The purge was carried through to trade unions, local organisations and the street. Stalinist verbiage about ‘foreign agents’ and ‘enemy espionage’ invaded everything from a quarrel between two Party bosses to a police report on petty pilfering or a wayside robbery. A brief affair with a former member of the AK was pretext enough for a girl to be interrogated, tortured and imprisoned for years. The prisons were bursting, and new concentration camps at Mielęcin and Jaworzno filled up with some 30,000 workers who had dared to strike. Peasants were forced to join Soviet-style collective farms. In 1951 Gomułka and others who had fallen from grace were imprisoned.
By then, Poland had been hermetically sealed off from the outside world, and not just by the three hundred kilometres of barbed-wire entanglements and 1,200 watchtowers surrounding it. In February 1947 leaders of the ruling parties of the Sovietoccupied countries of Central Europe met and set up an ‘information bureau’, the Cominform, ostensibly a vehicle for friendly cooperation. Although it was supposedly an inter-party body, it was in effect an inter-government one, and an instrument through which Stalin could exert pressure. In February 1948 a coup in Prague turned Czechoslovakia into a Soviet dependency, and the same happened in Budapest later that year. The Berlin blockade in June and the transformation of the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany into another Soviet satellite the following year finally drew the Iron Curtain across Europe. In 1952 a Soviet-style constitution, personally edited by Stalin, was imposed on the country, which was officially renamed the People’s Republic of Poland.
TWENTY-ONE
It is a grim irony that although it had been a member of the victorious alliance, Poland was the ultimate loser of the Second World War. It lost its independence and almost half its territory—in defence of which the war had been declared. According to the Bureau of War Reparations, it also lost 38 per cent of its national assets, a gigantic proportion when compared with the figures for France and Britain: 1.5 and 0.8 per cent respectively. These assets included the majority of its cultural heritage, as museums, libraries, palaces and churches had gone up in smoke. But the real losses were far greater than that, and the consequences more lasting.
Nearly six million Polish citizens had been killed, a proportion of one in five. The proportion among the educated elites was far higher: nearly one in three for Catholic priests and doctors, and over one in two for lawyers. A further half a million of Poland’s citizens had been crippled for life and a million children had been orphaned. The surviving population was suffering from severe malnutrition, while tuberculosis and other diseases raged on an epidemic scale. Another half a million Polish citizens, including a high proportion of the intelligentsia, most of the political and military leadership, and many of the best writers and artists, had been scattered around the world, never to return. In all, post-war Poland had 30 per cent fewer inhabitants than the Poland of 1939. But these figures give only a pale picture of the real harm done to Polish society: the Second World War destroyed not only people, buildings and works of art. It ripped apart a fragile yet functioning multiracial and multi-cultural community still living out the consensual compact that had lain at the heart of the Commonwealth.
There had been no lack of suppressed tensions before 1939 between the ethnic Poles and the various minorities, and indeed between some of the minorities, but there had been remarkably little violence, and this had been limited to fringe groups of the kind that exist in any society. Toleration, albeit sometimes grudging, was the norm. It was inevitable that these tensions would be aroused by the advent of war, and that not only the German minority would openly declare for Germany against Poland and their Polish neighbours. Ukrainian nationalists in south-eastern Poland greeted both the Germans and the Soviets with open arms, while further north many Lithuanians, Belorussians and communist Jews received the invading Soviets as liberators.
These fissures were exacerbated by the elimination or removal of local elites, the closing down of schools and other communal institutions, the brutalisation which is the constant companion of war and the banditry that thrives under wartime occupation. Communities were further torn part by the massive deportations carried out by both occupying powers.