Russia at war 1941-1945

One young man, I remember, took me aside and drew my attention to a large inscription painted on a wall; it said "MONTE CASSINO". "Monte Cassino," he said, "that's a Polish victory won on the other side, and we are particularly proud of it... It was our people who painted the inscription." "Your people?" I said, "You mean the Armija Krajowa?" He nodded. "The war seems to be going well," he said, "but you realise there are many buts, many, many buts. .. There's Warsaw, and we don't trust these Lublin Committee people... Well, you know what I mean... And 2,000 arrests." He was a pink-cheeked young man of about twenty-three with carefully-plastered hair which, however, strangely contrasted with his shabby clothes; he had worked as an accountant under the Germans, but was also active in the Polish "London" underground. Now, he said, he was going to be mobilised into the Polish Army. "Seems reasonable enough, I suppose," he said, "to be mobilised to fight the Germans, though I can't say I am particularly delighted to fight under Russian orders... "

Since the end of the war, there have been numerous accounts of various German

Extermination Camps—Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Belsen and others—but the story of

Maidanek has not perhaps been fully told to Western readers; moreover, Maidanek holds a very special place in the Soviet-German war.

As they advanced, the Russians had been learning more and more of German atrocities

and the enormous number of killings. But, somehow, all this killing was spread over

relatively wide areas, and though it added up to far, far more than Maidanek, it did not have the vast monumental, "industrial" quality of that unbelievable Death Factory two miles from Lublin.

"Unbelievable" it was: when I sent the BBC a detailed report on Maidanek in August 1944, they refused to use it; they thought it was a Russian propaganda stunt, and it was not till the discovery in the west of Buchenwald, Dachau and Belsen that they were

convinced that Maidanek and Auschwitz were also genuine...

The Russians discovered Maidanek on July 23, the very day they entered Lublin. About a week later Simonov described it all in Pravda; but most of the Western press ignored his account. But in Russia the effect was devastating. Everybody had heard of Babyi Yar and thousands of other German atrocities; but this was something even more staggering. It brought into sharper focus than anything else had done the real nature, scope and

consequences of the Nazi régime in action. For here was a vast industrial undertaking in which thousands of "ordinary" Germans had made it a full-time job to murder millions of other people in a sort of mass orgy of professional sadism, or, worse still, with the business-like conviction that this was a job like any other. The effect of Maidanek was to be enormous, not least in the Red Army. Thousands of Russian soldiers were made to

visit it.

My first reaction to Maidanek was a feeling of surprise. I had imagined something

horrible and sinister beyond words. It was nothing like that. It looked singularly harmless from outside. "Is that it? " was my first reaction when we stopped at what looked like a large workers' settlement. Behind us was the many towered skyline of Lublin. There was much dust on the road, and the grass was a dull, greenish-grey colour. The camp was

separated from the road by a couple of barbed-wire fences, but these did not look

particularly sinister, and might have been put up outside any military or semi-military establishment. The place was large; like a whole town of barracks painted a pleasant soft green. There were many people around—soldiers and civilians. A Polish sentry opened

the barbed-wire gate to let our cars enter the central avenue, with large green barracks on either side. And then we stopped outside a large barrack marked Bad und Desinfektion II.

"This," somebody said, "is where large numbers of those arriving at the camp were brought in."

The inside of this barrack was made of concrete, and water taps came out of the wall, and around the room there were benches where the clothes were put down and afterwards collected. So this was the place into which they were driven. Or perhaps they were

politely invited to "Step this way, please?" Did any of them suspect, while washing themselves after a long journey, what would happen a few minutes later? Anyway, after the washing was over, they were asked to go into the next room; at this point even the most unsuspecting must have begun to wonder. For the "next room" was a series of large square concrete structures, each about one-quarter of the size of the bath-house, and, unlike it, had no windows. The naked people (men one time, women another time,

children the next) were driven or forced from the bath-house into these dark concrete boxes—about five yards square—and then, with 200 or 250 people packed into each box