Inferno - Max Hastings [314]
Among other victims of the Soviets were 1.5 million Poles deported to Siberian exile or the gulag in 1940–41, in furtherance of Stalinist ethnic-cleansing policies; at least 350,000 perished of starvation or disease, and a further 30,000 were executed. Edward Matyka, a twenty-one-year-old soldier, naïvely supposed that the Russians would not impede his escape to Romania from the German-occupied region of Poland. But he was arrested by a Soviet patrol in January 1940, imprisoned, and awarded a sentence of five years’ hard labour for “illegal crossing of the border and attempts to carry out spying on behalf of the enemies of the Soviet Union.” In October, after weeks of travelling on prison barges, he and his comrades were required to march forty miles in bitter cold to reach their labour camp: “Four hundred shadows of men moved after one another slowly, with difficulty, making their way through deep snow … We went through forest and the column began to stretch and thin out as the weak and owners of baggage dropped out.”
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 hoarfrost. 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 600-mile railway, laid with their bare hands. Matyka wrote bitterly, “The bones of Poles and other prisoners probably lie under every sleeper.”
Felicks 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 Polish communist 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 Iran, 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