Russia at war 1941-1945

Government Building. Minsk had also had its torture-chambers at the Gestapo

headquarters, and its mass graves of slaughtered Jews. It was hard to grasp that, only three years before, it had been a prosperous industrial city.

We flew on to Lublin, into Poland. The rural scene here looked very different. Outwardly at least, the country looked almost un-scathed by war. The Polish villages looked intact, with their white-washed houses and their well-kept and prosperous-looking Catholic

churches. The front was not very far away from here, and we were flying low; children waved as we roared past; and in the fields there were many more cattle than in any part of the Soviet Union where the Germans had been; and most of the land was cultivated. We landed a good distance outside Lublin, and the villages through which we then drove

along a terribly dusty road looked much the same as from the air—all fairly normal-

looking, with a large number of cattle about, and the landscape dotted with haystacks...

I was to stay several days in Lublin. The streets were crowded, which they seldom were in any newly-liberated Russian town; there was also great activity in the market place.

Everywhere there were many Russian and Polish soldiers. Before leaving, the Germans

had shot 100 Polish prisoners in the old Castle; but apart from a few burned-out

buildings, the city was more or less intact, complete with the Castle, the Radziwill Palace and the numerous churches.

Yet this first impression of normality was a little deceptive. The German occupation—

which had now lasted five years—had left a deep mark on the people of Lublin, and the arrival of the Russians here had not set their minds at rest; far from it. And, for over two years now, Lublin had, as it were, lived in the shadow of Maidanek, the great

extermination camp only two miles away. When the wind blew from the east it brought

with it the stench of burning human flesh from the crematoria chimneys.

At dinner on the night of our arrival with some of the local worthies and some of the

"Lublin Poles"—among them Colonel Wiktor Grosz [A few months before, Grosz, as one of the leading lights of the Union of Polish Patriots, had tried to go to London to present to the British Government the "Moscow Poles'" point of view, but had been refused a visa. Grosz was a brilliant writer, and spoke excellent English. He was to become one of the chief foreign policy advisers of the "Lublin Committee" and was later to play a leading rôle at the Polish foreign ministry in Warsaw until his premature death only a few years later.] whom I had already met in Moscow—I sat next to Professor Bielkowski,

who had, before the war, been Assistant Rector of Lublin University; he was one of the few Polish intellectuals who had survived the German occupation. Lublin University, he said, was closed by the Germans, and the Library looted; but he was given a wretched job in the Archives where he was expected to dig up books and documents to show that this part of Poland was urdeutscher Boden (ancestral German territory). "The whole thing was a mockery," he said, but would not go into any details on how the "research work"

was conducted, or on what results it had produced. He had obviously collaborated in a small way to save his life. And he was ready to admit that he was one of the few Polish intellectuals to have escaped.

"The Germans' policy," he said, "was to exterminate the Polish intelligentsia; and now that they are going to be thrown out of Poland before long, they want to make sure that our power of national recuperation is reduced to zero, if possible. In the last few days I have learned that the Germans have murdered dozens more of our professors—in

addition to the thousands and thousands of our intellectuals who have already perished in their concentration camps." He gave a long list of names. "They wanted Poland to be an inert mass of peasants and labourers, without leadership and without any kind of national prestige."

"And the clergy?" I asked.

"Yes, I'll grant you, the Church has done its best to maintain a sense of national cohesion and consciousness in Poland; but there are going to be complications now: most of the priests are pro-AK and anti-Russian."

"How are things here in Lublin?"

"You'll no doubt see Maidanek tomorrow; that's one aspect of Lublin. For the rest—well, things are taking shape, but slowly. There is a lot of worry and uncertainty. People are obsessed with the idea of Warsaw burning and its people being butchered by the

Germans."

"What's the feeling among the Polish people about the Russians? "

"Quite good," he said, "yes, quite good. Of course, I may be more pro-Russian than most Poles. I studied in St Petersburg; I like Russian people, and admire their great civilisation.

But it's no use denying it: there's a terribly old tradition of mutual distrust between Poles and Russians. Now, for the first time, I think, a real attempt is being made by the