captivity and starvation in Soviet hands, which cost the lives of some 350,000. Many such families were without menfolk, because these had been summarily dispatched. On 5 March 1940, the Soviet Union’s security chief Lavrenti Beria sent a four-page memorandum to Stalin, proposing the elimination of Polish senior officers and others defined as leaders of their society. Those held in Soviet camps, urged Beria, should be subjected to ‘the use of the highest means of punishment – death by shooting’. Stalin and other members of the Politburo formally approved the recommendation to decapitate Poland. During the weeks that followed, at least 25,000 Poles were murdered by NKVD executioners at various Soviet prisons, each receiving a single bullet in the back of the head. The bodies were then buried in mass graves in the forests around Katyn west of Smolensk, at Minsk and other sites, the largest of which was discovered by the gleeful Nazis in 1943.
Later allegations that the post-1945 Allied war crimes trials represented ‘victors’ justice’ were powerfully reinforced by the fact that no Russian was ever indicted for Katyn. In October 1939 a Pole under interrogation by NKVD officers demanded bitterly: ‘How is it possible for the USSR, a progressive and democratic state, to be on friendly terms with a reactionary Nazi Germany?’ His inquisitor replied coldly: ‘You are wrong. Our policy is at present to be neutral during the struggle between England and Germany. Let them bleed – our power will increase. When they are utterly exhausted, we shall come out as the strong and fresh party, decisive during the last stage of the war.’ This seems a just representation of Stalin’s aspirations.
Hitler, visiting Warsaw on 5 October, gestured to the ruins and addressed accompanying foreign correspondents: ‘Gentlemen, you have seen for yourselves what criminal folly it was to try to defend this city…I only wish that certain statesmen in other countries who seem to want to turn all of Europe into a second Warsaw could have the opportunity to see, as you have, the real meaning of war.’ Warsaw’s Mayor Starzy
Britain’s Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Gen. Sir Edmund Ironside, met Adrian Carlton de Wiart on that officer’s return from Warsaw and snapped dismissively, ‘Well, your Poles haven’t done much.’ This assertion reflected the frustration of British and French hopes that the Polish army would inflict sufficient injury upon the Wehrmacht to alleviate the Western Allies’ need to do so. Carlton de Wiart replied, ‘Let us see what others will do, sir.’ A remarkable number of Poles made the decision to accept exile, separation from everything they knew and loved, in order to continue the fight against Hitler. Some 150,000 made their way westwards, often after memorable odysseys. This was by far the largest voluntary exodus from any of the nations eventually overrun by Germany, and reflected the Poles’ passion to sustain their struggle. Exiles fleeing west were astonished by the warm reception they received in fascist Italy, where a host of people called to them, ‘Bravo Polonia!’
Before quitting his home airfield, fighter instructor Witold Urbanowicz gave a radio and his silk shirts to the woman cleaner of his quarters, his formal evening dress to the porter, then set off by bus with his cadets, down the road to Romania; almost a year later, at the controls of a Hurricane, he became one of the RAF’s foremost aces. Some 30,000 Poles, one-third of them air force pilots and ground crew, reached Britain in 1940, and more came later. One man clutched a wooden propeller, a symbol to which he had clung doggedly through a journey of 3,000 miles. Many others joined the British Army in the Middle East, after their belated release from Stalinist captivity. These men would make a far more notable contribution to the Allied war effort than had Britain to their own.
Poland became the only nation occupied by Hitler in which there was no collaboration between the conquerors and the conquered. The Nazis henceforth classified Poles as slaves, and received in return implacable hatred. As Princess Paul Sapieha crossed the frontier to precarious safety amid a throng of refugees, her small daughter asked, ‘Will there be bombs in Romania?’ The princess answered, ‘No more bombs now. There’s no war here. We’re going where it will be sunny and where children can play wherever they please.’ The child persisted: ‘But when are we going home to Papa?’ Her mother
