The Exile Mission. Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann
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Most Oflagen introduced harsh discipline and very limited food rations; the Oflag in Sandbostel became particularly famous for its lack of food and the near starvation of the prisoners. Polish officers had only very restricted religious privileges, but, in compliance with the 1929 Geneva convention, they were allowed to develop limited forms of culture and education, such as the publication of internal bulletins and the establishment of libraries, amateur drama groups, sports teams, or educational courses. The clandestine resistance movement led mainly by the Home Army penetrated many Oflagen, which resulted in the creation of small underground organizations.24
Slave laborers faced much hardship and oppression. Most were hungry and mistreated on a daily basis, deprived of any rights or protection. They worked to exhaustion and experienced repeated physical punishment and abuse. Laborers could not marry, worship freely, establish schools, travel, or engage in any economic activity. Arbitrary German laws subjected them to public execution for many transgressions, including sexual relationships with Germans. The sharpest measure of cruelty was the separation of infants born to Polish women workers in order to Germanize them or to kill the weaker ones through lethal injection. The same fate also awaited seriously ill adult individuals. About one hundred forty thousand slave laborers from Polish lands and several thousand newborns perished in Germany during the war; many of those who survived remained either ill or crippled for the rest of their lives.25
Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Flossenburg, Gross-Rosen, Mauthausen, Neuengamme, Ravensbrück, and Sachsenhausen were among the largest concentration camps in Germany and Austria, and held more than two hundred thousand persons born in Poland. The inhuman treatment and cruelty that Holocaust victims experienced in the concentration camps defy imagination. Systematic extermination of the prisoners was intertwined with their unscrupulous use in the German war economy, without any regard for human life. Despite those brutal conditions, some prisoners created small secret organizations within the camps, specializing in passing information and keeping up the spirits of their fellow prisoners. Others engaged in the so-called szkoła chodzona (walking school), when university professors and other teachers orally passed on their knowledge to students during walks.26
Civilian refugees also fled Poland through various channels. The majority of those persons who were temporarily out of country at the outbreak of the war remained abroad. A large number of refugees followed the retreating Polish army and government officials to Romania and Hungary in September 1939. Some—a majority of them young men determined to join Polish military forces in the West—managed to leave occupied Poland through the so-called green border, that is, by illegally crossing into Romania and Hungary. Finally, a small number of civilians were able to leave the country at the very outset of the occupation, or even later, with false passports.27
In order to survive, civilian refugees sought any available jobs. Young men usually joined the Polish army in the West; some Poles in France and Spain established very successful intelligence networks, working for the Allies; and others joined foreign resistance movements, for example, in France, Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, and Albania. Others worked for different units of the Polish government in exile, for the press, or in schools. Professionals and artists tried to continue their occupations. For example, Irena Koprowska, a Polish physician, found temporary employment as a doctor in an insane asylum in France. Irena Lorentowicz, a painter, interior decorator, and stage designer who had been on a scholarship in Paris at the outbreak of the war, worked in Portugal, painting furniture for wealthy families. Others accepted any available jobs, used family resources salvaged from Poland, and called on friends and business connections in European countries.28 Many of the Polish refugees in western Europe fled before the advancing German army and immigrated to Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Uruguay. For some, the South American countries became a permanent home; a large group of them, however, gradually arrived in the United States.
Wherever a Polish exile community took shape, the refugees strove to establish some kind of organization that included cultural and political institutions, a press, book publishing, and schools. In Hungary, Romania, France, Switzerland, and Great Britain, the refugees published newspapers and literary journals, created theater groups, revived political parties, and taught Polish children and youth in networks of elementary and high schools.29 Exiled Polish intellectuals formed a university in Paris in December 1939; when France fell, they organized several higher learning institutions in Great Britain, including a medical academy at the University of Edinburgh, a Polish teachers’ college, a department of veterinary studies, a law school, a business school, a technical school, as well as a military school and an air force school. Polish soldiers and officers interned in neutral Switzerland at the beginning of the war enrolled in three Swiss universities and received more than 350 university diplomas and degrees between 1940 and 1945. The United States, Great Britain, and Switzerland became centers of research that gathered exiled scientists and intellectuals who desired to continue their scholarly work.30
To sum up, as a result of forced population movements from the lands of Nazi-occupied Poland, about 4 million Polish citizens were outside Polish borders at the end of the war. Ninety percent of them were slave laborers.31
Poles in the Soviet occupation zone did not fare much better than their counterparts in the Generalna Gubernia. In the fall of 1939 the Soviets captured more than one hundred ninety thousand Polish soldiers and lower-ranking officers and held them in camps located in Soviet territory. The prisoners were hungry, inadequately clad, overworked, and tortured. After mid-1940, they were gradually freed from the camps and transferred as civilians to perform heavy labor for the Soviet economy. About fifteen thousand Polish officers were placed in three camps in Kozielsk, Starobielsk, and Ostaszków. Between April and June of 1940, the Soviet NKVD executed 14,552 of these officers, including 12 generals. The Germans discovered their mass graves in the Katyń Forest in 1943, but Soviet authorities denied any responsibility until 1990.32 About three hundred fifty thousand civilian Poles were incarcerated in Soviet prisons and penal camps, accused of activities against the Soviet Union. The death toll among these prisoners was extremely high; for example the death rate in some of the harshest prisons in Kolyma or Chukotka reached a full 90 percent.33
Helena Podkopacz and her family lived in western Ukraine. In June 1940 they were crowded into cattle cars and transported to Siberia under inhuman conditions. They were part of one of the major deportation waves in February, April, and June 1940 that decimated the Polish population of the eastern territories of prewar Poland. Estimates differ among authors trying to appraise the total of the deported population. The most commonly accepted figures indicate that between 1939 and 1941 the Soviets deported about 1.7 million Polish citizens. About 60 percent of those were ethnic Poles, 20 percent Jews, 15 percent Ukrainians and Russians, and about 4 percent Belorussians. More than 66 percent of those deported were male. Close to three hundred eighty thousand were children, and one hundred eighty-four thousand were more than fifty years old.34 Polish citizens, faced with brutal living and working conditions and inhuman treatment by Soviet camp officials, died of starvation, malnutrition, exposure, exhaustion, and epidemics. According to some conservative estimates, two out of every ten people deported lost their lives in Siberia.35
Olga Tubielewicz’s husband, Jan, worked as a postmaster in Telechany in the Pinsk region. The Tubielewicz family avoided deportation until early summer 1941. In June 1941 the NKVD burst into their house at night, arrested and took away Jan, and ordered Olga to pack some bare necessities for herself, her two children, and mother-in-law. “I, my husband’s elderly mother, and my children all went to our bedroom, knelt in front of the picture of the Virgin Mary of Perpetual Help, cried, and prayed. . . . After they took my husband, I could not move or pack anything,” recalled Olga. They spent the night in cattle cars in the train station. The next morning’s news electrified everyone: war between Germany and the Soviet Union had just broken out. Olga and the other deportees heard German planes circling over the station, which was a natural target for bombing. “If we die,” she thought, “at least it will be in our own land.” Despite the danger, the transport made it through to Siberia and to a work camp in the Altai Mountains, where the family was forced to perform slave labor in the forest.36
The outbreak of the German-Soviet war in June 1941 prevented the total annihilation of the deported