Open resistance and assassinations of German personnel provoked such massive reprisals on the civilian population that they were abandoned in favour of more covert action. As well as derailing trains, blowing bridges and cutting communications, AK operations embraced the wholesale sabotage of German military materiel—engines, view-finding and navigation equipment for tanks, guns and planes—at source in the factories which produced them.
The life of the nation was lived in hiding. The government was represented by the Delegatura, an executive based in Warsaw with its own consultative committee drawn from all parties. The Delegatura was the political master of the AK and controlled everything in Poland from underground law courts to the flying universities and clandestine schools, much as the City Committee had done in 1863.
For a period of six years, education at every level was carried on secretly. Bombs were manufactured, plays were staged and books were published under the noses of the Germans, and an active clandestine press kept people informed. These activities were carried out with an efficiency and a wit that sometimes obscure the difficulties and dangers involved. Torture, concentration camp and death awaited anyone on whom German suspicion fell, and many thousands paid the price.
One area in which the German reign of terror was devastatingly successful was in dividing and estranging the various ethnic groups inhabiting Poland, and particularly in segregating Poles of Jewish descent and sealing them off from the rest of society prior to exterminating them. This was achieved mainly by regulations that did not obtain in any other country occupied by the Germans.
In Poland, anyone caught assisting or sheltering a Jew faced an automatic death penalty not just for himself, but for his entire family. Faced with this, even most philo-Semitic Poles were reluctant to get involved. The same penalty applied to anyone failing to report that someone else living in the same house was sheltering a Jew. This meant that someone who noticed that another occupant in his apartment block was hiding one was powerfully tempted to save himself and his family by reporting the fact rather than run the risk of death by waiting until some other inhabitant of the block did so. But there were other factors at work as well.
Not unlike the Jews themselves, many Poles responded to repeated and relentless failure and misfortune by developing an exclusive sense of grievance, and a paranoid, inward-looking sense of the uniqueness of their predicament, accompanied by an inability to view events and processes otherwise than in a strictly personalised manner. This allowed them to watch the Jewish tragedy unfold around them without seeing it, or indeed seeing it merely as an element in a scenario in which they, the Poles, were the chief victims. And there were plenty of anti-Semites who regarded the German extirpation of Jews from Polish society with indifference, or even as a favourable development.
At the same time, countless Poles did risk their lives to hide Jews and provide them with false papers. The clergy saved thousands of Jews, mostly children, by concealing them in schools or orphanages attached to monasteries and convents. In 1942 the AK set up a special commission of assistance, codenamed Żegota, which was responsible for saving the lives of some 10,000 Jews.
Such operations were made all the more difficult and hazardous by splits and conflicts within the resistance movement itself. Followers of the extreme right in politics had formed the National Armed Forces (NSZ), which remained independent of the AK, and which took a different line on this and other issues. An even greater source of difficulty for the AK and the Delegatura was the People’s Army (AL), affiliated to a recently founded Polish Workers’ Party and ultimately to Moscow.
The Polish Communist Party had never been a significant force on the political scene. In the mid-1930s its leadership was imprisoned, and the bulk of the activists sought refuge in Russia, where in 1938 Stalin liquidated the higher echelons and dispatched the rest to the Gulag. The only senior Polish communists to avoid this fate were those, like Władysław Gomułka and Marceli Nowotko, who were safe inside Polish jails.
In the spring of 1941, Stalin began seeking out those surviviing Polish communists. In December 1941 he instructed Nowotko to start a Polish workers’ party, which he did, in January 1942, but he was assassinated less than a year later. In 1943, Gomułka, who had been organising underground units in south-eastern Poland, became leader of the party, and it was under his leadership that the People’s Army built its own structures as an alternative to those of the Polish government, which Stalin meant to unseat.