Category Archives: USSR

by | 5 April 2026 · 12:04 am

Polish Exiles Trapped Abroad

From the Epilogue by Neal Ascherson in Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero, by Aileen Orr (Birlinn, 2014), Kindle pp. 174-178:

The Polish troops in Scotland, Italy and Normandy, like Poles all over the world, watched in agony as Warsaw fought and died. But there was little they could do. Some long-range aircraft, Polish, British and South African, managed to reach Warsaw from airfields in Italy, but they suffered terrible losses and the supplies and ammunition they dropped often fell into German hands. Predictably, Stalin refused to let the Allies use airfields in Soviet-held territory until it was too late. The British, for their part, refused to let the London Poles fly the Parachute Brigade to Warsaw.

From the military point of view, that would have been suicidal madness. But there was political reluctance too. Both Churchill and Roosevelt knew that the Soviet Union was carrying the main burden of a war now approaching its climax. They were determined not to let ‘Polish problems’ disturb their partnership with Stalin.

After the collapse of the rising, the Home Army in the rest of Poland began to disintegrate. A few groups retreated into the forests and carried on a hopeless guerrilla war against the new Communist authorities. Within a few years, anyone who had fought in the Home Army fell under suspicion as a ‘counter-revolutionary’, and thousands were imprisoned. The parachute couriers from Scotland were hunted down by Soviet military intelligence, and some – caught with their radios tuned to the Polish government in London – were tried and shot as ‘imperialist spies’. The true story of the Warsaw Rising, and the main role in the resistance played by the non-Communist Home Army, became forbidden topics.

From trenches in Italy, or from camps in Lowland Scotland, Wojtek’s friends watched this process in deepening despair. Although they did not know it, their country had already been abandoned by Britain and America. At the Teheran summit in late 1943, Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed that Poland should remain under Soviet occupation when it was liberated and that the new eastern frontier established by the Soviet invasion in 1939, leaving the cities of Lwów and Wilno (Vilnius) in Soviet hands, should become permanent. As compensation, Poland would be given the eastern provinces of Germany. The whole country would be shifted 150 miles to the west.

The Yalta conference in February 1945 did little more than publicly confirm these decisions. Postwar Europe would be divided into ‘spheres of influence’ – with Poland left in the Soviet sphere. Roosevelt and Churchill eagerly accepted Stalin’s assurance that there would be free elections in Poland.

It didn’t escape the soldiers’ notice that Poland was invited to neither of these meetings, nor to the Big Three Potsdam Conference after the Nazi surrender. It was behind closed doors that the ‘Victor Powers’ had dictated Poland’s political future.

General Sikorski had died in a plane crash at Gibraltar in 1943. His successor as prime minister in the London government was Stanisław Mikołajczyk, a peasant politician who tried desperately but vainly to save what he could from the Yalta settlement. But the Communist-led Committee of National Liberation had now become the provisional government of Poland. In July 1945, a few months after Germany’s unconditional surrender, Britain and the United States withdrew recognition from the London government-in-exile and transferred it to the Communist-led regime in Warsaw.

At first, the new regime pretended to be an alliance of ‘progressive forces’ and Mikołajczyk felt able to join a coalition government in Warsaw. But the Communists controlled the security police and within two years the opposition was being crushed by violence and threats. The promised free elections produced crudely faked results. Late in 1947, Mikołajczyk fled Poland, hidden in the back of an American diplomatic car. The Communist monopoly of power soon became complete.

By now, Poland was being ruled by state terror. Veterans of the AK were still being rounded up and imprisoned. The Home Army commanders were kidnapped, taken to Moscow and tried on incredible charges such as ‘collaborating with the Nazis’. Returning soldiers who had served in the Polish armies under British command were treated as suspected traitors and saboteurs.

The Polish troops in the West, by now demobilised and living in temporary camps scattered over England and Scotland, knew what was going on. The postwar British government hoped that they would go back to Poland, but – in a rare act of guilt-driven generosity – promised to care for them if they preferred to stay.

It was a miserable choice that they all faced. Most of them longed to go home and help rebuild their beloved, shattered land. But there they would be rewarded by persecution, by the sadness of life under foreign tyranny. On the other hand, what future could they have in a land whose language they hardly spoke, where they lacked friends, where their skills beyond manual labour and soldiering seemed to count for nothing?

But for the men who lived with Wojtek in the camp at Winfield, the choice was a little easier. Before they came across that bear cub in the Persian hills, they had seen the real face of Soviet Communism and had experienced on their own bodies its brutality, its callous indifference to human suffering, its hunger and its lies. If Poland were to become like that, it would no longer be a country they could live in. These were the men who had travelled the third path, and they knew only too well what they were being offered.

The third path, like the first, began on 17 September 1939, in south-eastern Poland. But this path led eastwards, into the depths of the Soviet Union. A part of the defeated Polish army was able to escape over the border into Romania and Hungary. But some 200,000 others were captured by the Soviet invaders and became prisoners of war. Some 15,000 of them, mostly officers, were moved into three prison camps in Russia and Ukraine: Kozielsk, Starobielsk and Ostaszków.

All over the regions which had been Poland’s eastern provinces, Poles in responsible jobs – teachers, judges, police chiefs, mayors, editors – were arrested and imprisoned. Under directions from Moscow, the local Communist Parties in what was now Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine filled the posts with their own Belorussian or Ukrainian supporters.

But this turned out to be only the first act in an immense programme designed to obliterate Polish identity for ever in this part of eastern Europe. In February 1940, the Soviet authorities began the first mass expulsion of the Polish civilian population. Troops from the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB, as the political security force) herded Polish families to railway stations and crammed them into unheated cattle wagons. From there, the trains set forth on journeys which could last many weeks, and which the old, the youngest children and the sick often did not survive, until the prisoners were dumped in Arctic labour camps, at railheads near Siberian mines or on the empty steppes of Kazakhstan.

More deportations followed in 1940, until by early 1941 something like 1.5 million Poles – Christians and Jews, Communists and Catholics – had been driven into exile. For the gulag empire, the life or death of these slave labourers was a matter of indifference. By the time that they were allowed to leave the camps, in the summer of 1941, between a third and a half of the deported Poles were dead from hunger, exposure, exhaustion and disease.

Leave a comment

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

by | 4 April 2026 · 6:47 am

Poland’s Underground State

From the Epilogue by Neal Ascherson in Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero, by Aileen Orr (Birlinn, 2014), Kindle pp. 170-173:

The couriers who reached London did not only bring despatches from the resistance. They were themselves direct witnesses to the appalling nature of the Nazi occupation. The messenger Jan Karski laid before British and American statesmen the full news of the Jewish genocide. Jan Nowak (Jeziorański) was sent out of burning Warsaw during the 1944 uprising to plead with the Allies for help. In the West, most people knew that the occupation was brutal, especially in its treatment of the Jews. But the governments of the democracies were slow, even reluctant, to believe the sheer scale and intensity of horror which the Polish messengers and the exile government revealed to them.

In German-occupied Poland, some 5.4 million people died in concentration camps or mass executions, 3 million of them Jews. That figure does not include casualties caused directly by war and, in all, Poland lost roughly a fifth of its pre-war population. Its industry and infrastructure were almost completely destroyed, while much of Poland’s cultural heritage was burned or looted. In 1944, the whole central city of Warsaw was blown up on Hitler’s orders and reduced to rubble.

After the 1939 invasion, the Nazis divided their half of Poland into two regions. The first consisted of territory in the west of the country which was simply absorbed into the Reich, the Polish population being driven out and replaced by German settlers. The second region was the ‘General Government’, a kind of colonial protectorate ruled from Kraków by the tyrannical Hans Frank. It was in the General Government that almost all the extermination camps were constructed for the Jewish Holocaust, the industrial murder of Europe’s Jews by gas. (Auschwitz lay just out[side] the General Government, in the Upper Silesian region absorbed by the Reich.)

In the General Government, the SS began a programme of selective genocide, designed to destroy the Polish elite and to prevent any national revival. Academics, creative intellectuals and the priesthood were targeted. A little later, the German authorities started to round up the first of 3.5 million men and women for slave labour in German war industries or agriculture. Villages which resisted were burned down; their men were shot, the women deported and the children either killed or kidnapped for ‘Germanisation’ in German families.

These conditions brought immense popular support for the resistance. But at first the AK concentrated on building up its strength and acquiring weapons, and it was not until 1942 that widespread attacks on the German occupiers began. The price for resistance, even for disobeying regulations, was usually death. In the cities, the Germans carried out random mass round-ups of ‘hostages’ who were lined up against walls and shot, their bodies left lying on the street as a warning against defiance or disobedience. Ghettos were set up in the towns, as a prelude to the Jewish genocide, and the penalty for hiding an escaped Jew was immediate execution for the rescuer and his or her whole family.

In spite of these risks, the underground state survived and proliferated. This was not a new idea. During and after the January rising of 1863, the insurgents had established a ‘parallel nation’ which preserved Polish identity through illegal publishing, education and even clandestine courts. The AK’s arms and explosives were captured from the Germans, and later parachuted in from the West. But the resistance was able to do little to help the Warsaw Ghetto Rising in April 1943, as Jewish fighters decided to die fighting rather than go passively to the gas chambers of Treblinka.

By the end of 1943, AK partisan units were in control of many districts of rural Poland, especially the forests and hills of the old eastern borderlands which now lay behind German lines. But once again, strategic problems emerged. In 1943, the plan of the government-in-exile and the AK command inside Poland had been to harry the Germans as they retreated and then to join the Soviet armies as they drove the Wehrmacht out of Poland. But early in 1944, as Soviet troops advanced across the pre-war Polish frontiers, it became clear that the Russians had no intention of restoring Polish authority in the regions they had seized in 1939.

Worse still, they treated the AK units which welcomed them as potential enemies. The Polish partisans were offered a choice between arrest and conscription into the Red Army. Places liberated by the Home Army were handed over to the People’s Army, the Communist partisans, and to their Committee for National Liberation (PKWN). This body had been set up in Moscow as the nucleus for a future Communist government of Poland.

Leave a comment

Filed under education, Germany, labor, language, migration, military, nationalism, Poland, religion, slavery, USSR, war

by | 9 March 2026 · 9:49 pm

Zygmunt Kwas, Kielce Boy Scout

Adapted from Muzeum Historii Kielc biography:

Zygmunt Kwas (aka Kościelny) was born in Kielce on 18 February 1926. From 1937 to 1939, he belonged to the 12th Kielce Scout Troop, along with Wojtek Szczepaniak; he joined the clandestine Scouting movement in November 1939. Together with Stanisław Wdowicz (aka Borzęcki), whom he met while working as a messenger at the Ludwików Steelworks, he published the Scout magazine Powstaniec [Insurgent]. Along with his friend Zygmunt Pietrzak (aka Bekas), he joined the [anticommunist] Nie organization in 1945. In May of that year, he freed the wounded Pietrzak, arrested by the Security Office, from the prison hospital by disarming a prison guard.

In 1946, Kwas was arrested and imprisoned in Kielce prison. He was subjected to a brutal interrogation. On 13 September, under unclear circumstances, he was shot in his cell by a guard and died shortly thereafter. The funeral was attended not only by Scouts from the Kielce “Gray Ranks” but also by numerous Scouts from all units, as well as schoolchildren, acquaintances, and friends. He was buried at the Old Cemetery in Kielce.

Since 1993, the street running along the Old Cemetery, near his grave, formerly that of [Soviet General] Ivan Konev, has been named after him.

Much more here.

Leave a comment

Filed under biography, Germany, nationalism, Poland, USSR, war

by | 7 March 2026 · 8:48 am

The Thaw Hits Poland, 1956

From Ryszard Kapuscinski: A Life, by Artur Domoslawski (Verso, 2012) Kindle pp. 83-85:

When did the cultural dissent, later known as revisionism, cease to be partly fashion and become front-line politics?

It starts with a secret speech by Khrushchev, given in February 1956 in Moscow at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. Its content creates a sensation in Poland: here is the Soviet Party admitting to murder, to the destruction of its political opponents, to fabricated trials. Knowledge of similar methods used by the authorities in People’s Poland has already reached certain segments of public opinion: almost two years earlier, Józef Światło, deputy director of Department X at the Ministry of Public Security, defected to the West and exposed crimes committed by the Polish apparatus of repression (his department was involved in eradicating ideological deviations within the Party). The Poles hear these revelations on Radio Free Europe; those who are glued to their wireless sets manage to catch bits of these nightmarish stories despite the jamming devices working at full steam.

Khrushchev’s speech initiates a political earthquake throughout the socialist bloc, most of all in Poland and Hungary. It is discussed at Party meetings, in cultural circles and on the streets. Duplicated using crude methods, the key points of the speech can be bought for an astronomical sum at flea markets and bazaars. At exactly the same time, Polish Party leader Bolesław Bierut dies in mysterious circumstances, prompting a wave of speculation: Was he murdered? Soon there’s a popular saying: ‘He went out in a fur overcoat and came home in a wooden overcoat.’ Straight after that the Party’s number two, Jakub Berman, is thrown out of his job. The Party is bursting from the inside.

There is a clash between two tendencies, later called fractions. One group is known as the ‘Puławians’ – people who seek more civic freedom, relative autonomy in cultural life, more democracy within the Party, less central planning within the economy, and more independence for enterprises. They have the sympathy of opinion-forming circles and of many people in the press and the cultural world. (It is interesting to note that they meet at the flat of Ignacy Loga-Sowiński, secretary of the Central Council of Trade Unions, and Irena Tarłowska, still editor-in-chief of Sztandar Młodych). The other group is called the ‘Natolinians’. They are believed to have connections with the Soviet embassy; they’re not keen on democratization, but they’re not against sacrificing a few scapegoats, preferably of Jewish origin, on the altar of squaring accounts with Stalinism.

The political prisoners are released, including people from the post-war anti-communist underground as well as followers of the ‘new faith’, who were locked up for being critical or as a result of internal power struggles. Functionaries within the apparatus of repression who have been particularly cruel to the prisoners lose their jobs and are accused of abusing their power. The Stalinist system is collapsing . . .

In June the workers’ rebellion in Poznań occurs. After several days of strikes and street demonstrations, the army and the secret police fire on the protestors. Several dozen people are killed, and many are wounded. A Party plenum calls the Poznań revolt ‘counter-revolutionary’ and a campaign by ‘imperialist circles’. Prime Minister Józef Cyrankiewicz warns that any hand raised against the people’s power will be cut off. The entire movement for renewal finds itself under threat. A day after the massacre, on the orders of the Party leadership, Sztandar Młodych – like other papers – writes about the tragedy in a tone ringing with Stalinist propaganda:

…

The Poznań tragedy is a shock, especially for those who still believe in socialism but want it to be thoroughly reformed. As a result, the workers’ protest, the massacre and the Party leadership’s conservative attitude to the tragedy accelerate the impetus for change. At the production plants, workers councils are established, and pro-democratization rallies are held at schools and colleges. The culmination of the political turmoil is a Party plenum held in October. Comrades from Moscow fly to Warsaw, headed by Soviet Communist Party First Secretary Khrushchev, and Soviet troops move towards the capital. There is a fear that their tanks will run down the Polish movement for the renewal of socialism.

The crisis ends with the election of a new Party chief, Władysław Gomułka, who led the communists during the war and who has recently been released from prison. He was sent to jail in the early 1950s for so-called rightist–nationalist leanings. Gomułka – who installed the Stalinist system in post-war Poland, took part in the elimination of the opposition, and agreed to Poland’s becoming subordinate to the Soviet Union – did, however, want Polish socialism to retain some specific national features. He was not a fan of collectivization; he was in no rush to condemn the ‘Yugoslav path to socialism’, which was independent of Stalin; and he was fond of the national features of Polish Socialist Party tradition.

Leave a comment

Filed under democracy, economics, labor, nationalism, philosophy, Poland, USSR

by | 1 March 2026 · 8:39 am

Herodotus Awaits Stalin

From Travels with Herodotus, by Ryszard Kapuscinski (Vintage,  2009), Kindle pp. 5-6:

Before those future prophets proclaiming the clash of civilizations, the collision was taking place long ago, twice a week, in the lecture hall where I learned that there once lived a Greek named Herodotus.

I knew nothing as yet of his life, or about the fact that he left us a famous book. We would in any event have been unable to read The Histories, because at that moment its Polish translation was locked away in a closet. In the mid-1940s The Histories had been translated by Professor Seweryn Hammer, who deposited his manuscript in the Czytelnik publishing house. I was unable to ascertain the details because all the documentation disappeared, but it happens that Hammer’s text was sent by the publisher to the typesetter in the fall of 1951. Barring any complications, the book should have appeared in 1952, in time to find its way into our hands while we were still studying ancient history. But that’s not what happened, because the printing was suddenly halted. Who gave the order? Probably the censor, but it’s impossible to know for certain. Suffice it to say that the book finally did not go to press until three years later, at the end of 1954, arriving in the bookstores in 1955.

One can speculate about the delay in the publication of The Histories. It coincides with the period preceding the death of Stalin and the time immediately following it. The Herodotus manuscript arrived at the press just as Western radio stations began speaking of Stalin’s serious illness. The details were murky, but people were afraid of a new wave of terror and preferred to lie low, to risk nothing, to give no one any pretext, to wait things out. The atmosphere was tense. The censors redoubled their vigilance.

But Herodotus? A book written two and a half thousand years ago? Well, yes: because all our thinking, our looking and reading, was governed during those years by an obsession with allusion. Each word brought another one to mind; each had a double meaning, a false bottom, a hidden significance; each contained something secretly encoded, cunningly concealed. Nothing was ever plain, literal, unambiguous—from behind every gesture and word peered some referential sign, gazed a meaningfully winking eye. The man who wrote had difficulty communicating with the man who read, not only because the censor could confiscate the text en route, but also because, when the text finally reached him, the latter read something utterly different from what was clearly written, constantly asking himself: What did this author really want to tell me?

And so a person consumed, obsessively tormented by allusion reaches for Herodotus. How many allusions he will find there! The Histories consists of nine books, and each one is allusions heaped upon allusions. Let us say he opens, quite by accident, Book Five. He opens it, reads, and learns that in Corinth, after thirty years of bloodthirsty rule, the tyrant called Cypselus died and was succeeded by his son, Periander, who would in time turn out to be even more bloodthirsty than his father. This Periander, when he was still a dictator-in-training, wanted to learn how to stay in power, and so sent a messenger to the dictator of Miletus, old Thrasybulus, asking him for advice on how best to keep a people in slavish fear and subjugation.

Leave a comment

Filed under education, literature, Poland, travel, USSR

by | 15 February 2026 · 12:18 am

Montagu vs. Montagu

From Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, by Ben Macintyre (Crown, 2010), Kindle pp. 84-87:

Montagu and Cholmondeley were blasé about the danger of being found out by an enemy agent in Britain, for the simple reason that they did not believe there were any. “There was almost complete security,” wrote Montagu. “We were able to put over what we liked to the enemy.” True, of the several hundred enemy spies dropped, floated, or smuggled into Britain, all but one was picked up and arrested: the exception was found dead in a bunker after committing suicide.

…

Montagu would cycle home every evening, his briefcase full of secrets, complacent that he was “the only deceptioneer in daily contact with the whole of special intelligence” and that his secrets were perfectly safe. Yet there were numerous spies living in London from supposedly neutral countries happy to furnish information to the Axis powers. Ewen Montagu never knew it, but there was one spy operating under his nose, a man with whom he shared a taste for exotic cheese, a love of table tennis, and both parents.

Ivor Montagu was addicted to founding, and joining, different clubs. From the Cheese Eaters League and the English Table Tennis Association, he had graduated to the Association of Cine Technicians, the Zoological Society, Marylebone Cricket Club, the editorial board of Labour Monthly, the World Council of Peace, the Friends of the Soviet Union, Southampton United Football Club, the Society for Cultural Relations with Soviet Russia, and chairmanship of the Woolwich-Plumstead branch of the Anti-war Congress.

He had also joined a less public and even more exclusive club, as an agent for Soviet military intelligence.

In part to antagonize his patrician parents, Ivor Montagu had from an early age displayed a keen “enthusiasm for all things Russian” and a penchant for radical politics. In 1927, the twenty-three-year-old Ivor was contacted by Bob Stewart, a founding member of the British Communist Party and a recruiter of Soviet agents in Britain. Stewart told Ivor, “We have had a request from the Communist International for you to go at once to Moscow. How soon can you leave?” In Moscow, Ivor was feted and flattered: he played table tennis in the Comintern building with “the keenest players in Moscow,” went to the Bolshoi, and watched the revolutionary parade from a VIP stand in Red Square. Someone in the upper reaches of the Soviet state was taking good care of Ivor Montagu.

Back in Europe, Ivor’s film career blossomed, as did his interests in table tennis, small rodents, and Soviet movies. At the same time, his commitment to communism deepened. In 1929, he began to correspond with Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik revolutionary expelled from the Communist Party and now living in exile on the Turkish island of Prinkipo.

…

The meeting with Trotsky marked a turning point. Ivor Montagu was attracted to this “fascinating and commanding personality” but “repelled by his self-admiration,” the raw ambition of the revolutionary in exile: “I felt I understood now why he was impossible in a party, that his personality swamped his judgement.” Ivor was not yet thirty, but he was already a party disciplinarian and a fully committed Stalinist. Trotsky knew that Ivor was a willing tool of the Soviet regime. In 1932, he wrote: “Ivor Montagu has, or had, some personal sympathy for me, but now he is even on that small scale paralysed by his adherence to the party.”

That adherence was now absolute and permanent: he gave speeches, wrote pamphlets, and made films in support of communism. The more covert, and more dangerous, manifestations of that party obedience remained secret for the rest of his life.

Leave a comment

Filed under Britain, education, Germany, military, philosophy, USSR, war

by | 12 February 2026 · 3:06 am

Sugihara’s List and Tadeusz Romer

A few months ago, my wife found an interesting book in a Polish bookstore here. It is titled Lista Sugihary (Sugihara’s List), by Zofia Hartman, a graduate student from Krakow, the site of Schindler’s List, which is now well-known throughout Poland, while Chiune Sugihara remains almost entirely unknown. The Polish edition of her book was published in 2024 by Austeria Press. An English edition titled Sugihara’s List, published in 2025, can be ordered from YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City.

In looking for the English edition, I found a Youtube video of a book talk featuring Zofia Hartman in October 2025 at the Ukrainian Institute of America in New York City, sponsored by the Polish Cultural Institute in New York. Hartman’s presentation was followed by a talk by Jolanta Nitoslawska, granddaughter of Polish diplomat Tadeusz Romer, Polish Ambassador in Japan 1937-1941. Romer and most of the refugees ended up in the stateless Shanghai Ghetto until Romer was included in the 1942 prisoner exchange off Africa via MS Gripsholm. He and most of his descendants ended up in Canada. Several others who attended the talk were descendants of the refugees.

Another diplomat who facilitated the exodus of so many Jewish refugees through the USSR to Japan was the Dutch consul in Lithuania, Jan Zwartendijk, who was director of the Philips factories there. Sugihara granted transit visas via Japan, while Zwartendijk granted official permission for the refugees to settle in Curaçao and the Dutch West Indies, if they should ever manage to get there.

One facet of Sugihara that I had not been aware of was his role as a spy for Japan, cooperating with Poland, sharing military intelligence among other areas. There was no Japanese community in Kaunas, where he served as consul. Japan and Poland both feared the USSR, and Japan was eager for evidence that the USSR might transfer troops west to fight the Germans, allowing Japan to transfer some of its troops from Manchuria to the South Pacific. Japan had helped earlier Poles exiled to Siberia and hosted a sizable number of Polish exiles in Karafuto (southern Sakhalin). Even though Poland declared war on Japan after Pearl Harbor, Poles and Japanese continued to cooperate.

In the summer of 2011, we visited the Sugihara Port of Humanity Museum in Tsuruga, Japan, and in the spring of 2025 we visited the Shanghai Ghetto Museum in China. I’m not sure we’ll get a chance to visit the Sugihara House Museum in Kaunas, Lithuania.

Leave a comment

Filed under Germany, Japan, migration, nationalism, Netherlands, Poland, religion, USSR, war

by | 7 February 2026 · 4:18 am

Displaced Poles in World War 2

My latest compilation from Culture.pl includes an article by Juliette Bretan on Polish refugees abroad during World War 2. Here are some excerpts.

Britain proved an early home for thousands of Poles following the invasion of Poland by Nazi and Soviet forces in September 1939. Polish civilians, and those in the armed forces, fled over the Carpathian mountains to Romania and Hungary, with around 90,000 military personnel known to have escaped by the end of September. Many of those in the armed forces reached France via then Yugoslavia and Italy, where new divisions were organised.

After France fell, thousands of Poles in the armed forces, and the Polish government-in-exile, transferred to London. In August 1940, an Anglo-Polish agreement allowed for the Polish land sea and air forces to be organised and employed under British command. Polish fighter and bomber squadrons were created, with Polish pilots destroying nearly 1000 enemy aircraft and dropping nearly 15,000 bombs and mines during the course of the war.

Persia

Following the Nazi invasion of Russia 1941, a treaty – the Sikorski-Mayski agreement – was signed between Poland and the Soviet Union, which included an ‘amnesty’ allowing for the release of many of the Poles who had been deported east. However, many Poles in labour camps were unaware of the development, and even those who were had only limited assistance from the Soviet authorities. Thousands of Poles, however, did manage to move south, joining Władysław Anders’s army as they moved through Russia and central Asia. In 1942, General Sikorski received permission to evacuate Poles into Persia (now Iran), across the Caspian Sea.

Africa

As Zdzisława Wójcik notes, more than half of the 37,000 Polish civilians who left the USSR with the Polish army found new homes in Africa, in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and South Africa. Some arrived by sea between 1942-43, and were housed in former POW camps or new settlements, whilst others were transported from refugee camps across the world:

The settlements […] operated their own businesses: farms, canteens, butcher shops, bakeries, and fabric–weaving, sewing and shoemaking shops […] the population in the Polish settlements had a specific demographic profile: about 47 percent were women, over 41.5 percent were teenagers and children, and only 11.5 percent were men. (Wójcik, in The Polish Deportees of World War II)

According to Wójcik, the Catholic Church played a prominent role in structuring Polish communities in Africa, although the number of priests varied by settlement. Support for the refugees was also provided by the Polish Red Cross and bureaus in Nairobi, with schools and orphanages established for children. However, the food available in these orphanages often left much to be desired, as Vala Lewicki – who was based in Uganda – remembers:

Meals were never elaborate affairs. The quick breakfast varied only between a plate of baked beans and a slice of bread with tea and coffee one day, and two slices of sparingly-buttered bread with cocoa or tea the next day. Occasionally we had powdered eggs which tasted like…powder. We had sandwiches for lunch, while dinner consisted of bean soup, a slice of meat and baked beans. Always baked beans! (Vala Lewicki, in The Polish Deportees of World War II)

New Zealand & Mexico

Just under 1000 Poles – 733 children and 105 adults – also found a new home in New Zealand during the war, after Prime Minister of the country accepted the refugees.

Arriving in Wellington in 1944, the refugees were settled in a Polish Children’s Camp in the town of Pahiatua, where Catholic services and Polish schooling and scouting trips were provided. Many of the Polish refugees also chose to settle in New Zealand after the war, finding ample opportunities for work as mining and logging industries expanded.

Meanwhile, a community of 1400 Poles also settled in Santa Rosa in Mexico, where they were welcomed by an orchestra playing the Polish national anthem. The settlement in Santa Rosa included living quarters and a school, where a Polish curriculum was used, as well as gardens and playing areas.

India

It is estimated that around 5000 Poles also found safe haven in India, after the wife of the Polish Consul General to Bombay, Kira Banasińska, petitioned the Maharaja of Nawanagar. The Maharaja had longstanding links to Poland – his father had been friends with pianist Ignacy Paderewski – and said that he was ‘trying to do whatever [he] can to save the children.’

Refugees settled in several camps in and around Bombay, as well as in a settlement built at the Maharaja’s summer palace. Polish culture remained an integral part of life, with Catholic teaching organised, Polish books provided, and the children also encouraged to give performances featuring traditional Polish dances and music. Sport was also encouraged: following the arrival of pre-war Lvovian footballer Antoni Maniak, a stadium and running track was built, and regular training sessions established to improve the children’s health and wellbeing. The Maharaja donated money to purchase sporting equipment – and the children proved themselves worthy foes against local teams.

The refugees dubbed the settlement camps ‘Little Poland’.

The Polish Red Cross supported the orphans who were being settled in India, although Ordonówna accompanied the first transport of children out of the Middle East, despite battling the symptoms of tuberculosis, which would later kill her.

Post-war resettlement

At the end of the war, many Poles were unable to return to their homeland. The British government recognised the contribution of Poles in the Allied forces, and established the Polish Resettlement Act, the first mass immigration legislation, in 1947, which offered British citizenship and support for hundreds of thousands of Poles. Following the act, transports were provided to enable their relatives to also reach the UK. Four thousand Poles arrived in overland transports from Italy by rail, whilst several ships carrying hundreds of displaced Poles arrived in ports in Southampton, Liverpool, Hull, London and Glasgow in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This included a transport of 66 Poles from Santa Rosa in Mexico, who travelled aboard the Empire Windrush in its historic passage to London in 1948; around 400 Poles – including many orphans – from Kilindini Mombasa in Kenya on the SS Scythia, which docked in Liverpool; and 600 displaced women, children and elderly Poles from Cape Town on the RMS Arundel Castle, which arrived in Southampton.

On board one transport from Lebanon in 1950, on the SS Oxfordshire, were also several unexpected passengers – two hives of bees, brought by one man in his 60s. The man was allowed to keep the bees, which he took to Haydon Park resettlement camp. By the early 1950s, over 100,000 Poles were registered in Great Britain. Among them were pre-war cultural figures, including Polish poet and songwriter Marian Hemar, and singers Adam Aston, Zofia Terné and Włada Majewska; as well as artists, including the Themersons and Stanisław Frenkiel. Many of these figures played a significant role in forming Polish communities in the UK post-war.

Leave a comment

Filed under Britain, France, Germany, India, Iran, Kenya, Mediterranean, migration, military, nationalism, Poland, South Africa, USSR, war

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.

Leave a comment

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.

Leave a comment

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