Russia at war 1941-1945

Mikolajczyk then recalled the "wonderful reception he had been given at Cracow—an ovation, a real ovation." (At this point somebody whispered that it wasn't really a pro-Mikolajczyk ovation, but an anti-Bierut ovation).

In 1945, Poland's "Western Territories" were still a desert. Nearly all the Germans had gone, and the villages were mostly empty. Polish and Russian troops were being used to bring in the harvest. Here and there new settlers were coming in in driblets, some from the Lwow areas, some from tiny "uneconomical" farms in central Poland. Some came without cattle, and although they had been given good German farmhouses—in which

they had already installed then-holy pictures—they were living on potatoes and little else.

Some, between the Oder and the Western Neisse, were saying: "Here we have been given more land than what we had at home, but we have nothing to work it with—we've no

horses—and this isn't our country, anyway." Two years later, both the general picture in these parts and the people's mentality had changed completely. By 1947 they looked

upon it very much as their country. Gomulka, the minister then in charge of the Western Territories, had played a leading part in this process.

A few Germans were still living here in 1945. I remember the local miller's son, a sturdy youngster with turned-up nose and freckles. He looked bewildered. "I don't know where they will send us. We have nowhere to go. I have lived here all my life." On a road we met a procession of several hundred Germans, men, women, children, carrying bundles, and the old folks sitting in horse-carts. Polish soldiers, who were escorting them,

bellowed at them when they started telling us some tale of woe. The Germans had had no pity for the Poles; now the Poles had none for the Germans.

Danzig—now Gdansk—was hideous in its destruction. The fighting here had been very

heavy, and there were dozens of Russian mass-graves along the coastal road between

Gdynia and Danzig. Outside Danzig we saw an experimental factory for making soap out of human corpses, which had been run by a German professor called Spanner. It was a

nightmarish sight, with its vats full of human heads and torsoes pickled in some Hquid, and its pails full of a flakey substance—human soap. A slow-witted Germanised young

Pole, who had worked here as a laboratory assistant, and who now looked very scared, said that the factory had not gone much beyond the experimental stage, though what soap had actually been made was good. It had smelt bad, until some chemical had been added which made it smell of almonds. His mother had liked it. He said that, Professor Spanner had told him that after the war, the Germans would set up a soap factory in each

concentration camp, so that the whole thing could be run on a sound industrial basis.

Now that the Jews had been wiped out, they could start on millions of Slavs.

Back in Warsaw. I talked to a Russian colonel who said: "There are a lot of AK and NSZ

[Polish Fascist] terrorists everywhere, especially in places like Cracow. The PPR [the Polish Communists] are having a very tough time; hundreds of their officials have been bumped off. One has to be very brave to be a Polish communist. In Czechoslovakia there is great enthusiasm for the Red Army, but not here in Poland. The Poles are difficult people; the only good thing is that they hate the Germans even more than they hate us; it may make things easier between us in the long run, especially with the Oder-Neisse

frontier, on which they are all very keen. Also, the Red Army is pulling out of Poland, except on the communication lines to Germany, and that may make them feel better and stop all their silly talk about the 'Russian occupation'."

Meanwhile, however, a little civil war was going on in Poland below the surface—and

not so very far below. It did not stop until 1947, and not without the help of the Army and a powerful police force, both built up with Russian advice and assistance. Mikolajczyk fled in 1948, Cyrankiewicz replaced Osöbka-Morawski, but, after several years of

"Stalinist" terror (though less violent in Poland than elsewhere) a different kind of Poland emerged, with Gomulka at its head—that very Gomulka whom Mikolajczyk regarded in

1945 as a criminal maniac. It was, however, wrong to assume that in 1945 there were no genuine socialists or communists in Poland, except those "sold" to the Russians, or that all Poles loved the West; just as there were very many Czechs, so there were also numerous Poles who remembered only too well that their country's alliance with the West had done them no good in 1939.