Arrests of Polish Communists had taken place sporadically all through the 1930s. Now the Party as a whole was caught up in an unprecedented campaign of almost literal annihilation, both organizationally and physically. The survivors in the whole of the Polish Communist movement and its following are said to have been about seventy or eighty in number. A Polish leader remarks, “Almost all the leaders and active members of the K.P.P. then in the Soviet Union were arrested and sent to camps.”54 It is certainly true that when a Polish Communist Government had to be formed in 1944, the leaders were scraped up from all over the place. The few who had the luck to remain in Polish jails, like Gomulka, had superimposed on them men like President Bierut, formerly (under the name Rutkowski) an NKVD interrogator, and as economic chief, Minc, who had been a lecturer in an institute in Central Asia.
On 20 and 21 August 1937 Warski, Budzynski, and others were shot.55 War-ski is said to have gone mad under interrogation and to have imagined that he was in the hands of the Gestapo. A number of Polish Communist leaders then in Poland were invited to Moscow for “consultation.” They included Ring and Henrykowski, both members of the Polish Politburo. The latter saw what was going on, and for weeks never ventured out of his room at the Lux except on nocturnal shopping for supplies. All eventually disappeared.56 From 1937 to 1939, all twelve members of the Central Committee present in Russia, and several hundred others, were executed. Among those who perished were all the Party’s representatives on the Executive Committee and the Control Commission of the Comintern, including the veteran Walecki.
Before his arrest, Walecki provided an example of the way old revolutionaries had become humiliated and degraded. Walecki, who had always given friendly greetings to Neumann’s wife, met her in the Lux soon after Neumann’s arrest. “I smiled and nodded,” she remembers, “but he looked away deliberately and there was an embarrassed, rather guilty expression on his face.”57 Walecki was to confess that he was a spy.58 By 11 September 1937, the whole Polish Politburo had been arrested. Stalin signed a proposal on “cleaning up” the Polish Party on 28 November 1937.59
Usually Stalin, after purging a Party, could make use of the struggles over power and policy invariably prevalent to select a new leadership. But in this case, “both factions” in the Polish Communist Party in 1937 were accused of “following the instructions of the Polish counter-revolutionary intelligence.”60 It seems to have issued its last official statement on 8 June 1938 and to have been finally dissolved by a vote of the Presidium of the ECCI on 16 August 1938. “Agents of Polish fascism” had “managed to gain positions of leadership” in it, according to the report of the Comintern delegate to the Soviet XVIIIth Party Congress, Manuilsky. (Manuilsky, making this report, referred also to police agents in the Hungarian and Yugoslav Parties.) When the accusations were announced to the Polish members of the International Brigade in Spain, they were received with silence and tears.61
The final batch of leaders, like Kostrzewa, were shot in 1939, when accounts were being settled with the whole Comintern apparatus. The left-wing poets Stande and Wandurski and other literary men perished; the most important was Bruno Jasienski, of whom we have written in Chapter 10.
The total dissolution of the Polish Communist Party was an extraordinary measure. It reflected simply the physical destruction of its cadres. It probably suffered little more than the Ukrainian Party. But Stalin could not, of course, simply dissolve the Ukrainian Party, since he needed someone to rule in Kiev. He did not, at the moment, have any immediate need of a group for ruling Poland and doubtless reflected that—as it turned out in practice—he could scrape one up from somewhere when and if required. The Polish Party, moreover, was one in which hostility to the forthcoming Nazi-Soviet Pact, with its partition of Poland, was likely to be strong.
The wives of the arrested foreigners suffered like those of the Russian victims. But they had no relations to turn to. They remained entirely at the mercy of official caprice. First, they were involved in a continual struggle with the manager of the Lux, who soon contrived to transfer them from their rooms to a separate, older building on the other side of the courtyard, crowded in with other wives. From here, too, they were eventually evicted.
Their papers were not in order, and they had to queue up regularly every five days to renew them. It was impossible to get jobs. They could live only by selling their possessions and books.
It was common to try to keep the children from knowing what had happened to their fathers. Margarete Neumann quotes a conversation:
“Is your daddy arrested too?”
“No, my daddy’s on holiday in the Caucasus.”
