Category Archives: USSR

by | 22 December 2025 · 9:45 pm

Prominenten, VIP Nazi Hostages

From Victory ’45: The End of the War in Eight Surrenders, by James Holland and Al Murray (Grove Atlantic, 2025), Kindle pp. 67-68:

Kaltenbrunner, meanwhile, had also decided that hostages might offer a little bit of leverage in these days of the crumbling Third Reich. Throughout Germany were a number of high-profile prisoners, Prominenten, as they were termed. At the beginning of April Kaltenbrunner drew up a list of 139 men, women and children and ordered them all to be brought together. They were of seventeen different nationalities: there were Germans, French, British, Soviets, Czechs, Danish, Italians, Hungarians and even Greeks among them. They included the former French Prime Minister, Léon Blum, Admiral Miklós Horthy of Hungary, Colonel ‘Mad Jack’ Churchill, a British Commando officer, and even General Franz Halder, the former Chief of Staff of the German Army and the architect of the Blitzkrieg in the west back in 1940. General Georg Thomas, the former head of the Economic Department of the OKW, was also on the list, as were a number of those now categorized as Sippenhaft – family members of disgraced Germans, such as the wife and children of Claus von Stauffenberg, the man who had attempted to assassinate Hitler the previous July.

It was an astonishingly eclectic bunch of VIP prisoners, now brought together by Kaltenbrunner. They were to be sent first to Innsbruck and from there to South Tyrol, where they would be hidden away in a remote mountain resort and guarded by the SS. And from there they could be used as a bargaining chip under the threat of execution, which, if necessary, Kaltenbrunner fully intended to carry out.

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Filed under Britain, France, Germany, Hungary, military, USSR, war

by | 22 December 2025 · 8:56 pm

Path to Unconditional Surrender

From Victory ’45: The End of the War in Eight Surrenders, by James Holland and Al Murray (Grove Atlantic, 2025), Kindle pp. 9-12:

Roosevelt’s call for unconditional surrender accepted the challenge that Hitler now offered the world. It acknowledged that there could be no negotiating with the Nazis. Ten years of the Nazi regime had shown that with crystal clarity: the bad faith that Hitler had exhibited in the 1930s, blazing his way through the Versailles settlement while the West dithered about his intentions; his betrayal of his Soviet ally; the total disregard for human life, for institutions, the repression of so many, and the grotesque ideology that was the evil counterpoint to the ideals Roosevelt had proposed in the Atlantic Charter. Everything Hitler and the Nazis had done and stood for told Roosevelt there could be only one outcome in this war: the complete, total and unconditional surrender of Germany. The irony was that within Nazism, a core aim, a bitter principle, was to avoid any repetition of the end of the First World War. The myth of betrayal, the so-called ‘stab in the back’ of 1918, could never be allowed to gestate and fester in Germany again. Unconditional surrender would ensure that it did not, that this time the war would come to the centre of the Reich, to Berlin, to the Reichstag, to within mortar range of the Führerbunker; that however the Allies chose to fight following the Casablanca Conference, the end of this war would be nothing like 1918. The generals would not be allowed to blame politicians, capitalists and unseen dark forces such as religious minorities. Ulysses S. Grant’s defeat of the Confederacy forces at Donelson in 1862 would come to the Brandenburg Gates.

The announcement that the Allies would be pursuing unconditional surrender was made by President Roosevelt at Casablanca without prior consultation on the morning of 24 January. The President, sat beside the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, on the lawn of his villa, smiled benignly for the fifty pressmen assembled cross-legged like schoolchildren before them, waiting for their remarks at the conclusion of the ten-day conference. Roosevelt spoke first, reading from notes. ‘The elimination of German, Japanese and Italian war power’, he said in his precise, patrician and clipped East Coast accent, ‘means the unconditional surrender by Germany, Italy, and Japan.’ He paused for a brief moment then added a caveat. ‘That does not mean the destruction of the population of Germany, Italy or Japan,’ he continued, ‘but it does mean the destruction of the philosophies in those countries which are based on conquest and the subjugation of other people.’

Roosevelt later claimed that the phrase had just ‘popped into my mind’; Churchill was certainly wrong-footed by it, although he immediately supported the President. Yet while the announcement of this war-changing policy might have been unrehearsed, the two men had discussed it beforehand; Churchill had even written a long memo to the British War Cabinet four days earlier in which he specifically told them he and Roosevelt were anxious to announce their intention of pursuing unconditional surrender. FDR had also discussed the issue in Washington ahead of the conference. The President’s son, Elliott, even recalled Churchill making a toast to ‘unconditional surrender’ at a dinner ahead of the press conference that Sunday. Sitting there, in the sunshine of that warm January day in Morocco, Roosevelt may have told the press that his policy was the same as General Grant’s at Appomattox in 1865, but he was far from being the only person in the American establishment familiar with Civil War history, and besides he had misremembered Grant’s victory at Donelson.

All of this was neither here nor there, of course. The world now knew that the Allies would only end the war against the Axis Powers when they accepted unconditional surrender. Arguments raged at the time and have done so ever since about whether such a policy was too rigid and whether, ultimately, it extended the war longer than necessary. But by demanding unconditional surrender the Allies were offering moral clarity in clear political terms; it forged the Allies in agreement, and spared them the complications that trying to treat with Vichy France had thrown up. It was definitive yet at the same time vague: a plain demand that was short on detail but heavy with intent. Unlike the Fourteen Points President Woodrow Wilson had proposed back in 1919 – which had come to little – there were no matters of argument to engage with and twist, no promises made that could be misinterpreted or regurgitated at a later date. The Germans, the Japanese and the Italians must surrender, without any conditions whatsoever.

Then the Allies would dictate terms.

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Filed under Britain, Germany, military, U.S., USSR, war

by | 25 November 2025 · 3:37 am

Poland to Manchuria and Back, 1940s

My latest compilation from Culture.pl has a long story about a Polish boy who went to Manchuria and back during the 1940s: Untold WWII Stories: A Boy’s Wartime Journey from Poland to Manchuria & Back. Here are a few excerpts:

Jerzy Sikora’s childhood was a whirlwind of war and exile. His father, a spy, vanished; his mother died, leaving him alone in Manchuria with his young sister. Arrest, hunger and betrayal shadowed his early years until an American soldier plucked him from chaos, setting him on a path back to Poland. But survival was just the beginning – reunion, loss and resilience would define the rest.

…

The story might have begun in 1936, when I was born, but let’s start with 1939, when my parents and I fled east after the war erupted. My mother (1909–1946) and my father (1907–1957) traveled as far as Busk, a town 40 kilometres east of Lviv. It was there that I was baptized, most likely in the Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady of the Rosary and St. Stanislaus. But our time together was short. On 15 September 1939, we were forced to separate from my father. The Polish military gave the order – it must have been in response to the Soviet invasion of Poland from the east. My mother and I suddenly found ourselves trapped in Soviet-occupied territory. Under the cover of darkness, we made a daring crossing of the Bug River, fleeing westward. After a long and arduous journey, we reached Siedlce, where fate intervened. By sheer chance, we encountered my uncle; with him, we made our way back to Warsaw.

…

Then, in early 1940, a Japanese man appeared at our door. Perhaps he was connected to the Japanese Embassy – I will never know for sure. But he carried something that would change everything: a letter from my father. In it, he begged my mother to apply for an official passport from the German occupation authorities to seek permission to leave for Japan. Somehow, money was arranged – perhaps through the Japanese messenger – enough to fund our journey. And so, in the spring of that year, we left Nazi-occupied Poland. Our escape was surreal – Berlin, Rome, Naples. We traveled by train, crossing hostile territory, until finally, we boarded a ship – the Hakozaki Maru. The journey carried us through the Suez Canal, across the Indian Ocean, at last reaching Japan, where we reunited with my father.

Our time in Japan was brief. Before long, we set sail once again, this time bound for Manchuria, eventually arriving in Changchun (then known as Hsinking). We settled in a small, single-story house with a garden, in a neighbourhood inhabited primarily by Japanese families in the northern part of the city. I spent my days playing with the local children – Japanese boys and girls from the neighbourhood. I picked up enough of their language to communicate with them easily. Childhood, even in the shadow of war, had its moments of normalcy.

…

On 29 January 1942, my sister, Anna Elżbieta, was born. At first, I barely registered her presence in my life. It wasn’t until nearly a year later that I truly ‘noticed’ her – when she sat down on our cat, and the cat did nothing. I was stunned. My own relationship with that cat had been nothing but claws and scratches. Whenever I tried to pet it, it defended itself fiercely. And yet, when Anna plopped down on top of it, the cat didn’t protest at all. Life changed again around that time. We moved into a larger, multi-story building, closer to the city centre. My father had an office on the upper floor, a space that was strictly off-limits to me. And yet, of course, that only made it more tempting. I snuck in a few times. Inside, I found kind, polite Japanese adults, but nothing particularly exciting. No grand mysteries, no hidden treasures – just stacks of paper and colourful pencils.

…

One day, I found myself witnessing a remarkable event: the last emperor of China, Puyi, being driven through the city. A convoy of cars made its way through the streets, and what struck me most was not the sight of the emperor himself but the fear that surrounded him. Fifty metres from the road, policemen blocked all movement. No one was allowed to approach. Worse still, we were ordered to turn our backs to the procession. No one was to look directly at him. One man hesitated – perhaps he didn’t obey quickly enough. A policeman slapped him across the face. I managed to sneak a glance. And what did I see? Just a few cars. That was all. And yet, the air was thick with tension, as if a single wrong move could change everything.

…

Not far from where we lived stood a Franciscan convent complex, surrounded by a high, solid wall. It wasn’t just a convent – inside, there was a chapel, a shelter for the poor, a small hospital, a school with a boarding house for girls and even a farm with cows and pigs. In the fall of 1945, I was admitted to the school as an exception – the only boy in an all-girl class.

Once again, I was faced with the challenge of forming letters into words – but this time, in English. I still resisted it, just as I had with Polish. Far more interesting were the mandolin lessons and drawing classes, especially because the drawing teacher was not a nun. She was a young woman, different from the others. I still remember how patient and kind she was, guiding my hand as I struggled to draw a pear. She showed me how to use three colours – yellow, red, and green – to make it look real. Her name was Larysa Ogienko. At the time, I knew little about her. Only later did I learn that she was the daughter of a White Army officer who had fled Russia during the October Revolution. I didn’t know it yet, but she would play a crucial role in my survival in China after I lost my parents.

The end of World War II was not a sudden event for me – it was a slow fading of the world I had known. The Japanese gradually disappeared from our surroundings. My father stopped going to work. I remember him sitting at home, carving wooden clogs. Was he trying to earn money? I’m not sure. Despite the massive changes happening around us, I didn’t sense hostility from the local Chinese. Life seemed to go on. And then, one day, everything changed.

…

It was the fall of 1945. I was playing outside in a courtyard with my friends, completely unaware of what was about to happen. Suddenly, my mother came running. There were tears in her eyes as she hugged me tightly. ‘Your father’s been arrested.’ I didn’t understand. He was often away from home – wasn’t this just another one of those times? The drama of the moment blurred even more the next day, when my father returned – escorted by two Soviet officers in uniform. They weren’t aggressive. They didn’t shout. They were calm, formal. They told me they had brought my father so I could say goodbye. I still didn’t grasp what that meant. At that age, I admired soldiers. Their uniforms, their posture – they seemed powerful, fascinating. I didn’t realize then that I could be seeing my father for the last time.

…

By then, it was warm outside – probably March or April 1946. Anna and I had regained consciousness in the hospital. But we were weak, frail and starving. I couldn’t even stand. The first time I tried to get up, I collapsed. My legs wouldn’t hold me. I could only crawl.

We were given very little food – they said that after typhoid fever, the body couldn’t handle large meals. But hunger doesn’t care about medical explanations. It consumes you. It burns inside you. It’s a feeling you never forget for the rest of your life. And then – something unexpected happened. One day, a visitor arrived at the hospital – Larysa Ogienko, my former drawing teacher. She was around 30 years old, with golden hair. She wasn’t just a friendly face – she had brought food. And more than that – she fed us. I asked about my mother, but she didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. Because what she did next saved our lives. After we were discharged from the hospital, she took us both into her home.

Larysa lived with her mother, whom I would soon call Babuszka [grandmother in Russian, AD]. She was without a doubt the most caring, loving person – and in the near future, she would become our only protector.

…

Then, one day, an American soldier arrived at Larysa’s home. His name was Henry, and he asked me a single question: ‘Would you like to go to Poland?’

The answer was obvious. I would go anywhere – as long as it meant escaping. At that time, a few Americans had arrived in Changchun. The city had briefly been retaken by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army, pushing back Mao Zedong’s forces. Henry and others like him were working with UNRRA (the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) and the International Red Cross, searching for people who wanted to be repatriated from China. Everything happened quickly. Mao’s troops were preparing to encircle the city again, and it was only a matter of time before they stormed back in. Among the few belongings I managed to take with me was my father’s collection of postage stamps, acquired during his time in Manchuria.

In May 1947, we boarded a DC-10 aircraft with Major Henry, departing from Nanking (Nanjing). We spent a few days there, though I learned only later that it was in Nanking that the Polish consul had issued us passports. I still have mine to this day. It was also there, on a beach by the Chinese sea, that I tasted something extraordinary for the first time – an ice-cold Coca-Cola. The next flight took us to Shanghai, and I quickly discovered that early aircraft had a terrifying flaw – whenever they hit thinner air, they would suddenly drop, plummeting before stabilizing again.

The feeling was horrible, but after a few days of travel, we grew attached to Henry. And then – another unexpected separation. In Shanghai, Henry was not allowed to continue with us. Instead, we were placed in the care of another American – Erling Logan. At first, I felt uneasy, even afraid. Henry had been our guardian, our protector – who was this stranger? But the fear didn’t last long. Erling Logan wasn’t just kind and protective – in some ways, he reminded me of my father. Even his age was similar.

We stayed with Erling in a luxurious hotel, a stark contrast to everything I had known. It was blisteringly hot, and to our surprise, taking a hot bath turned out to be the best way to cool down. For the first time in a long while, I felt safe.

…

In June 1947, we boarded the SS Marine Lynx – our final passage out of China. Our cabin housed four people: me, Anna, a German woman, and her young child. Meanwhile, Erling Logan was in charge of the entire transport of about 700 emigrants to Europe. We saw him only occasionally, as he was busy overseeing the journey. The voyage from Shanghai to Naples, Italy, lasted nearly two months, but despite its length, it was anything but boring. The sailors created a small pool for the children, stretching canvas to form a makeshift basin where we could splash and cool off.

…

The last leg of our journey took us by train to Warsaw, arriving at the Main Railway Station. From there, we rode in a horse-drawn carriage to Hotel Polonia, where we spent our final night together with Erling. The next morning, on 7 September 1947, we traveled to Anin, to the home of my aunt – my father’s sister. Our return to Poland was even mentioned in the newspaper Wieczór (Evening). And then – it was time to say goodbye to Erling. I was not happy about it. Once again, I felt that I was being handed off like an object, given away to someone I barely knew. I only learned many years later that Erling wanted to adopt us. He had no children of his own and had grown deeply attached to Anna and me. But to make it official, he needed my aunt’s permission. And she refused. At the time, I thought I was saying goodbye to Erling forever. There was no reason to believe our paths would ever cross again. And for years, with no word from him, rumours even surfaced that he had died during the Korean War.

After returning to Poland, I found myself in the home of my extended family. We lived in a modest apartment with my aunt and uncle, Irena and Wacław, along with their four children – Hanna (born 1934), Jan (1936), Tadeusz (born 1945) and Marek (born 1946). Also living with us was Aunt Wilunia (my grandmother’s sister) and her daughter. For a child, adaptation is instinctive. The will to survive is powerful, and at a young age, the mind is still flexible. Within a few weeks, I regained my ability to speak Polish, and soon I began making new friends.

…

In early spring of 1954, some family friends in Anin mentioned that they had received a letter from my father. I was stunned.

Why had they not shown us the letter? It seemed impossible that my father could be alive. Then, about a month later, a phone call came from the local post office. I picked up the receiver. And on the other end, I heard my father’s voice. He asked for directions to where we lived, and we arranged to meet at the crossroads near our house.

And just like that, it happened. He walked toward us as we approached from the opposite direction. He was thin, unshaven and wore a quilted jacket and trousers. His entire life’s belongings were packed in a bundle slung over his back. It’s impossible to describe the feeling of that moment. It was so unreal that none of us could fully comprehend it at first. For nearly eight years, my father had no idea whether we were alive. For nearly eight years, we had no idea that he was alive.

…

I was fortunate to preserve my father’s handwritten biography, written by him in 1954. From this document, I was able to reconstruct key moments of his life.

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Filed under China, Germany, Japan, language, migration, military, Poland, U.S., USSR, war

by | 6 November 2025 · 10:03 pm

Escaping Russia to Riga, 1921

From Kosciuszko, We Are Here!: American Pilots of the Kosciuszko Squadron in Defense of Poland, 1919-1921, by Janusz Cisek (McFarland, 2025), Kindle Loc. 2673ff.

The last prison that Cooper was in was Vladykino. Here with two Polish officers he decided to escape. This time he succeeded. In a way he was forced to escape by his Polish counterparts. In his report filed after reaching Warsaw, he wrote that the two Polish prisoners managed to brake into the prison office in order to forge a few documents for the escape. At this point there was no return. Cooper was very well aware that not only the two direct perpetrators might be shot dead on the spot. He, after all, was considered to be a dangerous anti-revolutionary and enemy of the people. The escape must have happened at the beginning of March, 1921.

Since Cooper himself did not know Russian, he pretended to be mute, and on the long march from Moscow to the Latvian border, Lt. Stanisław Sokołowski and Corporal Stanisław Zalewski facilitated everything for him. They marched in the direction of Wielkie Łuki with Latvia as their general destination, which was then, as through the entire inter-war period, the most efficient crossing point between the workers’ paradise and the outside world. It was through this very border that Boris Savinkov, the famous terrorist, returned to Russia, lured by the mirage of the great anti–Bolshevik conspiracy. Food was obtained by exchanging the clothes they had received in the Amcross packages. The escapees brushed with arrest several times. They were, after all, moving across completely unknown territory with neither a compass nor a map. Cooper recalled that he spent one night up to his neck in water. In any case in an expedition covering over 800 kilometers, the sympathy, or at least indifference, of the local population had to play a crucial role. The last five days of the route to the border was on foot through mud and swamps. At the last minute, a smuggler they had engaged tried to betray the escapees by refusing to lead them across the border. Only threatened with death did he decide to fulfill his part of the contract. The border was crossed at 2:00 A.M. on April 23, 1921. “We came to ‘Amcross’ in rags and without shoes, hungry and completely fatigued,” as Cooper wrote in his first dispatch from Riga.

The shoes were payment for the smuggler who had led them across the border. Cooper would not have been himself if he had not immediately expressed his gratitude to Amcross and brought attention to the need for better care of the American prisoners still held by the Bolsheviks. He wrote about this a few weeks later, to Hoover among others, including a few practical hints. He brought attention to the still existing legal avenues of action by Western charitable organizations in Russia, he stressed the attitude of the two Polish officers and the local population. As an eyewitness, he was also a credible source of information about the conditions prevailing under the communist rule in Russia: “Cooper, a prisoner in Russia, states that Russia is full of propaganda against United States, France and Great Britain; people are told that these countries are responsible for all trouble in Russia. German influence is strong and popular.” In another report he confirmed the level of control by the new regime. “Absolute control of Bolsheviks, either they will stay in control or anarchy.” This experience of the nature of the communist system, gained through direct contact with the iron hand of terror, remained with Cooper throughout his life. He became an unrelenting opponent of the system, and he intended to write a book about his experiences. However he never fully realized his intention. The only fragments were included in his book Things Men Die For. It is worth mentioning here the durability of the anti–American propaganda, whose influence is present even in contemporary academic works. Simonenko, already mentioned in these pages, states in an article about the Kościuszko Squadron that after the signing of the Polish-Bolshevik peace in Riga, Cooper was most ordinarily released from prison and arrived to Poland without any problems. He does not say, however, why he had to overcome the boundless Russian territory in rags and on foot, nor why he crossed the border illegally.

…

Meanwhile, the Polish authorities and the squadron airmen awaited the miraculous rescue of their comrade. His journey from Riga to Warsaw began on April 29, his train reached the capital on May 3, the day celebrated by Poles as Constitution Day. As a witness to the event recalled, “he received a great ovation.” It so happened that this was the first time that Constitution Day had been celebrated without a major war being waged, although the borders had not yet been officially recognized by the Conference of Ambassadors. It is true that in Silesia the third uprising had broken out against the Germans, but Poland was not officially involved in that conflict. Help was provided to the insurgents unofficially using paramilitary organizations such as the Polish Military Organization. Thus, the 3rd of May in 1921 was celebrated solemnly and in an atmosphere of peace, as the new constitution was declared in March and a peace treaty was signed with Russia.

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Filed under Baltics, language, migration, military, nationalism, Poland, U.S., USSR, war

by | 6 November 2025 · 8:41 am

Pilot Captured by Bolsheviks, 1920

From Kosciuszko, We Are Here!: American Pilots of the Kosciuszko Squadron in Defense of Poland, 1919-1921, by Janusz Cisek (McFarland, 2025), Kindle Loc. 2636ff.

The Bolshevik Cavalry immediately captured him and took him to the HQ of the 2nd Brigade of the 6th Division of Budenny’s Konarmia [‘Horse Army’]. Peasants who managed to see the events gave an exact description of the airman’s appearance, and on the basis of this, Fauntleroy identified Cooper.

As it happened, the plane was damaged during the landing and Cooper himself lost consciousness. When he came round, he found himself surrounded by Budenny’s cavalrymen. At that moment, the wounds and burns he had suffered in action in September 1918 were his succor. One of the basic Bolshevik practices towards prisoners and people of the captured areas was to seek out the “representatives of the Bourgeousie.” One of the most popular tests of class membership was an analysis of their hands. The so-called “white hands” signified a man who had never done any manual work and therefore was an “enemy of the people.” However, Cooper’s hands were burnt. His second lucky break was his army discharge underwear, which he had on that day. The underwear was stamped with the name of the previous owner, who was Corporal Frank Mosher. Both lucky events allowed Cooper to maintain that he was in reality a corporal of that name who had been enlisted into the Polish Armed Forces. Of course, the Bolsheviks did not entirely believe that story, because even within their ranks the names of the American pilots were known. Apart from that, Cooper had some incriminating documents in his pocket, such as notes addressed to Fauntleroy and, even worse, his memo to Col. Castle regarding the importance of the air force. Its content was unambiguous. Cooper wrote that through their participation in the war, the airmen of the squadron were gaining experience of the role of the air force in a war of maneuvers in geographically wide-open country. This experience, he noted, could have significance in the event of a revival of the war with Mexico. He also summarized his thoughts on the subject of the air force combat effectiveness against the infantry and cavalry. They were certainly not commensurate with even the most sharp-witted corporal.

Cooper was transported to the Division HQ, where he was interrogated by the komdyw, or Division Commander, Timoszenko, who was later to become a Soviet Marshal. They tempted him with the proposition of service as an instructor of the Bolshevik Air Force, but he consistently refused. Even a five-day visit to the Bolshevik Air Squadron did not help to change his mind. Early in his captivity, Cooper attempted to escape. Unfortunately after two days he was caught and imprisoned with a heavy guard. He found himself in Moscow, where in all he spent as much as ten months in various penal facilities. Prison food rations consisted of barely half a pound of black bread per day—and not always. Years later, he recalled his experiences in a reply to a letter from Capt. Marek Mażyński, a Polish airman of 303rd Squadron who in the first years of World War II was also a Soviet prisoner. The men compared notes on prison conditions in the 1920s and the 1940s. Cooper wrote:

For a week in Moscow, nobody had a bite of eat—nothing. One of the prisons I was in was fairly good. The second one was just about as you describe. The third was rougher and tougher than any you describe; there was a good reason for this as my imprisonment was during the starvation period of 1920–1921, where for one week in January (as I have already said) there was absolutely no food in Moscow. Not only had the transportation broke down, but this was the first time the peasants refused to give food to the city workers…. Nothing is more terrible than the breaking of the human spirit by torture, starvation, and the sadistic questioning by “Cheka.” I want to say that in the toughest prison I was in, where men died every night from lack of food and typhus, there were two prisoners who kept other prisoners from complete disintegration. One of the men had lost all his teeth while working in the coal mines of Siberia; he was a 30-year-old baker who had only one tooth. He was from Łódź, Poland. The other man was a man who spoke only a little Polish. This, of course, was me. I take no credit, but credit only the tough training I had at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis.

The prisoners’ situation was saved by food parcels from “Amcross” and one of the English charitable organizations. The living conditions in jail were also severe for other reasons. Cooper recalled gaining permission from the prison authorities to hold prayers in the presence of a priest on Christmas Eve. It was an evening when companions in misery were people of differing confessions and nationalities, including prisoners related to the richest American families. On that day they were joined in prayer, although not all of them were believers. The prisoners’ prayers cemented the Bolsheviks’ hatred towards them as representatives of the social order that they had vowed to destroy.

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Filed under migration, military, nationalism, Poland, U.S., USSR, war

by | 5 November 2025 · 12:22 pm

Piłsudski vs. Bolsheviks, 1920

From Kosciuszko, We Are Here!: American Pilots of the Kosciuszko Squadron in Defense of Poland, 1919-1921, by Janusz Cisek (McFarland, 2025), Kindle Loc. 2230ff.

Neither personnel nor materiel reinforcements arrived during the general battle waged near Warsaw, nor was there any aid for Lwów, which was facing its own battle of life and death. At the very beginning of August 1920, when the Bolsheviks occupied the Brest fortress, the road to Warsaw seemed to be wide open and defenseless. The fall of the Polish capital appeared to be inevitable. Foreign missions, with a few exceptions, began to evacuate from Warsaw, the world press began to write about the fall of Poland. On August 11 the Universal News Service reported from Washington that the Secretary of State recommended the U.S. legation move to Grudziądz. Other sources confirmed the information.

Piłsudski took full responsibility for the preparation of a counteroffensive. At first his plan depended on a concentration of forces under the cover of the fortress at Brest. When the fortress fell on August 1, his plan had to be completely rethought. The French advisor to the Polish General Staff, General Maxime Weygand, opted for a concentration of forces around Warsaw and a linear defense along the natural lines. Waygand envisiged only a limited counterattack. Rozwadowski, who from July 22 was the Chief of General Staff, proposed a counterattack with a force concentrated near Garwolin. None of these plans gained full recognition by the Commander in Chief. It was on August 6 that Piłsudski prepared the basic idea of his maneuver. It established a broad pincer movement from the south, striking the Bolsheviks’ left wing engaged near Warsaw and closing off their retreat path to the east. Piłsudski simultaneously issued an order dividing the armed forces into three fronts: the Northern, Central, and Southern. The 7th Squadron was assigned to the Southern Front in the area bordered by the line between Włodzimierz Wołyński, Hrubieszów, and Zamość, all the way to the Romanian border. At the same time, the Marshal recommended a concentration of troops in the vicinity of Puławy, under the cover of the Wieprz River, south of Warsaw. This was to be established from the 1st and the 3rd Infantry Division Legions, the 21st Mountain Division, the 14th Wielkopolska Infantry Division and other smaller units. These units had been delegated to carry out the main strike. The key to success was that designated units were to swiftly isolate themselves from the Southern Front, while at the same time effectively defending their right wing in order to prevent Bolshevik units operating in the Lwów area from taking part in battle. The next crucial element for the success of operation was to maintain the complete secrecy of the plan and to guarantee maximum surprise by attacking at the very moment of the full engagement of the enemy near Warsaw. Piłsudski personally led a counteroffensive in the morning hours of August 16 on the Wieprz River. His presence among the units, as Gen. Maxime Weygand wrote, transformed morale, which had been shaken after a retreat lasting a few weeks. The Bolsheviks were completely surprised; they did not expect the Polish armed forces to be ready for a greater offensive. Their defeat was more complete because the day before Piłsudski’s counterattack, the 5th Army under the command of Gen. Władysław Sikorski gained a local success in action north of Warsaw along the Vistula. On August 18 the Poles’ success was already evident. The Bolshevik Mozyr Group, which approached Warsaw from the southeast, was smashed, as was the 16th Army, which attacked Warsaw from Mińsk Mazowiecki and Radzymin.

By August 25 the Bolsheviks had lost 25,000 killed and wounded, with 66,000 taken prisoner and over 231 artillery pieces, 1,023 machine guns, and a huge amount of military equipment captured. The 3rd, 4th, 15th, and 16th Bolshevik Armies found themselves in a panic retreat. The battle was swiftly baptized as the 18th decisive battle in world history. It was already clear that Piłsudski had halted the Bolshevik advance into the heart of Europe.

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Filed under military, nationalism, Poland, Ukraine, USSR, war

by | 18 October 2025 · 1:14 am

Polish Attack on Kiev, 1920

From Kosciuszko, We Are Here!: American Pilots of the Kosciuszko Squadron in Defense of Poland, 1919-1921, by Janusz Cisek (McFarland, 2025), Kindle Loc. 1530ff.

The main burden of the Polish offensive was to be born by the land forces. In January and February 1920 two new classes of recruits were admitted to the Polish armed forces, which supplemented the rank and file to such an extent that in the spring of that year the Ukrainian part of the eastern front was reinforced by 55,000 men. On March 8, 1920, the High Command divided the whole eastern front between four armies. The 6th Polish Army was stationed at Podole and the 2nd Army at Wolynia. The 3rd Army, which was to mount the main attack on Kiev, found itself in the middle of reorganization. The choice of direction and the time of attack were determined by forthcoming signals about the concentration of the Red Army to the north of Błota Poleskie (Pripet Marshes). In order to prevent communications between the Bolshevik north and south theaters of operation, Piłsudski recommended taking control of an important rail junction. The Polish attack of March 5, 1920, led to the occupation of two key strategic points at Mozyrz and Kalenkowicze, which cut the Red Army into two separate groups unable to cooperate with each other. The main attack of the forces, consisting of eight infantry divisions, five cavalry brigades and an operational armed group of Ukrainians, took placed on April 25, 1920, in the direction of Kiev. The first objective of the operation was the control of Koziatyń, a vital center, which became the meeting point of the 14th and 12th Red Armies. Koziatyń had already been occupied by a Polish cavalry group on April 27. A day earlier, the important center of Żytomierz had been taken. In the space of a dozen or so hours the Bolshevik 12th Army was smashed to such an extent that they did not manage to regain their fighting ability before the end of the war. On April 29, Poles took Winnica, and thus opened up the road to Kiev. An Operational Group under the command of Gen. ŚŚmigły-Rydz attacked Kiev. It was their task to occupy the city, make safe the crossing and open the bridgehead on the eastern bank of the Dniepr River. The action in this direction moved so quickly that the American Military Attache expected the city to be entered by the first days of May. Significantly, it happened on May 7. Leaving the destruction of the 12th Army and the significant weakening of the Bolshevik 14th Army aside, a lot of war material and transport equipment fell into the hands of the Poles. Apart from that, the Ukrainians gained time to achieve their plan of establishing an independent state. Unfortunately, it was not successful. As a result of the break in the frontline at Samhorodek by Budenny’s cavalry on June 5, 1920, the front started to shift to the west. Budenny not only buried the hope of an independent Ukraine, but seriously threatened the independence of Poland herself.

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by | 8 August 2025 · 6:27 am

Polish Acronyms ZSRR, ZOMO

I came across two striking Polish acronyms in the last chapter of the history book I just finished reading: Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014).

ZSRR = Związek Socjalistycznych Republik Radzieckich, lit. Union of Socialist Republics Soviet (abbr. Związek Radziecki, Union Soviet),
also ZSRS = Związek Socjalistycznych Republik Sowieckich (abbr. Związek Sowiecki, Union Soviet)

ZOMO = Zmotoryzowane Odwody Milicji Obywatelskiej, lit. Motorized Reserves of the Militia of Citizens. These were the troops who broke up large public demonstrations against the regime from the 1950s through the 1980s. They were disbanded in September 1989, after the election of June 4, 1989, a day of glory in Poland (and of infamy in China).

Another linguistic tidbit from the last chapter (p. 630) is Nie ma wolności bez Solidarności! lit. Not have freedom without Solidarity!

The Far Outliers will be heading for Poland next month.

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Filed under democracy, labor, language, military, Poland, USSR

by | 21 July 2025 · 5:40 pm

Changing Faces of Lublin’s Old Town

From The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey through Cities at the Heart of Europe, by Marek Kohn (Yale U. Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 220-223:

Lublin has a long history as a site for key moments in the formation of Polish states. A congress of nobles welcomed Grand Duke Jogaila of Lithuania there in 1386, as he made his way to his royal wedding in Kraków, and proclaimed him King Władysław II Jagiełło of Poland. Jogaila returned the favour by granting a range of privileges that enabled Lublin to develop as a centre of trade between the two countries he and Jadwiga had united through their marriage. The treaty of union that inaugurated the Polish-Lithuanian Republic was signed at Lublin’s castle in 1569.

By that time, the urban kernel later known as the Old Town was taking shape on the high ground opposite, as a sturdy cluster of churches and townhouses arranged around a market square and an axis running from the Grodzka Gate on the eastern side to the western Kraków Gate. With an area of ten hectares, the walled town was the same size as its Warsaw counterpart. Meanwhile the space between the castle and the town was beginning to fill with buildings, as the Jewish quarter developed on the inferior land known as Podzamcze, meaning ‘under the castle’. Jews had been prohibited from settling within the city walls in 1535, after Christian merchants objected to the competition they introduced.

By the end of the sixteenth century, the district below the castle boasted one of the most important Hebrew printing houses in the country, and provided the base for the principal Jewish authority in Poland. Around the turn of the nineteenth century it became a major centre of Hasidic Judaism, after the legendary spiritual leader Yaakov Yitzhak haLevi Horowitz took up residence on Podzamcze’s main street. He was known as the Seer of Lublin, because of his reputed ability to see into the future and across the world, and he bestowed a magical aura on the Jewish Town that remained as his posthumous legacy after his death there in 1815.

As the century went on, however, many of Lublin’s Jews were drawn to modernity instead of mysticism. Their local horizons were opened up in 1862, when they gained full citizenship and the city abolished restrictions on where they were permitted to live. ‘Through Brama Grodzka, by which they had waited for so many years, they entered Lublin again,’ wrote the historian Meir Balaban, ‘renting and buying properties for shops and homes, first on Grodzka Street and later also on the Market Square.’ The poorer incomers gradually found niches throughout almost the whole of the Old Town, which had fallen into decline after being abandoned by its wealthier residents. Those who could afford it made instead for the up and coming streets around the city’s spacious central avenue. They resembled their Christian neighbours in their dress and lifestyle, while the old Jewish quarter became even more of a world apart.

That world disappeared from the face of the earth during the Second World War. After the German invaders took control of Lublin in 1939, they ejected Jews from the townhouses around the central avenue, forcing them back to the old Jewish quarter. The Jews of the Old Town were sent there in April 1941, after the occupiers turned the former Jewish Town into a ghetto, which they liquidated a year later. Some 26,000 Jews from the Lublin region were killed at the Bełżec extermination camp, almost all of them upon arrival. Others were sent to a secondary ghetto on the outskirts of the city, Majdan Tatarski, and eventually to the nearby Majdanek camp. The Lublin extermination ended with Aktion Erntefest, Operation Harvest Festival, in November 1943. Over two days, SS squads and German police shot 42,000 Jews at Majdanek and two other camps in the region. At the outbreak of the war, some 43,000 Jews had been living in the city, out of a total population of around 120,000. Almost none of them were left alive by the war’s end.

Little was left of the Jewish Town either. The Germans razed much of it to the ground, as they did in Warsaw’s Jewish district. There, the destruction had begun as a tactic used by the occupiers in their efforts to suppress the Ghetto Uprising. In Lublin, the Germans had already emptied the houses, which they condemned on the grounds of the buildings’ poor construction standards and states of repair. Their underlying purpose was to erase the remains of Jewish presence, which in that locality dated back four hundred years.

The main street disappeared altogether, and with it the form that the Jewish settlement had found in Lublin’s topography. It had previously run along the base of the slope below the castle, its buildings jostling for space and concealing the lie of the land. Tumbledown shacks and solid edifices alike were gone, as was the warren of alleys into which Alfred Döblin had ventured. One unintended consequence was to give the Red Army a clear field of fire in front of the castle for its artillery when it fought its way into Lublin in July 1944.

Three days after the Soviet forces captured the city, the new authorities installed the provisional body that became known as the Lublin Committee, and which formed the germ of the regime that eventually became the Polish People’s Republic. This was the third key moment in Lublin’s history as a site of state formation, initiating a drive to build socialism on Soviet lines that was led by a man with local roots. Bolesław Bierut was born near Lublin and went to school in the city. His early work experience there included a job as a bricklayer’s assistant, and his presence was felt in the reconstruction of Lublin when he headed the country during its Stalinist period.

The site with the most obvious potential for symbolically loaded redevelopment was the barren plain, overlooked by the castle and the Old Town, that now lay where the main street of the Jewish district had previously been. A quadrant had been spared on the far side, where the tenement houses were in relatively good condition, and housed ethnic Poles who had been displaced by the creation of the Majdan Tartaski ghetto. Apart from that, the area formerly occupied by the Jewish Town was emptier than it had been since the Middle Ages.

For nearly ten years, the authorities’ efforts were concentrated up above, within the castle, and were devoted not to reconstruction but to the suppression of armed resistance. The castle had itself been rebuilt in the 1820s after a long twilight of ruin, its rectangular mass clad in a stern neo-Gothic facade appropriate to its function as a prison. Having served to incarcerate anti-czarist insurgents in the nineteenth century, communists between the wars and resistance fighters during the German occupation, it now held anti-communist partisans, many of whom had previously been anti-Nazi partisans. More than 30,000 prisoners were confined there during the new regime’s first decade in power. Death sentences were carried out in the cellar of a building that stood by the castle’s arched front entrance.

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by | 20 July 2025 · 6:05 pm

Changing Wilno into Vilnius

From The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey through Cities at the Heart of Europe, by Marek Kohn (Yale U. Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 179-183:

The transformation of pre-war Wilno into post-war Vilnius was effected by removing those of its inhabitants who called it Wilno, the Poles who had constituted the majority of its population. Their departure followed the removal by genocide of the second largest ethnic group in the city, the Jews, who called it Vilna or Vilne. The same sequence took place in the other borderland city that Poles had held dear, known today as Lviv, which had also been inhabited largely by ethnic Poles and Jews before the war.

Vilnius’s reconstruction was principally a population project and only secondarily a rebuilding programme, especially in the Old Town. Czesław Miłosz described the pre-war city as an enclave of negative ambiguity, ‘neither Polish nor not-Polish, neither Lithuanian nor not-Lithuanian’. The aim of the reconstruction was to remove that ambiguity, remaking Vilnius as a city that was definitely Lithuanian and very definitely not Polish. It succeeded in establishing the city’s Lithuanian identity, but had to make do with concealing the ambiguities endemic to the Old Town and the surrounding districts.

Until the Nazi occupation, the heart of Vilnius’s character as a multi-ethnic city was a triangular district adjoining the central space over which the town hall presides. The historic Jewish quarter was not beyond the walls – unlike in many European cities, such as Kraków, whose Jewish residents had been sent to live in the separate township of Kazimierz at the end of the fifteenth century – but right in the middle of the city. A larger Jewish neighbourhood spread out from it across the western side of the Old Town. By 1939, according to one estimate, the central district was home to 75,000 people, of whom 35,000 were Jewish.

Many of that fraction were crammed into the overcrowded and insanitary alleys of the original quarter, which was an object of fascination for outsiders and a symbol of identity for Vilna’s Jews. During the First World War, a boy named Moyshe Vorobeychik often happened upon German soldiers painting and sketching scenes in the quarter. Some of them were notable artists in civilian life. Vorobeychik himself became a photographer, under the name Moï Ver, and produced an avant-garde album based on one of the Jewish streets. The project represented a desire shared by other young Jewish artists in the city, to innovate and embrace modernity while retaining their cultural roots. They formed a group called Yung Vilne, whose emblem was a young tree growing above one of the old Jewish quarter’s signature arches.

Max Weinreich, an eminent linguist and scholar of Yiddish, felt similarly about the relationship between learning and place. He considered that modern Jewish research needed an environment like that of Vilna, where ‘the houses and stones retain a memory’ of its Jewish cultural heritage. Weinreich was a leading figure in the YIVO institute of Yiddish studies, which continued a tradition of intellectual enterprise that had made Vilna a centre of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, in the nineteenth century. YIVO’s headquarters opened in 1933 on a broad modern street at a distance from the city centre, but the emotional heart of Jewish Vilna was still embedded in the sclerotic alleys of the old quarter. The enclave retained its allure for outsiders too, despite the warning in a guidebook by a Polish professor about ‘the typically eastern slovenliness of the inhabitants of this anti-hygienic district and its unbearable fug, which makes it impossible for a cultured European to visit these alleys, especially on hot summer days’.

After the Germans took control of Vilnius in 1941, they confined its Jewish population to two ghettos, one in the old quarter and one in the newer neighbourhood. The former was the smaller of the two, holding 11,000 people. It was liquidated after a month, in October 1941, leaving 29,000 people in the larger one, which was maintained until September 1943 and used as a source of labour. The ghetto inmates’ tasks included the construction of a model of Vilnius, which was produced by a team of thirty architects, engineers, draughtsmen and artists. They were forced to create a representation in miniature of the city from which they had been excluded, complete with the tiny zone where they were imprisoned in the middle of it. Four of them are known to have survived the war, but they were rare exceptions. The great majority of Vilnius’s Jews perished in the Holocaust, many of them shot by squads of Lithuanian volunteers at a killing ground in woodland outside the city. Several hundred managed to stay alive until the end of the German occupation, and a few thousand escaped – many of them involuntarily, deported by the previous communist authorities – into the depths of the Soviet Union. Nearly all of the survivors subsequently emigrated to the United States, Israel and other distant lands. Vilna, the ‘Jerusalem of Lithuania’, became an exile memory.

The dissolution of Wilno began with an attempt by Polish forces to recapture it. In July 1944, as the Red Army pushed westwards, the Polish underground state launched a nationwide operation to liberate cities and territories ahead of the Soviet advance. The battles of July were the overtures to the nine-week tragedy of the Warsaw Uprising, which began on the first day of August. Wilno’s political and emotional importance to the Polish cause was expressed in the codename for the Armia Krajowa (AK) assault against the city’s German occupiers: Ostra Brama, the Polish name for the Gate of Dawn. A grand and reverent window is set above the arch on the inside of the gate; through it an image of the Virgin Mary, clad in gilded silver, presides over the street below. The site is one of the most intense foci of the Marian cult at the heart of Polish Catholicism, and therefore of Polishness as it is orthodoxly conceived, venerating Mary as ‘Queen of Poland’. Thousands of silver votive offerings attest to its devotees’ faith that the image has miraculous powers. It is said that the first of the offerings came from a Polish-Lithuanian commander who led his men through the gate in an assault on the Swedes who occupied the city in 1702.

As a precedent, it was hardly auspicious. Instead of ejecting the occupiers with supernatural support from the Mother of God, the attackers were checked and forced to retreat. The assault in 1944 also lacked the miraculous intervention that would have been needed to achieve its double objective of driving out the Germans and keeping out the Soviets. After failing to overcome the German defences on the first day, and struggling to communicate with their comrades inside the city, Polish units operated alongside the Soviet forces. In the latter stages of the battle, AK troops fought their way through the Old Town to capture the city hall, and raised the Polish flag over the castle tower. It was quickly taken down by their inimical Soviet allies, who replaced it with a red one.

After six days, the Germans were defeated, and on the day after that, the Soviet leadership ordered the disarming of the AK soldiers. The ensuing arrests of Polish officers heralded a programme of repression that saw thousands detained in Vilnius as the year went on. That sent an ominous message to the Poles who comprised most of the city’s surviving population. In September, the Soviet and Polish authorities agreed terms for the removal of ethnic Poles from Lithuania to territory within Poland’s new borders. It was to be a notionally voluntary exodus, not an expulsion. Lithuanian Poles were sent away from their homes and birthplaces in railway goods trucks, but they were not herded onto the trains at gunpoint. The official term was ‘evacuation’, which suggested that the Poles were being given aid – and that they were under threat.

Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog’s (1968) Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change was one of my most memorable textbooks during my early graduate work in linguistics, in a class taught by one of my most memorable professors, Derek Bickerton.

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