Gulag

But, as in peacetime, this data, and the efficiency it appears to suggest, is deceptive. “From the first days of the war, the Gulag organized its industries in order to meet the needs of those fighting at the front,” wrote Nasedkin. Might those needs not have been better met by free workers? Elsewhere, he records that production of certain types of ammunition quadrupled. ¹⁷ How much more ammunition might have been made if patriotic prisoners had been allowed to work in ordinary factories? Thousands of soldiers who might have been at the front were kept behind the lines, guarding the imprisoned workforce. Thousands of NKVD men were deployed arresting and then releasing the Poles. They too might have been better used. Thus did the Gulag contribute to the war effort—and probably help to undermine it as well.

Alongside General Gorbatov and a few other military men, there was another, much larger exception to the general rule against political amnesties. Despite what the NKVD had told them, the exile of the Poles to the outer edges of the USSR was not, in the end, destined to be permanent. On July 30, 1941, a month after the launch of Barbarossa, General Sikorski, the leader of the Polish government-in-exile in London, and Ambassador Maisky, the Soviet envoy to Great Britain, signed a truce. The Sikorski-Maisky Pact, as the treaty was called, re-established a Polish state—its borders still to be determined—and granted an amnesty to “all Polish citizens who are at present deprived of their freedom on the territory of the USSR.”

Both Gulag prisoners and deported exiles were officially freed, and allowed to join a new division of the Polish army, to be formed on Soviet soil. In Moscow, General Władysław Anders, a Polish officer who had been imprisoned in Lubyanka for the previous twenty months, learned that he had been named commander of the new army during a surprise meeting with Beria himself. After the meeting, General Anders left the prison in a chauffeured NKVD car, wearing a shirt and trousers, but no shoes.¹⁸

On the Polish side, many objected to the Soviet Union’s use of the word “amnesty” to describe the freeing of innocent people, but this was not the time to quibble: relations between the two new “allies” were shaky. The Soviet authorities refused to take any moral responsibility for the “soldiers” of the new army—all in a terrible state of health—and would not give General Anders any food or supplies. “You are Poles—let Poland feed you,” the army’s officers were told. ¹⁹ Some camp commanders even refused to let their Polish prisoners out at all. Gustav Herling, still imprisoned in November 1941, realized that he would “not survive until spring” if he were not released, and had to conduct a hunger strike before he was finally let go.²⁰

The Soviet authorities complicated matters further by stating, a few months into the amnesty, that its terms applied not to all former Polish citizens, but only to ethnic Poles: ethnic Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Jews were to remain in the USSR. Terrible tensions erupted as a result. Many of the minorities tried to pass themselves off as Poles, only to be unmasked by genuine Poles, who feared re-arrest themselves if the identity of their “false” comrades was revealed. Later, the passengers on one Polish evacuation train, bound for Iran, tried to evict a group of Jews: they feared the train would not be allowed out of the USSR with “non-Polish” passengers. ²¹

Other Polish prisoners were released from camps or exile settlements, but not given any money or told where to go. One ex-prisoner recalled that “The Soviet authorities in Omsk didn’t want to help us, explaining that they knew nothing about any Polish army, and instead proposed that we find work near Omsk.”²² An NKVD officer gave Herling a list of places where he could get a residence permit, but denied all knowledge of a Polish army.²³ Following rumors, the released Polish prisoners hitchhiked and rode trains around the Soviet Union, looking for the Polish army.

Stefan Waydenfeld’s family, exiled to northern Russia, were not told of the existence of the Polish army at all, nor offered any means of transport whatsoever: they were simply told they could go. In order to get away from their remote exile village, they built a raft, and floated down their local river toward “civilization”—a town which had a railway station. Months later, they were finally rescued from their wanderings when, in a café in the town of Chimkent, southern Kazakhstan, Stefan recognized a classmate from his school in Poland. She told them, finally, where to find the Polish army.²⁴