During the early years of WWII, the Soviets invaded and occupied the independent country of Lithuania in the Baltics. In June of 1941, the Germans turned on their ally and invaded the Soviet Union, including Lithuania and its capital, Vilnius. Twenty-five percent of the city’s population was Jewish.
Vilnius, Lithuania Old Town Skyline. Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC BY-SA 3.0. Courtesy of Wikipedia
By late summer 1941, the SS Einsatzgruppen, Hitler’s elite killing squads, began escorting Jewish men, women, and children to large pits in the Ponary Forest outside Vilnius to shoot them. The Nazis murdered tens of thousands of Jews as well as Poles and Russians in this forest.
When World War II began, thirty-nine-year-old German shopkeeper Toni Schmid from Vienna, Austria, was drafted into the German army. Schmid did not support the Nazis or Hitler but was a deeply committed Christian. Schmid was a sergeant and ran an army post behind German troops for soldiers who were stragglers or were separated from their units. In 1941 he was sent to Vilnius where he witnessed SS troops murdering Jewish children. Horrified, he wanted to help the Jews but didn’t know how.
One night Sergeant Schmid walked down a dark street in Vilnius, and a desperate, young Jewish woman stepped out of the shadows and begged him to protect her from the SS death squads. He took her to his apartment for the night and the following day to a Catholic priest he knew.
The priest issued the woman a certificate of membership from his church. Schmid helped her obtain an official identity card and an apartment to rent. He told the German officials that she was a civilian employee from his military unit and the Soviets had taken her documents when they retreated.
Sergeant Schmid helped a young Jewish man also hiding from the death squads. Schmid gave him a German army uniform and the military identity papers of a German soldier who’d died, but his death hadn’t been reported. Then Schmid installed the young man as a military aide in his office.
One of Schmid’s duties was to oversee workshops manned by convalescing German soldiers, Russian POW’s, and Jews with skills needed for the war effort. Although he was only allowed to employ fifteen Jews, Schmid hired dozens to work in the shops.
Site of the Ponary massacre, where the German Nazis and their collaborators executed up to 100,000 people of various nationalities. About 70,000 of them were Jews. Photo by Avi1111 DR. AVISHAI TEICHER. License: CC BY-SA 3.0. Courtesy of Wikipedia.
Under the cover of darkness, Schmid visited the Vilnius ghetto and supplied the Jews with food, medicine, and baby bottles filled with milk he had kept warm in his pockets. He warned the ghetto residents when Nazi raids were about to take place. Some of Schmid’s Jewish workers were caught in roundups, but he went to the local prison and obtained their release. He hid Jews in the back of covered trucks headed for German-occupied areas of the Soviet Union, hoping they would be safer there than in Lithuania.
Sergeant Schmid secretly advised the leaders of a Jewish resistance movement in the Vilnius ghetto. He helped transport Jewish resistance fighters out of the city, warned them of pending German operations, and even supplied them with stolen German weapons. He also permitted resistance members to meet in his apartment.
Schmid’s good deeds did not escape the notice of the Gestapo, and agents began following him. One day they raided his apartment while he was visiting the ghetto. Some of Schmid’s soldiers located him before he arrived home and warned him that Gestapo agents were waiting at his apartment. Schmid fled, but the Nazis caught him after several weeks and sentenced him to death.
Prior to his arrest, Sergeant Schmid had assisted almost 300 Jews to escape the Nazis in Lithuania. On April 13, 1942, he was executed by a Nazi firing squad. The last words out of his mouth were the Lord’s Prayer.
The night before his execution, Sergeant Schmid wrote a letter to his wife and daughter in Austria.
“‘I am informing you, my dearest that I must depart from this world, I am sentenced to death. Please remain strong and trust in our dear God, who decides the destiny of each of us….Now I close my last lines, the last I can write to you, and send my love.’”
Sergeant Schmid took to heart Christ’s teaching that “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” But Sergeant Schmid went one step further – he gave his life for strangers.
Source:
Gragg, Rod. My Brother’s Keeper. Center Street, 2016.
When the Soviet Union invaded and occupied Poland at the beginning of WWII, the secret police (NKVD) immediately began arresting and deporting Polish citizens identified before the invasion. They simply pulled out their prepared lists . . .
These initial arrests focused on individuals holding leadership roles in the government, in the church, in education, in the military, as well as foreigners and those who had visited foreign countries. In February 1940, hundreds of thousands of landowners and their families were sent to labor camps in northern Russia and Siberia.
In April 1940, family members of individuals previously arrested were transported to camps in Kazakhstan. Smaller numbers of Ukrainians and Jews were also deported.
Over one million people “rode the rails” to exile.
Maria Zareba Andrzejewska was deported with her mother and sisters during one of these mass roundups. Prior to WWII, Maria’s father served as mayor of a small town in Eastern Poland where Maria and her sisters lived peacefully, enjoying skiing, hiking, playing sports, reading, and picking mushrooms.
After the Soviets occupied Eastern Poland, they arrested, imprisoned, and then deported Maria’s father in October 1939. Six months later, in April 1940, Soviet soldiers pounded on the Zareba’s door at 4:00 AM, demanded entry, and gave the women only fifteen minutes to pack. They gathered many clothes but only a little food and rode by horse and buggy to Kolomyja where they were deposited in a cattle boxcar holding fifty to sixty people. The guards bolted the windowless boxcar from the outside, and the occupants were only allowed to leave their quarters one time during their month-long train journey.
Deportation to the Soviet Union. Courtesy of Official Composite.
Maria and her family prayed and sang as they traveled to Kazakhstan, hoping they would be able to return home soon. Upon arrival, the Zareba women were assigned to a dirt hut with no stove or furniture. Thirty people slept side by side on the clay floor. They dug water ditches for field irrigation, gathered hay during harvest season, and subsisted on very small rations of food.
Knowing little work would be available during the cold winter months, and the Soviets only distributed food to those who worked, Maria’s family bartered clothes for food in the villages. In the fall, they moved to a small chicken coop and endured the cold, dark, and brutal winter which followed. Snow built up until it covered the entire dwelling.
The Zarebas survived by melting snow for water and making a thin soup, which they ate once a day. To entertain themselves they sang and played instruments made of combs.
After walking to the local villages, Maria’s feet froze, causing festering boils on her toes. Maria’s sister developed large black sores all over her legs that spread to her torso, and she lay unconscious for weeks. Maria developed a milder form of the disease.
In the spring of 1941, the Zarebas worked in the fields and later in huge stables, caring for cattle. The deportees were told they could gather leftover sunflower seeds after the harvest, but other officials arrived and told them they were committing a crime against the state and could be arrested. The officials confiscated the bags of seeds the hungry children and teens had collected, much to their sorrow.
In June of 1941, the Germans invaded Eastern Poland and attacked the Soviet Union. Two months later the Zareba’s manager revealed that the Soviets and the Polish government-in-exile in London had signed an agreement granting the deportees amnesty so they could form an army to help the Allies fight the Germans.
The exiles were free to leave, so the Zarebas sold everything possible and purchased train tickets to go south, where General Anders was gathering and training the Polish Army. Traveling for weeks and suffering more hunger and disease, the Zareba women hoped to find their husband and father if he was still alive.
The women arrived in Samarkand, Uzbekistan and lived on the streets for three weeks. They were attacked and robbed.
A friend helped the Zarebas move to Zirabulak, where Maria worked in a cotton factory and her older sister labored in the mines. They stayed in the factory’s little living quarters. Maria’s older sister met her future husband, a Polish Army officer, and he helped the family arrange transportation to Krasnowodsk, a port town on the Caspian Sea. From there they crossed over to Pahlavi, Persia, on an overloaded dilapidated ship, full of hungry and ill passengers.
A ship carrying Polish soldiers and civilian refugees arrives in Iran from the Soviet Union, 1942. Courtesy of Wikipedia.
The Zareba women sheltered temporarily in tents on the beach until relocating to Tehran.
The British occupied part of Iran at this time, but the Iranians assisted the Polish exiles and treated them warmly. In Tehran a miracle took place . . .
Maria’s father had survived his imprisonment in the Soviet Union and after his release was searching for his family. What a joyful reunion took place in Iran! All the Zarebas were together again except Maria’s oldest sister who had fled with an aunt to Romania at the beginning of the war.
While waiting in Tehran for the war to end, Maria, her sisters, and thousands of other Polish youth attended school.
Maria’s father was sent to England, and the family later followed. At a Polish Military Resettlement Camp near Liverpool, Maria met her future husband Antek who had fought in the Polish Home Army, survived Auschwitz, and escaped to join the Polish Army in Italy.
After, Maria and Antek’s engagement, Antek moved to Alberta, Canada, and Maria followed six months later. They married the next month in February 1950. Maria’s sisters and their families also immigrated to Edmonton, Alberta, where many other Polish immigrants had settled after the war. After the death of Maria’s dear father in England, Maria’s mother joined the girls in Canada. Maria and Antek were blessed with three children and four grandchildren in their adopted land.
Germany and the Soviet Union defeated and divided Poland between them in September of 1939. The Soviets quickly arrested and deported University professors, police officers, border guards, lawyers, doctors, pastors, priests, physicians, engineers, journalists, pilots, teachers, landowners, writers, chaplains, civic leaders, and any other person deemed a threat to the establishment of a communist society. The Soviets arrested anyone wearing a uniform, even boy scouts!
A column of arrested Polish police officers, civilian public servants and other “enemies of the people,” being escorted by the Red Army in “liberated” Eastern Poland in September 1939. From the Soviet Cinema Newsreel.
The fascinating story of Mietek Rymaszewski begins in the small town of Malkowicze in Soviet-occupied Eastern Poland during the winter of 1940. Mietek belonged to a youth cadet organization but had been too young to fight at the outbreak of WWII. After a number of families from his town were deported to Siberia in February, word came of his own impending arrest due to his youth organization ties.
Mietek packed underwear, food, and a little money, bade farewell to his mother and younger brother and left during the night with two female school friends. He never returned to Malkowicze. The train ride toward the border was interrupted twice by NKVD (secret police) passenger checks. At the first check he was questioned about the contents of the suitcase he carried for one of his friends.
Mietek replied that he was taking the items to his sister at college, and the NKVD let him pass. The two girls said they were traveling to college, and they were allowed through. At the next passenger check, Mietek and his friends moved to a group that had already been processed, avoiding another search. The threesome arrived safely in the city of Łomża, near the border between Soviet occupied Poland and East Prussia (Germany).
Mietek and his companions went to a prearranged address where they waited for an opportunity to cross into German-controlled territory. The moon was full and the nights were too light to avoid detection in the open, flat country covered with deep snow. Growing impatient, Mietek left with a guide who took him to within three kilometers of the border. Before parting, Mietek questioned his guide thoroughly about nearby villages, landmarks, woodlands, and the best places to cross the border. Later when he was intercepted by a Russian soldier, he posed as a local citizen, accurately describing the area. The soldier let him pass, but Mietek returned to Łomża because of the impossibility of successfully crossing the border. The Russian patrols were too active at the time.
Łomża, Poland
Mietek’s two schoolmates sold some of their jewelry and returned home, but the jewelry dealer sold out the owner of the house and the other potential escapees. The NKVD surrounded the house, arrested everyone, and took them to the NKVD station in an old seminary. The officers plied the prisoners with questions. Who were they? Where were they from? And what they were doing in Lomza? The prisoners were put in separate cellars at the old seminary so they couldn’t talk with one another but not before Mietek let his companions know he had changed his name. He was determined to protect his mother.
Fifty men shared the cellar with Mietek, including smugglers from Warsaw who bragged about their exploits. They described their route in detail, and Mietek memorized everything he heard. Since the penalty for those coming into the Soviet occupied section of Poland was less severe than for those caught escaping, Mietek prepared his story. When he was questioned, he said he had come from Warsaw and was headed to Bialystok (about 80 km/50 miles away) to find his uncle. He described his journey, including a detour at the river Narew where the bridge had been blown up. He had crossed an improvised bridge and took another train.
When Mietek’s interrogators asked him how he had crossed the border (from German-occupied territory into Russian-occupied territory), he claimed he didn’t know he’d crossed the border. The NKVD believed him. An army officer came in to report the arrival of new captives, and the NKVD berated the officer for not having stopped Mietek at the crossing.
Mietek’s interrogation lasted for several weeks, and the NKVD officers used a variety of methods to coerce confessions from the prisoners for whatever they were accused of committing—usually spying. The prisoners were forced to sit on a small stool with sharp edges and corners, which cut into their spines. The NKVD used special handcuffs, tightening them until the prisoners’ hands turned blue, causing pain and then numbness. They stood the prisoners against a wall and pointed a gun to their heads. Another interrogator would enter and gently question the prisoners and then pretend that he was going to shoot them also. Prisoners were pulled in for questioning at two o’clock in the morning, submitted to a volley of rapid-fire questions, and suffered if their answers were inconsistent.
A well-known engineer in Mietek’s cellar was accused of spying, and the NKVD tortured him for hours at a time. He would come back covered in bruises, bleeding, and unable to walk.
Someone scratched a hole in the wall, allowing communication with the women prisoners in the next cell. The women collected a matchbox full of lice, and when an inspector visited, they complained about the conditions. The inspector said the lice problem was their own fault, so they threw their collection at him, and he raced out of the cellar.
Mietek was transferred to the Łomża Prison and later taken with hundreds of other prisoners to the railway station and loaded into cattle trucks. Destination – Siberia.
The next morning the train pulled out of the station headed east. The prisoners united to sing a patriotic Polish song, vowing to “defend the Polish spirit” from the Russians. The guards riding between and on top of the cattle cars unsuccessfully tried to quiet the prisoners.
After passing through five cities and into Byelorussia, the train stopped at Gomel near the Ukraine, and the prisoners were escorted in groups of fifty to the local prison. Mietek saw the largest rats he’d ever seen. They ran along the top of the wall and fed on corpses in the mortuary.
Fifty men shared the 4 by 5 meter cells (13 x 16 feet). They were only allowed to exercise in the yard for ten minutes each day. As they marched down the winding stairs, a number of prisoners committed suicide by jumping down head first, forcing the Russians to install netting on the bannisters to prevent these deaths. One prisoner hid in an outbuilding and escaped over the wall after dark. Dogs tracked him, and the Soviets beat him up, put him in a penal cell, and reduced his food allotment.
An epidemic of dysentery passed through the prison—those with the worst cases went to the hospital on the ground floor. They were stripped and given only a blanket so they wouldn’t climb out the bathroom window, jump onto the wall and attempt to escape.
In August of 1940, the NKVD (Soviet Secret Police) sentenced Mietek to serve three years in corrective camps of the Northern Railway in Kotlas, Northern Russia. He refused to sign the paper, so the NKVD officer signed the documents for him, using Mietek’s false name since the NKVD had never discovered his true identity. He was taken to a new cell, and one of the occupants jumped up calling out Mietek’s name. To everyone’s surprise, Mietek’s cousin Edward was also a prisoner. The two remained together for the rest of their captivity.
Again the Soviets separated the prisoners into groups of fifty, escorted them to the railway station, and loaded them in cattle trucks. They traveled through Minsk and then Smolensk where Mietek’s grandfather had been wounded during WWI.
Soviet Deportation Train
Between Leningrad and Kotlas, a Bielorussin cut a hole in the floor of a cattle truck with a piece of flint and dropped between the rails. Unfortunately the guards saw him, stopped the train, and beat the prisoner black and blue.
They arrived at Kotlas to find a camp holding a few huts, a high barbed wire fence with a tower in each corner, soldiers brandishing rifles and machine guns, and knee-deep mud. There were two ditches – one for drinking water and one for a latrine. After a short time at this camp, the prisoners were taken in groups of fifty about eight kilometers through the taiga to the Northern Dvina River. They sailed north on barges for a few days, stopping at night. They were given 300 grams (10.5 oz.) of bread and a small piece of boiled fish during the journey.
The new camp was a completely empty square piece of ground, so Mietek and his fellow prisoners used tools lent to them and cut down trees to build shelters and fires. Since Mietek had grown up in the forest, he built a safe shelter for himself and a small group of fellow prisoners; however, others built inadequate shelters which collapsed during the night, killing the occupants.
Mietek and the other prisoners decided to escape while they were out of camp collecting firewood, but on the planned day Mietek woke up with legs so swollen his flesh hung over his boot leggings. He had scurvy and the escape was called off. The prisoners later learned to boil pine and spruce needles and drink the brew to fight scurvy. They boiled willow bark and twigs to make a drink substituting for aspirin. They also boiled the twigs of bilberries to cure diarrhea. The water in the ditches overflowed and mixed with the drinking water, causing dysentery, so the prisoners learned to only drink water from melted snow.
After a few weeks the prisoners moved to a new camp where they found marquee type tents pulled over a wooden frame-work with a small metal stove and firewood inside. A group of Estonian sailors shared Mietek’s tent. These strong, healthy, intelligent, and good-looking young men needed lots of food, but they didn’t get it and were the first to die. The old and weak perished next. A group of Lithuanians in the tent also died – the last one with his head frozen to the tent. From November, 1940 to February, 1941, 300 of the 360 captives died.
The prisoners built a railway line from Kotlas to Vorkuta by digging soil from the hillside and taking it in wheelbarrows to the embankment. If they didn’t obtain the required cubic meters of soil each day, their food rations were reduced – 300 grams (10.5 oz.) of bread and some watery soup twice a day.
A Russian railway supervisor, also a prisoner, asked to buy Mietek’s jacket and boots – hunting boots with high leggings made of very good leather. Mietek agreed, although the items were worth much more than the supervisor paid for them. But he did reward Mietek with a new job – measuring and recording the soil in each man’s wheelbarrow. It was wise Mietek was meticulous in his measurements because a supervisor checked his work. Later he heard that six million cubic meters had been overlooked and two Russian engineers were shot for it.
One morning after a heavy snowfall in late December, Mietek strode to his worksite in the frigid temperatures and worked up a sweat. Finding a hole that had been chiseled in the ice of a nearby river, he drew a cup of water and drank from it. A nasty chill resulted, and by the end of the day, a 102°F fever gripped him. On December 31st, Mietek was taken to the hospital, a deep dugout located outside the prison camp. At first he was delirious, but soon he lost consciousness.
Sometime later, Mietek awakened but couldn’t lift his head. After drifting off, he woke again and asked how long he had been at the hospital. The doctor pointed to a calendar tacked to a post. The day was February 5th. He’d been unconscious for thirty-six days! Lena, a nurse and also a prisoner, brought bread, dipped it in tea, and fed Mietek by hand. She had kept him alive in the same way all the weeks he was unconscious.
Mietek gradually gained strength and helped the nurses by carrying food to the other patients. Later when the doctor examined him, the doctor told Mietek he was all right but just needed food. To help solve the problem, the doctor hired Mietek to keep a fire going in his dugout at night. When the doctor came in, he shared food brought from the kitchen with Mietek.
On May 11th Mietek was escorted back to camp and returned to work the next day – cutting firewood for locomotives. A nasty blizzard struck and left a case of frostbite on Mietek’s face. The male sickroom nurse provided him with a mixture of surgical spirit and glycerin, and his skin began to heal after a few weeks.
Mietek and his fellow prisoners moved on to build an embankment to support bridge timbers for a rail line spanning a deep river. Next, they relocated to a camp on the River Pechora where they pulled timber out of the river, cut it, and rolled it to a small sawmill to be cut for railway sleepers. Here Mietek saw eskimos and reindeer for the first time.
Many young Russians lived in this camp, and some of them stole whatever they wanted or took the items by force. One Russian demanded Mietek’s soup, so he quickly drank it and rammed the bowl in the Russian’s mouth, causing his mouth to bleed. The same fellow approached Mietek as he was lying down that night, so Mietek struck him a few times with a stick, and the Russian walked off holding his ribs. The fellow didn’t bother Mietek again.
After the ice on the Ust Usa River melted, the prisoners sailed up the river on barges and crossed the Arctic Circle. They passed an area where many human bones protruded from the melting snow. Some of the Russians thought these were the remains of eight hundred slaves who’d been trapped by an Arctic storm while they were marching on foot to Vorkuta (an area where prisoners slaved in the uranium mines).
It was thought that the whole convoy had frozen except for the escort commander who’d escaped with a pack of dogs. Since Mietek and his fellow prisoners were heading to the same place, he expected the Soviets to force them to work the mines until the radiation finished them off. Meanwhile, the men in his convoy continued to die from malnutrition.
But . . . another miracle transpired.
Before arriving in Vorkuta, an official boarded and pulled all the prisoners from Poland off the barges. Because Germany had invaded Russia, the Soviets were joining the Allies in their fight against the Germans and had agreed to release all Polish citizens held in the Soviet Union. They released Polish POW General Anders from prison to immediately gather and train a Polish Army in the east to aid the Allied fight.
The Soviets sent Mietek back to camp and tried to persuade him to join their army, but he carefully responded that he hadn’t been educated in Russian and wouldn’t feel right in the Russian Army. Instead, Mietek and a group of other former prisoners boarded a cattle truck and rode south to join the Polish Armed Forces in the East. They rode the same rail line they had previously built and relished the freedom of traveling unguarded in Russia for the first time.
Obtaining food became an immediate priority. Along the way, the former prisoners were occasionally given boiled fish and a piece of bread, and at some stations they obtained all the boiled water they wanted. At one stop Mietek exchanged his shirt for a small bantam hen and a few potatoes. He plucked and cleaned the hen, confiscated a large can by a well, gathered nettles, and made four gallons of soup. Since the train never stopped for long, Mietek built a fire at each stop, gradually cooking the broth until it was ready to eat.
Mietek traveled from Kotlas in northern Russia through Svierdlovsk and Kyubishov to Buzeluk on the southern Russian frontier, each time expecting to find a Polish recruiting station but only to discover the offices had moved. He and his companions traveled through the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan and entered Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, also under Soviet control.
While waiting at a stop further south, Mietek attempted to do some trading. He went to the closest hamlet and knocked on a door. He was invited in and discovered a poor Russian family of three sharing a meal of tiny potatoes. Observing their plight, Mietek only asked for water, but after the family learned that he had been recently released from the labor camps, they insisted he share their meal. With tears in her eyes, the Russian woman gave Mietek a half glass of milk from their meager stores.
Continuing south, Mietek and his companions arrived in Samarkand (outer Mongolia) and slept outside for a few nights until barges arrived and took them to Nukus near the Aral Sea. They walked behind an Uzbeki riding an oxen-driven cart to a collective farm 120 kilometers away and stayed with the Uzbeki families. They slept in a tent-like accommodation covered with homemade felt, ate sesame flat bread, rice and sesame meal noodles with some meat, and drank boiled water. Mietek’s host was the local school teacher who was embittered because the Red Army had killed his father, confiscated his father’s lands, and eaten his herds of livestock without compensation. He vowed to one day get it back.
After news arrived that the Polish recruiting office had reopened in Bukhara, Mietek and his fellow travelers spent a day and a night walking back to Nukus where they soaked their blistered feet in the river. They sailed on barges down the River Amudarya to Farab near Samarkand and were encouraged by the majestic flight of three white eagles above the river. Mietek also witnessed the reunion of a Polish husband and wife who’d been separated since 1939 and had survived the labor camps. In Farab, they stayed in rail trucks and were given a dead dog to eat. While Mietek was with an NKVD officer getting soup (boiled water with a few green tomatoes), some of his companions stole millet. After he returned, they were all arrested by the local militia and sent to the Samarkand Prison.
A number of Russians and Uzbekis shared Mietek’s cell. One Russian was imprisoned for being fifteen minutes late to work (his wife was sick). Mietek and his companions went to court where his charges were dropped, but three others were given the maximum sentence (death penalty). Then a man spoke, pleading that the men had been brought up in a capitalist country and didn’t know the difference between right and wrong, and they should be allowed to repay their crime by joining the army. The court released them with a warning to be out of Samarkand within twenty-four hours.
Mietek and a friend walked to Bukhara, surviving on weeds and desert tortoise eggs. When they arrived, the recruiting office was empty, but after two days a Polish 2nd lieutenant arrived and took them to the railway station. He shielded them from Soviet agents who were in the area conscripting the local men for the Russian Army. They traveled to Kermine where the Polish garrison was stationed, and Mietek gave his true name for the first time since he had been captured by the Soviets in Poland. Despite reaching the Polish Army, forty men died daily from the prolonged starvation they had endured. Even Mietek collapsed and spent two days in the hospital where he was put on a special diet.
As the Polish recruits gained strength, their military training increased. For a time, the Soviets refused to provide the Polish garrison at Kermine with transportation to Persia (Iran), where they planned to connect with the British Army. Instead the Soviets tried to persuade them to fight on the Eastern Front with the Russian Army. The Polish military leaders objected, and the troops prepared to march out. The Soviets didn’t have enough forces in the area to stop them, so they provided transportation to Krasnovodskon on the Caspian Sea.
The Polish troops and civilians at Krasnovodsk crossed the Caspian Sea on rusty, old ships, fighting dysentery and dehydration. One day while standing in line for his water ration, Mietek noticed a pair of bright, young eyes watching him through the gaps in the steps. Then he heard a young voice say, “Mum, it’s Mietek.” The girl’s mother appeared and greeted him. She was the daughter of the station master from his home town in Poland! She shared that they had been deported to Siberia with his mother, brother, and grandfather. She gave Mietek his mother’s address, and he was able to later make contact with her.
In Pahlavi, Iran, the troops showered, obtained haircuts, and were powdered with insecticide. They burned their uniforms and were issued new tropical uniforms. Mietek was posted to Iraq, where he defended a refinery and later an airport and served as a driving instructor. His unit transferred to Palestine and then North Africa. In Egypt, Mietek volunteered for the infantry and fought in Italy. He was wounded in a battle on the the Kenti River and was hospitalized in Taranto and in Scotland. He recuperated and returned to Italy, where he guarded German POW’s following the war.
After his time of service, Mietek settled in England and worked for the forestry commission. He married Stephanie Burnett, an English widow. The Soviets resettled Mietek’s mother in western Poland, but Mietek didn’t see her again until she visited him in England in 1963, twenty-four years after parting. They didn’t recognize each other after all that time, but she stayed for five months. When Mietek visited Poland in 1988 (after a 49-year absence), he was disturbed by the moral scars caused by the communist domination of the country.
What: In a surprise move on the seventeenth day of the German invasion of Poland, the Soviet Union invaded from the east. The Nazis and Soviets had secretly agreed the month before to divide the country. Because the Polish military leadership had ordered the Polish forces not to engage the Soviets, the Red Army advanced rapidly with little opposition.
Problem: Stalin and the NKVD (the secret police and forerunner of the KGB) planned to quickly transform the eastern portion of Poland into a communist society and incorporate it into the USSR, but the educated classes stood in the way.
Lvov, the third largest city in Poland, was under German attack when Soviet troops arrived on September 19, 1939. Polish General Langner rejected German demands to surrender and abdicated to the Soviets instead. The negotiated agreement called for the 30,000 Polish troops in the city to surrender at 15:00 hours on September 22. The agreement allowed the soldiers to return home and the officers to cross the border into Romania or Hungary.
The Polish officers assembled at the designated time and laid down their arms, but the Soviets marched them off and transported them around the country for four days without food or water.
At station stops the soldiers scrounged for roots in unharvested gardens, and strangers thrust food at them. They eventually landed in prison camps to the east.
Polish prisoners of war captured by the Red Army after the Soviet invasion of Poland – Wikipedia
Before the war, the Polish government had required every non-exempt university graduate to join the military reserves. University professors, physicians, lawyers, engineers, teachers, writers, journalists, pilots, and chaplains made up the pool of reservists mobilized when Germany invaded. Those that weren’t captured in the initial surrender were easily rounded up later and transferred into the custody of the NKVD. This included police officers, border guards, landowners, refugees, and a prince.
From October 1939 through February 1940, the soldiers endured lengthy interrogations and constant political agitation in concentration camps established on the former grounds of orthodox monasteries in the western USSR. If the captives resisted the Soviet government, they were condemned to die as enemies of the state.
In March of 1940, Stalin signed the death warrant for over 20,000 officers, soldiers, and civilians. They were secretly shot and buried in mass graves. One such grave site was in Katyn, Russia. Although the captives were executed and buried in various locations, Katyn Forest became the symbol of the atrocity. In all, the NKVD annihilated almost half of the Polish Officer Corp.
Professor Stanislaw Swianiewicz was condemned to die at Katyn, but a NKVD colonel pulled the professor out of line while he waited to board a bus to the execution site. Swianiewicz had studied in Moscow before the Russian Revolution, was an internationally recognized expert on forced labor in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, and had written books on the Soviet economy. He was sent to various prisons, interrogated, and eventually incarcerated in Siberia.
Another officer, General Wladyslaw Anders, had commanded a cavalry brigade which had engaged in heavy fighting with the Germans. While fleeing to the Hungarian border in late September of 1939, he and his troops fought the Soviets. He was injured, captured, and eventually sent to prison in Moscow, thus avoiding the same fate as his fellow officers.
The NKVD arrested, tortured and killed thousands of other Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, and Belorussians from 1940 to 1941. Estimates vary among historians, but it’s believed that 300,000 to 1.2 million Poles were deported to Northern Russia, Siberia, and Central Asia during this time period.
Many died in transit or in exile.
After the Germans overran Eastern Poland and attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, the Soviets formed an alliance with Great Britain and the Polish government-in-exile in London. As part of their agreement, Stalin released all surviving Polish prisoners with the understanding that they would assist in the fight against the Nazis.
General Anders was freed and given command of the Polish Army in the east. It was his responsibility to gather and train the recently released Polish prisoners to form the new army. When inquiries were made regarding the whereabouts of the thousands of missing Polish officers, Stalin claimed that he had lost track of them in Manchuria.
Germany uncovered and exposed the Katyn atrocity to the world in 1943. The Soviets denied responsibility, claiming the Germans had killed the soldiers found in the mass graves. The Polish government-in-exile objected, so Stalin broke off relations with them. Great Britain and the United States chose to accept the Soviet explanation of Germany’s guilt rather than rouse the ire of their ally.
General Anders led his freed Polish troops through Iran and Iraq to Palestine where he successfully organized and trained them to fight the Germans. The Anders Army went on to fight in the Italian Campaign, capturing Monte Cassino in 1944. He and his soldiers engaged in other major battles before the war ended. Anders died in London in 1970.
Professor Swianiewicz was released from Siberia, and left the Soviet Union in 1942. He worked with the Polish government-in-exile in London and informed them of the number of Polish officers that were held in the Soviet Union in the spring of 1940. Later he wrote about the Katyn Massacre and lectured at numerous universities around the world. He died near London in 1997 at the age of 97.
The Soviets also released thousands of previously deported Polish civilians, including many women and children who left the Soviet Union with the Anders Army.
It wasn’t until 1990 that Russia admitted responsibility for the massacre and expressed “profound regret” for its actions.
Sources:
Williamson, David G. Poland Betrayed. Stackpole Books, 2007.
During World War II, the Doolittle Raiders were the first to launch fully loaded B-25‘s off an aircraft carrier. In 1942, these airmen did the impossible and lifted off from the Enterprise aircraft carrier and bombed Japan by total surprise. The pilots were ordered to drop their bombs and fly directly to airfields in free China, but all the men knew if the Japanese didn’t shoot them down they faced the likelihood of running out of fuel before reaching China.
Pilot Ski York and copilot Robert Emmens of Plane #8 had both missed out on the training the other pilots had participated in at Eglin Air Force Base. Yet their plane safely leaped into the air as the deck of the USS Enterprise disappeared beneath them. The crew breathed a sigh of relief.
York piloted his plane to Japan and bombed a large factory installation. After strafing an airfield and not encountering any opposition, the men of Plane #8 made their getaway, flying just above the treetops. Navigator/bombardier Nolan Herndon calculated they would run out of gas over the ocean, three hundred miles from free China.
York made the decision to fly to the Soviet Union which was much closer. By that time, the U.S.S.R. had joined the Allies. York directly disobeyed his commander, Jimmy Doolittle, who had ordered the Raiders not to land in the Soviet Union under any circumstances.
The Raiders of Plane #8 reached the Soviet coastline and turned inland. They sighted a small airport thirty miles from the city of Vladivostok and made a perfect landing. The Russians greeting the airmen didn’t speak English, but they correctly identified the airmen as “Americanski.” They communicated through sign language and provided the Raiders with food and vodka.
The airmen asked for gasoline and an opportunity to contact the American Embassy, but their requests were put off. The next morning the Raiders were informed that their plane was ready, but, when they emerged from their quarters, they discovered a DC-3 waiting for them.
The crew of Plane #8 was taken to Khabarovsk, Siberia, and interrogated by a Russian general who informed them they would be interned in the Soviet Union. The airmen were taken outside the city to an army dacha by the Amur River, across from Manchuria.“ The Soviets provided beds, three meals a day, and a guard for each of the men. The Raiders were convinced they would only be interned for a week or two.
Amur River Basin – Note the Cities of Vladivostok and Khabarovsk on the Right Courtesy of Wikimedia By Kmusser – Own work using Digital Chart of the World and GTOPO data
Ten days later the Soviets locked the Raiders and their guards in a third-class sleeper car attached to a freight train. The men traveled for twenty-one days to the village of Okhuna, three hundred miles south of Moscow. The U.S.S.R. billed the United States thirty thousand rubles a month to provide for the interned soldiers.
As time passed, the Raiders’ worries grew. They learned that the Wehrmacht (German Army) was approaching Moscow. They studied a map and realized that Okhuna was only a few days’ march from the front lines of the war. After seven weeks, American officials from Moscow arrived to check on the Raiders, and the airmen asked about the rest of the boys on the Tokyo raid. The officials had no information about the other members of the Doolittle gang, but the attaché brought a telegram from the U.S. for copilot Bob Emmens. He was now the father of a red-headed baby boy!
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
War-time shortages caught up with the airmen, and they went without meat or vegetables and sometimes both for days. For weeks they survived on cabbage, rice, black bread, tea, and red caviar. Next the Soviets sent the men by train and then on a flat-bottomed paddle wheeler into the foothills of the Urals, on the western edge of Siberia. The inhabitants in that area were very poor, dirty, and malnourished.
The American ambassador visited the Raiders but could provide them with very little. The men ate boiled, fried, and baked cereal, and pure, uncooked pork fat, sliced about an inch thick. The temperature hovered at thirty-five to forty degrees below zero and for one three-day period at fifty below. The airmen remained in Okhansk for seven months, and their physical condition rapidly deteriorated.
In early January of 1943, the Raiders wrote a letter to Stalin. They praised the progress of the Soviet Army against the Germans, and they made three requests. Their reply came close to the end of March with the arrival of two Russian officers sent by the High Command of the Red Army in Moscow. They couldn’t grant the airmen’s request to be released from the Soviet Union, but they could move them to a warmer climate and allow them to work.
The Raiders traveled by car for twelve hours to the city of Molotov, flew south to Chkalov, and then traveled by train for eight days to Ashkhabad, the capital of Soviet Turkmenistan. On the trip, Ski York shared a compartment with a young Russian named Kolya. Kolya had brought a large store of various food items and shared his bounty with Ski for every meal during the trip.
Courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin
In Ashkhabad, the airmen lived in a two-room mud house and slept on bare wooden beds with one blanket each. They worked in a factory, overhauling small trainer biplanes. A Soviet officer showed up to count heads each night. Kolya visited and also took the Raiders to his own home, but always after dark. The airmen begged him to help them escape to Persia (present day Iran), only fifteen miles south of their current location.
One evening Kolya escorted York to the downtown square and directed him to a Persian man, Abdul Arram. After bargaining with York, Abdul agreed to take the airmen across the border for two hundred and fifty U.S. dollars.
In the middle of the night on May 26, 1943, after more than a year of internment in the Soviet Union, the Raiders of Plane #8 hiked over a mountain into Soviet-occupied Persia. After managing to avoid Russian sentries manning the bridge into the city of Meshed, the airmen found refuge at the British Embassy. From there they flew to India and on to the United States.
Source:
Nelson, Craig. The First Heroes: The Extraordinary Story of the Doolittle Raid—America’s First World War II Victory. Viking, 2002.
With the outbreak of WWII, submarine warfare took on new dimensions. Many heroic battles occurred “under the sea.” The adventures of one particular Polish submarine received international attention and provided inspiration to those at war.
Where? The Baltic Sea, the Gulf of Finland, and the North Sea
Poland’s submarines were commissioned to protect the 90 miles of Polish coastline on the Baltic Sea. The Orzel had only been at sea for about twenty months when Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and World War II began. At first, the Polish submarine fleet carried on very low-key operations, observing and reporting German naval activity, but on the seventh day of the war, the fleet was ordered to return to the Central Baltic region.
Poland’s submarines weren’t prepared for battle—they’d missed their May maintenance because of the seriousness of the international situation and had been at sea for nearly twelve months without an overhaul.
At first, the Polish submarine fleet carried on very low-key operations, observing and reporting German naval activity, but on the seventh day of the war, the fleet was ordered to return to the Central Baltic region.
On September 14th, the commanding officer of the Polish submarine division ordered the sub commanders to carry out patrols and thwart enemy shipping for as long as possible. When they could no longer continue, they were to sail to the United Kingdom. If that wasn’t possible, they were to seek internment in Sweden.
When the Polish submarine Wilk attempted the long journey, the Germans attacked with depth charges and dropped thirty-eight bombs from the air. Despite the opposition, the Wilk made it safely to the rendezvous point at Rosyth, Scotland on September 20.
The Orzel’s adventure lasted much longer . . . After patrolling the Baltic Sea for nine days, the Orzel landed at Talinn, capital of Estonia. The captain needed medical treatment for stomach pains. Officially neutral, but sympathetic to Germany, the Estonians insisted upon following international law. They required the Orzel to leave port within twenty-four hours but not until a German freighter already in port departed first (also international law). The German vessel didn’t sail, so the Orzel missed her departure deadline.
The Estonian government then interned the Orzel and her crew. They removed the ship’s charts, the sailors’ small arms, the breach locks on the ship’s guns, and fifteen of twenty torpedoes. They stationed two Estonian guards on the ship to conduct surveillance. But, undetected, the Polish submariners partially cut through the thick ropes mooring the ship, leaving the sub attached to the jetty by a single strand.
On the night of September 17-18, two Polish sailors crawled ashore and cut the lines powering the jetty searchlights. The sailors severed the last rope tying the Orzel to the jetty and overpowered the two Estonian guards, taking them aboard the sub. At the mouth of the harbor, the ship hit a rock, but the crew trimmed the tanks, and the sub floated free.
While the Estonians fired on the sub with rifles and artillery from the small fortified islands outside the city, the Orzel submerged and fled. The sailors steered blindly with no chart for soundings. At dawn, they lay down at the bottom and waited as the hunters passed over them and depth charges burst around them.
At midnight, the Orzel cautiously rose, and the submariners discovered they were at the entrance to the Gulf of Finland. Nothing was in sight, so they remained surfaced and recharged the sub’s batteries.
Meanwhile, the Orzel’s escape from Estonia became an international incident, and Germany accused the Estonians of complicity with Poland. The Soviets, who had invaded Poland on September 17th , patrolled the Gulf of Finland with cruisers and six destroyers, looking for Polish subs. The Orzel’s crew dropped off the Estonian guards on the island of Gotland, Sweden, leaving them with money, cigarettes, and a bottle of whiskey. The Orzel then cruised the Baltic for two weeks, evading the Soviets.
The Orzel in English Port, 1940 – Public Domain Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
With their water supply running low and their cook suffering from an infected finger, the crew of the Orzel decided to proceed to Scotland. On the way, they sighted a flotilla of German destroyers, so they dove to a shallow bed and avoided detection. After dark, they surfaced to periscope depth, ran aground, floated free, and crept along until reaching deeper water, all while the German flotilla continued to patrol.
The Orzel traveled up the narrow waterway between Denmark and Sweden and arrived at the North Sea where she was vulnerable to German attack and “friendly fire” from British patrols. On October 14 at six o’clock in the morning, a British shore naval station picked up a faint transmission from the Orzel, and a few hours later a Royal Navy destroyer escorted the sub into Rosyth.
The arrival of the Orzel shocked the Royal Navy—the British had presumed the ship was lost at sea. The Orzel went on to serve the Allies, sinking the clandestine German troop transport, Rio de Janeiro, in southern Norway in April 1940. During the sub’s seventh patrol in May-June of 1940, the Orzel disappeared and was never heard from again. To this day, her fate remains a mystery, although the Polish government has made repeated attempts to locate her final resting place.
