All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [312]
At their camp, they spent the next eighteen months in conditions of ghastly privation. Some mornings, even in the prison hospital, Matyka awoke to find his hair covered with white hoar-frost. Each day, an average of twelve men perished. The Pole wrote of his desolation: ‘I was so far from my dear ones and I lay ill among unknown dying people. I knew that if I died, I would be forgotten like those whose lifeless bodies were carried out each day and that my family would never know what had happened to me. I cried like a helpless child that has been wronged, and prayed for a miracle.’ He was sent to work inside the Arctic Circle at a camp named Ust-Usa, canning meat for prison consumption. By the time he and his comrades were finally freed, they had completed a six-hundred-mile railway, laid with their bare hands. Matyka wrote bitterly, ‘The bones of Poles and other prisoners probably lie under every sleeper.’
Feliks Lachman, another Polish prisoner in the gulag, afterwards wrote a bitter little poem:
Lice bugs bugs lice
More bugs more lice
Rats fleas gnats flies
And bread-devouring mice
Dirt mud no soap
Stench filth to cope
No faith no hope
In darkness we grope
Our beds bare planks
Our mates sheer cranks
Our dreams long ranks
Of American tanks.
In the Soviet Union’s desperate circumstances of July 1941, Stalin amnestied 50,295 Poles who were released from prisons and camps, together with a further 26,297 from PoW cages, and 265,248 from special settlements and exile. A substantial number of soldiers subsequently joined the communist Polish army raised inside the Soviet Union. In the following year 115,000 others, 73,000 of them military personnel and the remainder women and children, were astonished to receive permission to leave Russia for Persia, where they became a British responsibility. Though foreign secretary Anthony Eden recognised the Poles’ ghastly plight, ‘living in harrowing conditions, diseased and threatened with death by starvation’, this was not a burden welcomed by their new hosts. The British colonial authorities in Cairo wrote to the Foreign Office in June 1942 expressing acute alarm about the scale of the Polish migration: ‘To put matters brutally if these Poles die in Russia the war effort will not be affected. If they [are allowed] to pass into Persia, we, unlike the Russians, will not be able to allow them to die and our war effort will be gravely impaired. Action must be taken to stop these people from leaving the USSR before we are ready to receive them … however many die in consequence.’
This shamelessly callous analysis illustrates the brutalisation of some of those directing the Allied war effort, in the face of so many competing tragedies. The Polish migration went ahead anyway: a British medical officer in Persia responsible for the care of the arriving refugees reported that 40 per cent were suffering from malaria, and almost all from dysentery, diarrhoea, malnutrition or typhoid. Nearly two years elapsed before these Polish soldiers were medically fit to join the Allied armies fighting in Italy, where they served with distinction until the war’s end. Their dependants were shuffled from camp to camp, in humane but nonetheless unhappy British captivity. Many were shipped to India, and thence in 1945 to Britain, where most chose to spend the balance of their lives. Whatever the shortcomings of British behaviour towards these Poles, the fundamental reality was that they were victims of a murderous persecution by the Soviet Union, a power joined with the democracies in a supposed ‘crusade for freedom’.
In Europe, meanwhile, an estimated twenty million people were displaced from their pre-war homes, often in circumstances of terrible hardship. One evening in 1940, Łód Jew Szmulek Goldberg took his girlfriend Rose to the nearby sports club where they had spent many happy hours. It was now bomb-damaged and shuttered.