Iron Curtain (26 page)

The Red Army was also directly responsible for the expulsion and deportation of Germans from Romania and Hungary. The persecution of Germans in Hungary was launched by a Soviet order on December 22, 1944, which commanded all Germans in Hungary to report to the front line as forced laborers. Preparation for full-scale deportation began in February 1945, when the Soviet mission of the Allied Control Commission ordered the Hungarian Interior Ministry to “prepare a list of all Germans living in Hungary” (the order that led to the dispute with the Census Bureau and the arrest of its administrators).
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By that time, the NKVD had already presided over the deportations of Germans from Romania as well.
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At the same time, the expulsion of the Germans was undeniably popular in every country where it took place, so much so that local communist parties rapidly took control of it—and eventually took credit for it—wherever they could. The Polish communist party gained much-needed credibility from its leading role in the deportations, even winning some guarded approval from
those on the political right, who had long advocated the creation of a “homogeneous” Polish state—homogeneity being very much an acceptable political goal everywhere in Europe at that time.
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The historian
Stefan Bottoni also reckons that the Romanian communist party’s dual policy toward Romanian minorities—harsh treatment of the Germans combined with efforts to integrate the Hungarian, Slavic, and Jewish communities—helped it win legitimacy too.
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The Czechoslovak communist involvement in the expulsions was even more popular and possibly more important, since it made the party seem mainstream. After all, their policemen were simply upholding a popular government policy with exceptional vigor.
Klement Gottwald, the
Czechoslovak communist party general secretary, even called on the nation to take revenge not just for the recent war but for the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620, when Bohemia had been defeated by the Holy Roman Empire and its mostly German allies: “You must prepare for the final retribution of White Mountain, for the return of the Czech lands to the Czech people. We will expel for good all descendants of the alien German nobility …”
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The Slovak communist party’s regional newspaper used similarly nationalist rhetoric against its Hungarian minority, sometimes endeavoring to give it a Marxist accent: “The rich productive areas of Southern Slovakia whence the Hungarian feudal lords forced the Slovak farmers into the mountains, should be returned to the Slovak people.”
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All the ad hoc institutions set up to facilitate German deportation quickly proved to have other uses as well. In Poland, many of the deportation camps built or adapted to hold German expellees were eventually transformed into camps or prisons for opponents of the regime. In Czechoslovakia, the communist party created a paramilitary organization to assist with the expulsions—the same paramilitary organization that would help the communist party carry out its coup d’état in 1948.
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In a very literal sense, the expulsions thus laid the institutional ground for the imposition of terror that would follow a year or two later.

Because their policemen had organized the expulsions, local communist parties often found themselves in charge fortunately of the redistribution of German property. Apartments, furniture, and other goods suddenly fell into their hands, all of which could be usefully handed out to party supporters. The Germans also left behind farms and factories that could be nationalized immediately, to public applause, and put under the control of Polish or
Czech officials. This mass property seizure helped prepare the psychological ground for popular acceptance of more widespread nationalization, which followed soon afterward. Many had watched the Germans lose their houses and businesses with satisfaction, and felt that it was “fair” to take property from the enemies of the nation. So why should it not be “fair” to take property from the enemies of the working class?

Thanks to the efforts of vocal and powerful organizations of former German expellees, the expulsion of the Germans has become, in recent years, the best-known and most frequently discussed example of ethnic cleansing in postwar Europe. Yet it was only one of many mass ethnic-cleansing projects to be carried out after the war.

At almost exactly the same time as the Germans were being chased out of
Silesia and
Sudetenland, another population exchange was under way on the Polish-Ukrainian border. Curiously, the agreements governing this exchange—the second-largest set of postwar deportations—were signed not between Poland and the Soviet Union but between Poland and the Soviet Republic of Ukraine, an entity that at the time had no sovereignty, especially in matters of international relations. One Ukrainian historian reckons this was intentional. If the other Allies objected to the population transfer—or if the accompanying violence got out of hand—Stalin could always deny legal responsibility: “It wasn’t us, it was the Ukrainians.”
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As Stalin well knew, a full-blown ethnic war was raging in southeastern Poland and western Ukraine at that time. This is not the place for a full discussion of the rights and the wrongs of that particular conflict: suffice it to say that it had its roots in the long-standing economic, religious, and political competition that had been inflamed and distorted by the Nazi occupation and two Soviet invasions, in 1939 and again in 1943–44. Nor was the cause of peace and ethnic harmony in eastern Poland and western Ukraine helped by the partisans of many nationalities—Polish, Jewish, Ukrainian, Soviet—and of many political persuasions who were vying for power at that time either. The violence reached a peak of horror and tragedy in the formerly Polish and now Ukrainian county of
Volhynia in 1943, when Ukrainian partisans aligned to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrayins’ka Povstans’ka Armiya, or UPA) became aware that the Germans were losing and that the Red Army was coming. They thought that the time to establish their own state
might be approaching. The local leader,
Mykola Lebed, called upon his followers to “cleanse the entire revolutionary territory of the Polish population.” In the summer of 1943 his men—many of whom had been witnesses to or participants in the Soviet deportations of Poles in 1939 and the murders of Jews during the
Holocaust—slaughtered some 50,000 Poles, almost all civilians, and chased tens of thousands of others out of Volhynia.
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Those who carried out the massacres that summer had absorbed both Nazi and Soviet lessons, as one Polish teenager’s description of a mass execution in her village well illustrates. She, her sister, her two brothers, and her neighbors had been herded into a forest outside their Volhynian village and told not to move. What followed was tragically similar to many other mass executions that had taken place in the same region only a few months earlier:

The Poles took revenge. A Polish partisan,
Waldemar Lotnik, recalled one of the return attacks that took place that same summer: “They had killed seven men two nights previously; that night we killed sixteen of theirs, including an eight-year-old schoolboy … there were 300 of us in all and we met with no resistance and suffered no casualties. Most of us knew many of the people in
Modryn, so we knew who was a Nazi supporter and who was a Ukrainian nationalist. We picked them out.” A week later, the Ukrainians retaliated, burned a village, raped all the women, and killed anyone unable to escape. The Poles retaliated again, this time in the company of men “so filled
with hatred after losing whole generations of their family in the Ukrainian attacks that they swore that they would take an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and they were as good as their word.”
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Given this recent history, and given that it took time for the reality of the border changes to sink in, it isn’t surprising that both Poles and Ukrainians resisted deportation. Initially the Soviet and Polish sides both agreed that the population exchange would be strictly voluntary, and some on both sides willingly boarded trains to cross the border in the autumn of 1944. But winter came, the bulk of the Red Army moved west for the final battle for Berlin, and volunteers began to dry up. Polish Home Army partisans, believing that the USSR would soon be forced to hand back former Polish territories to Poland—surely another world war was about to break out—continued to conspire in western Ukraine through 1945. “The territory of Western Ukraine will not be kept by the Soviet Union, it was and will be Polish territory,” one Polish inhabitant told an NKVD informer. “America will never let the Soviet Union do that, because at the beginning of the war she declared that Poland would be the same as it was until 1939. And therefore it’s not worth moving [to Poland].”
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Faced with this refusal and aware of the continuing ethnic conflict, Stalin made his policy toward ethnic Poles in the formerly Polish districts of what was now the Soviet Republic of Ukraine harsher.
Nikita Khrushchev, then the
Ukrainian communist party secretary, wrote to Stalin in September 1944, proposing to close down all Polish schools and universities in western Ukraine, to ban all Polish textbooks, and to start rounding up Poles to work on industrial projects elsewhere in the USSR.
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As a result of these policies (as well as of America’s failure to come to the rescue, and the failure of the Third World War to break out) Poles finally did begin to board the transports heading west. Although the NKVD was still finding and arresting members of “White Polish” organizations on Soviet territory as late as February 1946, those seem to have been the last cells of open resistance.
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By October 1946, according to Soviet documents, 812,668 Poles had left Soviet Ukraine for Poland.
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In total, 1,496,000 Poles would leave the USSR for Poland, moving from
Lithuania and
Belarus as well as Ukraine.
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This was a major cultural shift: the Poles leaving Lithuania, western Belarus, and western Ukraine were abandoning towns and cities that had been Polish-speaking for centuries. Many were moving to towns and cities
that had been German-speaking for centuries. The ancient Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów, now called L’viv, left behind its buildings and moved what remained of its books and professors to Breslau, now Wrocław, where it took up residence in what remained of that city’s equally ancient university. Peasants who had farmed the famously fertile “black earth” of Ukraine found themselves relocated to the much sandier soil of
Silesia, which required complex machinery and different farming methods. Sometimes resettled Poles walked into German houses where the tea kettles were still sitting on the stoves or where the previous owners, like Countess
Dönhoff, had not bothered to do the dishes after eating a final meal.

In due course the Polish government would develop an elaborate mythology about this “recovered land” (
ziemie odzyskane
, a phrase that sounds, in Polish, very much like “promised land,”
ziemia obiecana
) and about the Slavic kings who had ruled there in the Middle Ages. But in truth many of those who arrived in the “recovered land” felt like trespassers. Their first harvests failed, as they were unused to the new conditions. They resisted making investments, as they feared the Germans would return. The fact that Poles from all over Poland journeyed to the former German cities in 1945 and 1946 to steal whatever the Germans had left is indicative: it isn’t the way people treat a place that feels like home.

Ukrainians who found themselves on the western, Polish side of the new border were if anything even angrier and more resistant to moving. Having heard stories of the 1932–33 Ukrainian famine, engineered by Stalin in part to quell Ukrainian nationalism, most had no illusions about the Soviet regime. They didn’t want to go to Soviet Ukraine and some who did go there soon tried to return. Throughout 1945 and 1946, partisans from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, as well as the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (Orhanizatsiya Ukrayins’kykh Natsionalistiv, or OUN), attacked the repatriation offices, damaged the roads and train tracks meant to carry deportees, and even burned down villages where repatriated Poles had come from Poland to live.
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Polish communists fought back. In April 1945, the Rzeszów special operational group, including members from the militia, the police, the secret police, and the Polish army, embarked upon a plan of forced deportation, intending to “clean out” the Ukrainians from five Polish counties. Their efforts were embarrassingly unsuccessful. Local support for the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists was so strong that at
one point Rzeszów’s leaders asked their secret police bosses for “extra reconnaissance planes.” Since they couldn’t catch Ukrainians on the ground, they thought they might do better spotting them from the air.
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By 1947, the Polish government was no longer interested in simple ethnic cleansing of the region. They faced a much more fundamental crisis: they had to preserve their own power in southeast Poland. Local administration was impossible, and in a few places the Ukrainian partisans had actually joined forces with the remnants of
WiN, the Polish independence movement.
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In March, Ukrainian partisans provoked a crisis by murdering the Polish deputy defense minister,
General Karol Świerczewski, following a battle with some 150 partisans who had been armed with artillery and machine guns. After that, the Polish communist newspapers practically boiled over with distinctly non-internationalist ethnic outrage, speaking of Ukrainian “hangmen,” “bandits,” “butchers,” and “foreign mercenaries,” accusing them of having murdered a gallant son of the Polish nation with “fascist bullets”
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(though Świerczewski was a long-standing Red Army officer, and one of the internal communiques about his death speaks of “informing his family in Moscow”).
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