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      “Smoke over America, blood over Europe”

      World War II and the Polish Diaspora

      War in Poland and the Creation of the Wartime Diaspora

      One day very early in the morning some stubborn knocking at the door woke us up. My husband, surprised, goes, opens the door and after a short conversation, comes back inside, holding a piece of paper in his hand. Looking straight at me he says: “This is my draft card to the army. Germans entered our lands without declaration; it is war. . . .” My hands began shaking, my heart began pounding. We stood for a moment in silence, staring at each other.¹

      THE DAY WAS SEPTEMBER 1, 1939. Helena Podkopacz saw her husband for the last time. His military transport was bombed, and he was killed instantly. She was left alone in a small village in eastern Poland with two little children and an ailing mother, while German air raids on all major cities and military installations were destroying Polish ground forces. A counteroffensive on the river Bzura broke down by midmonth, and other points of defense in the country fell one after another when the Soviet army entered the Polish territories on September 17, cutting off escape routes and closing the trap on the surviving Polish forces. On September 28, Warsaw, although furiously defended by its civilian population, surrendered to the Germans, while the Polish garrison on the peninsula of Hel on the Baltic held out until October 2. The president of Poland and Polish government officials crossed the border to Romania, and, after a brief internment there, they continued on to France, where the government was reconstituted. The last Polish military unit in the field capitulated at Kock on October 5, although some guerrilla forces fought for many more months. Poland lost some sixty thousand men killed in action and another one hundred forty thousand wounded, in addition to high civilian casualties.² By the end of the campaign, Poland was divided into a German occupation zone in the west and a Soviet zone in the east.

      The formal division of Poland between German and Soviet conquerors became a fact with the signing of a convention between them on September 28, 1939. The demarcation line that ran along the rivers Bug and San became the official frontier between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. Each occupation zone received a different administration and became subject to the unrestrained terror of the invaders. The territories in the Soviet zone were divided into three areas. The northern area was granted to the Republic of Lithuania, eventually annexed by the USSR. The central area was granted directly to the Belorussian SSR. The southern part, containing the city of Lwów, was attached as “Western Ukraine” to the Ukrainian SSR. Fraudulent and openly coerced plebiscites organized by the NKVD (National Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the Soviet secret police) on all three territories resulted in the “official request” of the populations to admit the occupied lands to the Soviet Union, a request that was promptly granted.³ The Polish lands under German occupation were divided into two separate areas. The western and northern parts were annexed directly into the Third Reich. The remaining, larger area formed the General Government (Generalna Gubernia) headed by Hans Frank, governor-general. The Polish population of both areas was subject to lawless and cruel Nazi terror, which increased systematically from the late fall of 1939.

      Beginning in November 1939, shortly after Hans Frank took office, the Nazis undertook a systematic extermination of the Polish nation’s leadership. The city of Warsaw’s president, Stefan Starzyński—distinguished in his defense of the city—and thousands of other Poles were promptly arrested. The Nazis put to death about thirty-five hundred political and municipal leaders in a mass execution in Palmiry Forest near Warsaw. One hundred eighty-three professors from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków were captured as a part of a special action (Sonderaktion). Some were later released, but many were transported directly to death camps in Germany or were delivered to the Gestapo (the German secret police), a fate that, in reality, also meant death. These first acts of terror were then followed by arrests of members of the Polish intelligentsia, the clergy, political activists, students, and anyone suspected of having leadership skills, whose names appeared on specially prepared lists used during spring 1940 and summer of 1941. The captives were then placed in German prisons and concentration camps, especially Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen.⁴

      Nazi authorities closed Polish universities, schools, museums, research institutes, theaters, archives, libraries, publishing houses, and presses. Poles were not allowed to own radios or to listen to Polish music. Food was rationed, and the work order included all citizens. In December 1939 Germans introduced the rule of collective responsibility that they later used with horrifying frequency; in revenge for the wounding of a German soldier, they executed 107 Poles in Wawer near Warsaw. In January of the following year, plans were laid for the building of a concentration camp in Auschwitz (Oświęcim), where some 1.5 million people were to perish by the time the war was over.⁵ The terror further intensified in 1941, when an arbitrary German law allowed for indiscriminate street executions, imprisonment and torture, and street hunts (łapanki). Rural pacifications decimated the Polish population in hundreds of villages. The largest systematic action was a 1942 campaign in the Zamość region, where hundreds of thousands of Polish peasants were forcibly evicted to make room for German and Ukrainian settlers, while their children were sent to the Reich for Germanization purposes.⁶

      Approximately 2 million Jews who found themselves on the territory of the Generalna Gubernia (many resettled from the area incorporated into Reich) were officially identified by a yellow Star of David worn on the clothing. Their possessions and businesses were confiscated. At the beginning of 1940 the Germans created work camps for Jews that did not differ much from concentration camps. In the ghettos created in many Polish cities, Jewish citizens were isolated and terrorized. They lived in terrible conditions, dying of hunger, brutal work, and epidemic diseases. In the spring of 1942 the Nazis began the introduction of the “Final Solution”: the ghettos were liquidated, and their inhabitants murdered en masse in concentration camps. Facing the liquidation of the largest Warsaw ghetto in April 1943, the Jewish population struck back against their oppressors in a military uprising, which the Nazis suppressed with great brutality.⁷

      The Polish nation responded to the Nazi terror with the formation of an extensive network of the resistance organizations. Already by the end of September 1939, the Służba Zwycięstwu Polski (Polish Victory Service)—the largest underground organization and the basis for the future Armia Krajowa (AK, Home Army)—had been established and had initiated its activities. Eventually, a large percentage of the Polish population directly participated in or supported what became the strongest resistance movement on the territory of occupied Europe. The Home Army, together with other guerrilla forces (Bataliony Chłopskie—Peasant Battalions; Gwardia Ludowa—People’s Guard; and Narodowe Siły Zbrojne—National Armed Forces), participated in a number of actions, including derailing trains and blowing up bridges to slow down German military transports, executing high Nazi officials, freeing Polish prisoners, and engaging local German units in direct battles. The resistance movement also contributed to uplifting the spirits of the oppressed population through the organization of underground schools, theaters, presses, and publications, the protection of Polish national art treasures, the dissemination of information on Allied victories, or the encouragement of small acts