The Exile Mission. Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann
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German economy. Polish resistance fighters also passed information on German military movements to the Allies. Youth from the Związek Harcerstwa Polskiego (ZHP, Polish scouting), which during the occupation reorganized itself into the storm troops known as Szare Szeregi (Grey Ranks), worked within the Home Army.8
When the Soviet offensive approached Warsaw in July 1944, the leadership of the Home Army decided to call for an uprising in the capital. Fighting began on the streets of Warsaw on August 1, 1944, and lasted for sixty-three days of heroic struggle to wrest Warsaw from German hands. After initial successes on the Polish side, the Nazis gradually regained control of the city, killing both Polish soldiers and the civilian population, while the Soviet army waited on the other bank of the Vistula River. Deprived of help, short on munitions, food, water, and medicines, the Warsaw Uprising collapsed in the fall of 1944. In an act of revenge, the Germans evacuated the city and undertook its systematic destruction, razing it to the ground.9
The Nazi occupation caused tremendous population movements that resulted in masses of Poles remaining outside Polish borders, forming the bedrock of the Polish postwar diaspora. The first waves of Poles left Nazi-occupied Poland in September 1939, and each following year brought more forced population movements out of the country.10 In October 1939 the Polish government, after evacuating to France, reached an agreement with the French government to raise a Polish army there. By early summer of the next year, more than forty-four thousand Polish immigrants residing in France had enlisted, joined by about forty thousand officers and soldiers initially interned in Romania and Hungary as well as some eighteen hundred who escaped from occupied Poland.11 In June 1940 Polish forces in France numbered more than eighty-four thousand men. Of that number, more than thirty thousand were brought over to Britain after the collapse of France in 1940, and these troops were reinforced by volunteers recruited from refugees and escapees from Poland.12 The Polish army under British command (London became the new seat of the Polish government in exile) was reorganized in Scotland as the First Polish Corps. Polish soldiers participated in battles on several different fronts. In the Battle of Britain in 1940, Polish fighter pilots accounted for some 15 percent of enemy losses.13 The First Polish Armored Division, under the command of General Stanisław Maczek, fought during the invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe and distinguished itself in battles on the territories of Belgium and France. After the capitulation of Germany, the division was stationed in the British zone of occupation in Haren, which was renamed Maczków in honor of the Polish commander.14
These military units in the West were not the only Polish soldiers outside of Poland after the end of the war. Combatants captured by the Germans in September 1939 had been interned in Oflagen (POW camps for officers) and Stalagen (POW camps for noncommissioned soldiers), and prisoners in the latter were forced to work in the German economy. The total number of Polish POWs taken in the initial invasion came close to four hundred twenty thousand. In the fall of 1944 some seventeen thousand insurgents of the Home Army who had fought in the Warsaw Uprising joined the imprisoned Polish soldiers.15 There was also a separate category of Polish citizens who had been forcibly conscripted into German military units. Most of them came from the areas that had been annexed directly to the Reich, and were considered “ethnically German.” In sum, between two hundred thousand and two hundred fifty thousand Poles served in German forces during the war.16
The largest category of migrants from Nazi-occupied Poland included people who worked for the German war machine as slave laborers. A few thousand accepted offers of work in the Reich, compelled by deteriorating living conditions in late 1939 and early 1940 and lured by German promises of a quick return to Poland. Some decided to join family members deported to or imprisoned in Germany. Wacław Jędrzejczak’s family, for example, made such a decision. After Wacław’s father had participated in the September campaign, he was imprisoned in a POW camp in Germany and then was forced to work for a German farmer. Despite receiving help from their extended family, Wacław’s mother and her two sons could barely support themselves. The reunification of the family in the Reich allowed them to survive the harsh economic reality of the war years.17 But low numbers of volunteers resulted in increased physical coercion, including penalties of prison and death camps for those who refused to comply. When even those methods did not bring about the expected results, the German authorities organized łapanki, the infamous manhunts in which they rounded up hostages in the streets and transported them to the Reich. The precise number of Polish citizens of various ethnic and religious backgrounds who remained in Germany as slave laborers is hard to estimate, but historians suggest that close to 3 million of them were at some point employed in the German war economy.18
Political prisoners and prisoners in concentration camps constituted another large group of people deported to Germany from Polish lands. Arrests and deportations were often elements of mass actions against the Polish population, including those in November 1939 and the mass deportations to concentration camps that took place in 1942 and 1943. Until the end of the war, both civilians and members of the Polish underground fell victim to this manifestation of Nazi terror. Victor Bik, for example, was arrested in January 1944, at the train station in Częstochowa while seeing off a friend. For the next three weeks he was brutally interrogated and tortured at Gestapo headquarters and then transported to the concentration camp in Gross-Rosen. “As soon as our transport arrived,” he remembered later, “even before the door of the boxcar opened, one could hear barking dogs and loud ‘barking’ commands of waiting SS guards, who marched us to the camp, about two miles from the railroad station.” What followed was his “induction to the existence in the concentration camp”:
About 250 of us were assembled to the big hall. . . . For the last time I heard my name before becoming just a number. This was call to shower room or should I say to another form of torture station. Stripped of everything, each of us underwent the assembly kind of processing, executed by the inmates under ever present supervision of SS guards. First step cutting hair . . . and of course, shaving of all private parts. No change of razor blade, who knows for how many victims. I received rather harsh treatment because I was perceived as “grosse bandite” on account of my blue and black back and buttocks from torture by Gestapo the day before. Next, actual shower consisting of a burst of very hot water followed by a burst of ice cold water and naked step outside and wait in the formation by five until column of one hundred was moved to the next barrack. It was winter: February 1944.19
In the fall of 1944, after the collapse of the Warsaw Uprising, about sixty-eight thousand Poles from Warsaw were placed in German death camps. Among them was Tadeusz Gubala, a soldier of the Home Army, who, by a lucky accident, was captured in a group of civilians. He was transported to Bergen-Belsen and made to work together with other prisoners on the railway in Lehrte during frequent bombing raids by the approaching Allies.20 Two other young powstańcy (insurgents), Jerzy Bigosiński and Tadeusz G., surrendered along with thousands of other soldiers of the Home Army after the uprising and were imprisoned in POW camps in Fallingsbostel and Sandbostel, respectively. They were only fifteen and sixteen years old, and throughout the war they had actively served in the Szare Szeregi and the AK resistance.21
Including those Poles who served out sentences in German prisons, the total number of Polish citizens deported to concentration camps in Germany and Austria was greater than two hundred thousand. In the last months of the war, the retreating Germans imposed even more inhuman conditions and treatment on tens of thousands of Polish prisoners, who were either immediately killed or transported (often on foot or in overcrowded cattle cars) to the territory of Germany, with the intention to eliminate eyewitnesses of Nazi terror.22
A special category of people forced to leave Poland as a result of the Nazi occupation were those whom the German authorities had decided to subject to the Germanization process. They included families from the ethnically mixed territories of Silesia, Pomerania, and Kashubia, who were transported to the Reich and resettled under special supervision, far from any Polish slave labor communities. Some seven thousand young Polish girls were selected for Germanization and placed in German homes between 1941 and 1942. Finally, the Germans deported about two hundred thousand Polish children to the Reich with the intention of Germanizing them.23
The living and working conditions for the Polish population