Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (34 page)

Early in 1944, Bashta was assigned one of the southern districts of Warsaw, in Mokotov, as its area of concentration. Buildings were allocated as defence points and secretly fortified. Plans were prepared for attacks on eleven locations around which the 2,500 men of the district’s German garrison were distributed. Special attention was paid to the Handweaving School, which lodged a unit of the SS. Anxieties centred on the chronic shortage of weapons. On 1 August 1944, Bashta’s 31 officers and 2,170 other ranks possessed the grand total of 1 heavy machine gun, 12 light machine guns, 187 rifles, 80 sub-machine guns, 348 revolvers, 2 PIAT antitank rockets, 1,750 hand grenades, and 120kg (265 lb) of explosives. One might have thought that this was no arsenal with which to confront the Wehrmacht.
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In the winter of 1939–40, a number of Polish military units had refused both to lay down their arms and to join the clandestine movement. In short, they fought on in the open. In the German Zone, for example, Maj. ‘Hubal’ kept a group of 200 cavalrymen in the field and fought several pitched battles before being hunted down by superior German forces. He was by no means alone. The survivors of his group only subordinated themselves to the Resistance after nine months of defiant adventures.
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In the Soviet Zone, similar units headed for the forests and the marshes, where they fought off the dragnets of the Red Army and the NKVD for many months. One such group was headed by Capt. ‘Lightning’, who was wounded and captured by the NKVD in a skirmish on 15 March 1941.
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At the start of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, Red Army reports mentioned trouble with ‘Polish bandits’.

Generally speaking, the Resistance found it more difficult to challenge the NKVD than the SS and the Gestapo, and for several sound reasons. First, the NKVD were extremely well prepared. They moved into Poland bringing detailed lists of hundreds of thousands of people to be summarily arrested. In this way, they paralysed many parts of the potential Resistance movement before it could be organized. Second, they took immediate precautions to deny any rebels the basic means of survival. They took control of all the major forests in eastern Poland, for example, replacing all foresters and gamekeepers with their own personnel and thereby stopping the Resistance from setting up bases. Third, they received important assistance from various sections of the local population. On this last point, the contrast with conditions on the German Zone was marked. The German invaders received very little cooperation from any Polish citizens with the sole exception of the sizeable German minority in towns such as Bielsko or Lodz. Pictures which show the Wehrmacht being welcomed by cheering crowds in Lodz, for example, don’t always mention the fact that the crowds as well as the soldiers were German.
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Yet the Soviet invaders received a warm welcome, notably from the poorer elements of the Byelorussian and Ukrainian peasantry, who hoped to gain materially, and from a vociferous section of the Jewish population. Soviet communism did not appeal to the majority of any ethnic group. But its spokesmen made clear that all Poles, all religious leaders, all commercial and professional people, all non-Communist politicians, and all land-or property-owners were its enemies. And it did prove attractive to those who believed the claim that it had come to save them from fascism.

The Jewish response to the Soviet invasion is best described by Jewish witnesses and by Jewish scholars:

Similar situations arose in larger places. For example, in the district of Pinsk, the chief Polish police inspector turned the town over to the local Jews before he fled:

The Polish Government abroad was specially interested in receiving accurate information on conditions and attitudes in their occupied country. To this end, one of their most famous Underground couriers, Karski, was dispatched from France early in 1940; and with extraordinary enterprise managed to see many things for himself. Captured and tortured by the Gestapo, he was rescued by the Underground, and helped to fulfil his mission. His report was personally delivered to the Premier and the President and subsequently to the British Foreign Minister, to the United Nations War Crimes Commission, and to the US President himself. It had a separate chapter on ‘The Jews’; and a separate subsection on Polish– Jewish relations in the Soviet Zone. Here he maintained a carefully even-handed position. He admitted that relations were ‘strained’. ‘It is the general opinion’, he wrote, ‘that the Jews have betrayed Poland . . . that they are fundamentally Communist, and that they welcomed the Bolsheviks with banners unfurled.’
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At the same time, he weighed these opinions in the light of established facts. ‘In the majority of cities, the Jews organized a welcome for the Bolsheviks with red roses, with speeches and declarations . . . [they] often denounced Poles, nationalist students, and political activists . . . It has to be admitted that these incidents are frequent, more frequent in fact than those which would indicate loyalty to the Republic.’
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Karski went on to contrast the conduct of Communist and proletarian Jews with that of educated and prosperous Jews who usually thought of Poland with sympathy. According to a recent analyst, he conspicuously
rejected the criterion of symmetry between Jewish anti-Polonism and Polish anti-Semitism.
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Western readers, who are so used to hearing that Jews were uniquely victimized in wartime Poland (as they certainly were under Nazi rule), need to realize that Jews were not necessarily the most vulnerable group in the Soviet Zone. What is more, one should not mince words about the duties which Soviet sympathizers and Soviet-appointed policemen and militia were required to perform. They were expected to denounce ‘hostile elements’ to the NKVD, to help expel houseowners from their property and peasants from their farms, to assist in the mass arrests and deportations, and to combat the Resistance. These were activities which inevitably gave all participants a bad name, and which made members of the Resistance movement justifiably wary. They also meant that when eastern Poland was evacuated by the Soviets during Operation Barbarossa in 1941, the ZWZ was obliged to restart its decimated organization virtually from scratch for a second time.

As for Karski, he freely admitted that his most chilling moment came when he tried to thank his Underground rescuers. ‘Don’t be too grateful to us,’ one of them said. ‘We had two orders concerning you. The first was to do anything in our power to help you escape. The second was to shoot you if we failed.’
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Adversity, in fact, was the challenge on which Polish resisters thrived. For they belonged to a hard school which had little in common with the sort of comfortable assumptions on which most British or American soldiers could rely. They had no home base to which they could safely withdraw. They could not count on technical superiority or on cautious, methodical strategy, still less on the luxury of fighting a war without sustaining heavy losses. Theirs was the chosen path of risk, loneliness, sacrifice, and ridicule, even from one’s own. Like the man who had inspired the army from which the movement’s organizers were drawn, they had been taught to value spiritual mastery over everything. ‘Victory’, the Marshal had said, ‘was to suffer defeat but not to surrender’. This was no easy advice, but it was open to all patriots irrespective of race, religion, or descent:

The Legions stand for a soldier’s pride
The Legions stand for a martyr’s fate
The Legions stand for a beggar’s song
The Legions stand for a desperado’s death
We are the First Brigade.
A regiment of rapid fire.
We’ve put our lives at stake.
We’ve willed our fate.
We’ve cast ourselves on the pyre.
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In spirit, the Home Army was the heir to Pilsudski’s Legions in the previous generation. Their ideals inspired the men and women who formed the core of the Polish Underground from 1939 onwards. They were the same ideals that fired the soldiers whose Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewish graves fill the hillside cemetery at Monte Cassino.

The scouting movement, which began life in 1908 in England, was specially welcome after the First World War in the newly independent countries of East Central Europe. Unlike the various youth movements that existed before 1914, it had international connections, was free from state control, and introduced a completely new ethos combining outdoor adventure with patriotic pride and religious morality. In Poland as elsewhere, it was equally popular among the boys and girls, whose scout and guide troops were typically organized in secondary schools or parish halls. After twenty years of development, a strong national organization was established in Warsaw in the shape of the national Scouting Union. Thanks, apparently, to their smart light-grey uniforms, the members of the movement were universally known as the
Szare Szeregi
, the ‘Grey Ranks’. It was an appropriate name for an influential section of society, which was to enter the Underground conspiracy without hesitation.

The Grey Ranks showed their mettle as soon as the war began. They set up auxiliary fire and ambulance services in Warsaw, Poznan, and other cities, and helped the authorities to cope with the effects of German bombing. When Poznan fell, a large body of scouts left with the retreating army and marched the 270km (170 miles) to Warsaw. In this way, the Posnanians joined their Varsovian colleagues, and played a significant role in many of the subsequent operations. On 27 September 1939 –
i.e.
on the same day that the Victory Service was founded – a meeting established a parallel, clandestine organization that put itself at the disposal of the Underground authorities. One of the first enterprises, undertaken with the regional Scout committee in Cracow, was to organize a regular courier
link over the southern mountains to Hungary and thence to the outside world. This was the route whereby Karski was brought in.

At first, the intention was to accept volunteers only above the age of seventeen. But the pressures from expanding tasks, and the pleas of the youngsters, led to the formation of a three-layer structure. The reception group took boys and girls of twelve to fourteen years, the training schools took recruits of fifteen to seventeen years, and the senior battle groups were limited to adults over eighteen. The ‘scholars’ were confined to non-military operations such as minor sabotage or the Underground postal service. The battle groups came to be counted amongst the foremost units of the Home Army. The sororial organization of senior guides trained girls of seventeen or more as nurses, liaison officers, radio operators, cryptographers, and intelligence agents. Unlike their pre-war civilian predecessors, the wartime Grey Ranks became paramilitaries. But their motto did not change: it was ‘Be Prepared’.

The origins of the Battle Group Parasol lie in the mass of scouting circles in wartime Warsaw, which in the early days were constantly merging and splitting and which were constantly changing their cryptonyms. But as the Warsaw Standard of the scouting movement evolved, it became closely associated with the K-Div. or ‘Diversionary Section’ of the Home Army, and its original educational functions were gradually transformed into military ones. In June 1943, following a series of nasty clashes with the Gestapo, a discussion was held in the house of the historian Professor H., and the decision was taken to form a special unit of armed youths which would fight the German police with their own methods. Its speciality was the assassination of Nazi officials. Its name was Agat,
i.e.
‘Anti-Gestapo’, and its commander, Maj. ‘Plough’, was a reserve army officer and one of the ‘dark and silent’. Over the next twelve months, it grew from a company to a battalion; and it changed its name twice, from Agat to Pegasus, and from Pegasus to Parasol.
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Its brother organization, Zoshka, grew out of a parallel scouting unit, which specialized in springing prisoners of the Gestapo from jail, and which took its name from the pseudonym of its legendary leader, killed during an attack on a German guard post in September 1943.

Pre-war Poland did not possess the vicious oppressive regime which its detractors have since thought fit to invent. In terms of the rule of law,
human rights and the treatment of minorities, it was categorically superior to the mass-murdering totalitarian systems that grew up on either side in Germany and in the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, it had several manifest blemishes. Even by sympathetic critics, it was variously described either as an ‘ailing democracy’ or as ‘an authoritarian dictatorship-in-the-making’. The model Constitution of 1921, which had been largely inspired by France’s Third Republic, broke down after only five years and was violated by a military coup whose leaders were intent on excluding a right-wing nationalist Government at all cost. Xenophobia was defeated by a dubiously anti-democratic manoeuvre. The
Sanacja
regime, or ‘Government of Political Healing’, which resulted, did not enjoy universal support. It did not destroy the elected Parliamentary or democratic elections, but it certainly set out to manipulate them. In 1930 and again in 1936, it created a Government-backed electoral bloc, which put the traditional democratic parties at a disadvantage. In 1931, it organized a series of political trials, which cast its opponents as enemies; and in 1936, it introduced a modified constitution with marked authoritarian features. This was no ‘one-party state’. But it wasn’t a perfectly happy democracy either. Its policies towards the nationalities, particularly the brutal pacification of the restive Ukrainian peasantry, left much to be desired.