Gulag

Nevertheless, the ex-zeks and their deported wives and children did slowly make their way to Kuibyshev, the Polish army’s base camp, and to the army’s other outposts around the country. Upon arrival, many were overwhelmed by the experience of finding “Poland” again, as Kazimierz Zarod wrote: “All around us in every direction, Polish speech, familiar Polish faces! I myself met several old acquaintances, and there were scenes of jubilation and exultation as men and women greeted each other with hugs and kisses.”²⁵ On the day of General Anders’s arrival, another ex-zek, Janusz Wedów, composed a poem, entitled “A Welcome to the Leader”:

Ach, my heart! Again you beat so strongly, so happily I had thought you had grown hard, died inside me ...²⁶

Within a few months, however, the optimism had diminished. The army lacked food, medicine, equipment—everything. Its soldiers were mostly sick, tired, half-starved men, who needed professional help and medical care. One officer recalled the horror he felt when he realized that “A vast tide of human beings who had left the places to which they had been exiled or deported . . . were now flowing down into the starving districts of Uzbekistan, to surge round an army organization which was itself undernourished and decimated by disease.”²⁷

In addition, relations with the Soviet authorities remained poor. Employees of the Polish Embassy, deployed around the country, were still subject to unexplained arrest. Fearing the situation might worsen, General Anders changed his plan in March 1942. Instead of marching his army west, toward the front line, he won permission to evacuate his troops out of the Soviet Union altogether. It was a vast operation: 74,000 Polish troops, and another 41,000 civilians, including many children, were put on trains and sent to Iran.

In his haste to leave, General Anders left thousands more Poles behind, along with their Jewish, Ukrainian, and Belorussian former fellow citizens. Some eventually joined the Kosciuszko division, a Polish division of the Red Army. Others had to wait for the war to end to be repatriated. Still others never left at all. To this day, some of their descendants still live in ethnic Polish communities in Kazakhstan and northern Russia.

Those who left kept fighting. After recovering in Iran, Anders’s army did manage to join the Allied forces in Europe. Traveling via Palestine— and in some cases via South Africa—they later fought for the liberation of Italy at the Battle of Montecassino. While the war continued, the Polish civilians were parceled out to various parts of the British Empire. Polish children wound up in orphanages in India, Palestine, even east Africa. Most would never return to Soviet-occupied, postwar Poland. The Polish clubs, Polish historical societies, and Polish restaurants still found in West London are testimony to their postwar exile.²⁸

After they had left the USSR, the departed Poles performed an invaluable service for their less fortunate ex–fellow inmates. In Iran and Palestine, the army and the Polish government-in-exile conducted several surveys of the soldiers and their families in order to determine exactly what had happened to the Poles deported to the Soviet Union. Because the Anders evacuation was the only large group of prisoners ever allowed to leave the USSR, the material produced by these questionnaires and somewhat rushed historical inquiries remained the only substantial evidence of the Gulag’s existence for half a century. And, within limits, it was surprisingly accurate: although they had no real understanding of the Gulag’s history, the Polish prisoners did manage to convey the camp system’s staggering size, its geographical extent—all they had to do was list the wide variety of places they had been sent—and its horrific wartime living conditions.

After the war, the Poles’ descriptions of their experiences formed the basis for reports on Soviet forced-labor camps produced by the Library of Congress and the American Federation of Labor. Their straightforward accounts of the Soviet slave-labor system came as a shock to many Americans, whose awareness of the camps had dimmed since the days of the Soviet timber boycotts in the 1920s. These reports circulated widely, and in 1949, in an attempt to persuade the United Nations to investigate the practice of forced labor in its member states, the AFL presented the UN with a thick body of evidence of its existence in the Soviet Union: