Chapter 1: From Selâtsy to Siedlce
We resembled a great laboratory, in which methods for political work of the fighting Army have been worked out. ⌠From our ranks arose an entire group of leading state and social activists in the Reborn, Democratic Poland.
âLieutenant Colonel WĹadysĹaw Maskalan to Colonel Piotr Jaroszewicz, July 4, 1945
The White Eagle flows above us
Our banner is white and red
onto the battle field, the field of glory
our division, forward march.
âLeon Pasternak, âWe, the First Division,â 1943
THE JOURNEY OF THE APOSTLES
On the bitter cold Moscow morning of May 12, 1943, six men embarked in an open, half-ton truck and sped off toward the sunrise. They headed to the region of Selâtsy, a swampy pool of the Oka River near Riazan. Marian Naszkowski and the handful of other Polish communists in the car felt tired but overjoyed, thrilled by their newfound roles as makers of history.1 In a few days, they would be setting up a recruitment camp for the KoĹciuszko Division. Named after Polandâs eighteenth-century revolutionary hero who stood up to the oppressive policies of Catherine the Great, this was to be the countryâs first Soviet-sponsored military unit to fight its way home under the wings of the mighty Red Army.
Jerzy Putramentâs eastward journey toward the red, rising sun constituted a symbolic landmark on his larger political odyssey, which was not unusual for men of his generation. He had been born in 1910 to a âRussified Polishâ mother and a âPolonized Lithuanianâ father, as he would remind his audiences in future years.2 Only one year older than CzesĹaw MiĹosz, Putrament met his younger colleague at the University of Wilno, where the two began a complicated, love-hate relationship that lasted throughout their lifetimes. In his Captive Mind, MiĹosz recounted the meeting with the boorish, provincial, and recalcitrant anti-Semite Jerzy Putrament whom he branded after World War II, âGamma, A Slave of History.â MiĹosz felt offended âby his behavior, his piercing voiceâhe just did not know how to speak in a normal toneâand by the opinions he uttered.â3
Selâtsy, 1943. Wanda Wasilewska speaking to the soldiers of the KoĹciuszko Division. Standing in the background are General Zygmunt Berling (left) and WĹodzimierz Sokorski (right). Courtesy of Polska Agencja Prasowa.
Putramentâs affiliation with right-wing student organizations lasted for only one year in 1930â31; while he himself minimized this episode in later autobiographical accounts, it colored MiĹoszâs memories of him for decades to come.4 Putrament had been attracted to the Right for many reasons. He admired the strong, charismatic leader of the universityâs right-wing youth organization. He liked the latterâs clear sense of hierarchy. He had few reasons to sympathize with communism, which, as a son of a Polish officer, he associated with fear during the Polish-Soviet war of 1920. He liked the lavish corporate dress and colorful, bombastic ceremonies of his organization.5 Putrament claims to have broken with the nationalist youth organization, the âAll-Polish Youth,â disgusted at the difference between their right-wing ideologies and the brutal methods with which they implemented them.6 Putrament prided himself on ending his affiliation in 1932, only after it dominated the student political scene at the University of Wilno. For that reason, as his biographer pointed out, it is difficult to read this choice as a result of Putramentâs opportunism.7 It was also a rare moment in which the young writerâs independence triumphed over the pressure from a force majeure. By the time the Soviets occupied Eastern Poland in 1939â41, Putrament was a committed communist, surprising the most radical Poles with his pro-Soviet zealâin one case, trying to convince the poet Adam WaĹźyk and a few others to sign a statement condemning selected âtraitors and renegades.â8 Back in 1939â41, the Soviets had been Nazi accomplices in the partition of Poland. Now the Red Army was defeating the Germans. After the Red Armyâs strategic victories at Kursk and at Stalingrad many people worldwide came to admire Stalin and the Soviet system. And Putrament, once a bellicose chauvinist turned Soviet collaborator, now traveled east to become a willing interpreter of Soviet soft power.
Besides the chill, their fatigue, and a common purpose, the passengers in that speeding half-ton truck shared a sense of relief. It stemmed from the long period of anticipation that had preceded their journey. Facing an invasion by Germany and the USSR in 1939, scores of Polish communists, sympathizers, and intellectuals chose to escape east, hoping to become useful one day. While some of them ended up dead or in the camps, others saw their desires fulfilled in the Soviet Union. The âRedâ Lâvov, a former Polish city (named LwĂłw in Polish) in Western Ukraine, turned into a cultural capital of Polandâs progressive avant-garde between the fall of 1939 and summer of 1941, even as the NKVD continued to arrest people with suspicious backgrounds left and right. After the German invasion of the USSR, Polish activists and cultural figures followed the patterns of Soviet relocation into the depths of the country meant to spare the countryâs industrial infrastructure and governing institutions from the bombings. Many enlisted in the Red Army either as political officers or for combat duties.9 Others, after months of doing odd jobs, often in remote corners of the Soviet Union, cut their teeth in propaganda work in the Comintern or Polish-language information outlets in Moscow, Saratov, Ufa, and Kuibyshev.10 Like Putrament, they were able to use their previous experience as cultural organizers, and some made their wartime media debuts. Like an answered prayer, these men at last became useful; the events of the recent past offered them the exhilarating chance to link their talents and utopian dreams directly to the cause of Polandâs liberation. The Red Armyâs offensive in the winter of 1942â43 raised questions about the fate of the continent after the defeat of the belligerents in this war. Polandâs central location in the âheart of Europe,â smack between the USSR and Germany, suddenly turned it into a focal point of interest for Stalin and the leaders of Western powers.
In March 1943, Stalin gave his support for the creation of the Union of Polish Patriots (ZPP). Led by Wanda Wasilewska, the charismatic daughter of the socialist Leon Wasilewski and wife of Ukrainian writer Aleksandr Korneichuk, the leftist activists spread the word about the ZZP. Stalin used the organization to create an alternative center of power to the London-based Polish government in exile. Ostensibly established on a broad leftist platform meant to represent Poles in the USSR, the ZZP was actually an organization dominated by Polish communists.11 The organizationâs press organ, Wolna Polska (Free Poland), founded in Moscow, became a creative outlet to individuals who had previously worked in other editorial posts. Both the Union of Polish Patriots and its mouthpiece provided the Polish activists with a clear sense of mission and an unprecedented feeling of cohesion. Wolna Polska also spread the word about the ZPP to the Poles dispersed throughout the Soviet Union. Two newspapers, Wolna Polska and Nowe WidnokrÄgi, became interactive forums for discussing the role that the scattered Polish community should play in World War II after the breakthroughs on the Eastern Front.
Stalin and the Polish communists worked to create a center of power that would rival the political and military forces loyal to the Polish government in London. A vision for the countryâs postwar development was most likely still vague in the mind of the Soviet leader. All the same, Stalin saw that a Soviet-sponsored Polish organization with its own military units as a potential asset in at least three ways. First, it would allow Stalin to speak on behalf of a visible, institutionalized Polish community in the Soviet Union during the inevitable negotiations with the other leaders of the great powers over the postwar orderâand thus, it would help legitimize Soviet geopolitical interest as a Polish claim. Second, there was a functional advantage to having such an organized political community ready for a potential power contestation in Poland, whatever its exact nature might be. Third, the symbolic weight of associating the Polish left with the agents of victory on the Eastern Front and the liberating Red Army furnished the communists with a weapon against Polish skeptics.12 The communists could thereby claim credit for the victory. They could also create a visible precedent for Polish-Soviet friendship, thus showing everyone that the impossible can be done.
As they were leaving Moscow behind, Naszkowski felt the growing anxiety that his fellow passengers shared. Given the complexity of the task they were about to begin, their fears were well-founded. The Polish communists in the USSR gained a powerful patron in the Kremlin. Most of them managed to rationalize Stalinâs purges of Polish communists in 1938, to justify the Soviet-Nazi nonaggression pact and their joint invasion of Poland in 1939, and even the Stalinist labor camp system. In the spring of 1943, Stalingrad seemed to embody the virtues of Stalinism more than the Gulag reflected its flaws; in any case, the Party knew best what it was doing and, after all, mustnât one break the eggs in order to make an omelet? The Polish radicalsâ faith in the iron laws of history and in the correctness of the All-Union (Bolshevik) Communist Party (VKP(b)) was matched by their unflinching belief in the infallibility of Stalin. Those few who needed still more reasons to justify their cooperation with Stalin summoned their sense of political realism sweetened by his promise of a truly free, democratic Poland, which they all yearned to see.
The bitter twined with the sweet. No Polish communist doubted that Stalinâs patronage would soon prove to be a serious liability. The ambitious young men riding to Selâtsy knew that most of the recruits they would try to mobilize for battle under the Soviet aegis knew better than to give Stalin a second chance. After marching into Polish territory in September 1939, the NKVD had arrested these future recruits along with 300,000 other Polish citizens as proven or suspected enemies of Soviet power. The captives and their families rode in cattle wagons into the depths of the Soviet Union; upon arrival, they suffered incredible hardship in the labor camps. Their anti-Soviet sentiments and deep distrust of Polish communists were hardly mitigated by their sudden release or by the news of the new military formations. On the contrary, the biggest question in their minds was whether the KoĹciuszko Division was really Polish.13 Anti-Semitic prejudice, often intertwined with anticommunist sentiments, was common among these inhabitants of historically multiethnic lands. It rankled them to see Jewish officers in the division. Also, many of the men knew and few doubted that the 22,000 missing Polish citizensâin some cases, their family members, friends, or neighborsâhad been murdered by the Soviets in 1940, not the Germans. The recruits had hoped to join the other Polish deportees released on Stalinâs orders during the brief moment of Soviet-Polish rapprochement that followed Hitlerâs invasion of the USSR. Stalin granted Polish General WĹadysĹaw Anders permission to form an army to be evacuated via Iran in the summer of 1942. Fiercely patriotic and loyal to Polandâs London government, the Polish deportees wanted to enlist to fight on the Western Front, but thousands missed their chance due to long distances, wartime chaos, and the obstinacy of the local Soviet authorities. Some people succeeded in contacting the Anders Army on time, butâas was the case with JĂłzef Sigalin, the future coarchitect of Warsawâs Palace of Culture and Scienceâthe enlistment commission rejected them on account of their Jewish background.14 They did not wish to embrace Polish-Soviet friendship, but they saw the KoĹciuszko Division primarily as their way to fight the Germans and thus earn their way home.
Naszkowski grew nervous as he anticipated the upcoming confrontation with his distrustful compatriots. There was more though. Like his fellow âapostles,â as they later became known by the self-serving chronicles of the communist regime, he was keenly aware that the division ought to become the poster child for a new Polandâa clear contrast to the authoritarian, socially oppressive regimes of the interwar era, yet unmistakably Polish; friendly with the great power in the east but never Sovietlike.15 Theirs was an ambitious vision: to transform the old Polish society with its social divisions, anticommunist political traditions, and interethnic resentments into a microcosm of a new, better society that would show everyone that a total overhaul of liberated Poland would be possible and, indeed, desirable. Naszkowski, Putrament, and others keenly felt the high stakes involved. With nervous excitement, as they approached their recruits in Selâtsy, they accepted the hard, cold, heady fact that the fate of this great experiment depended largely on them.
MICKIEWICZ AND BRONIEWSKI IN THE KILLING FIELDS
Selâtsy surprised the newly arrived men with its onion-domed church and richly decorated window framesâa typical, picturesque Russian village. Yet, filled with excitement at the historic moment, the communist activists tended to see the familiar: the name Sielce (a Polish rendition of Selâtsy) reminded them of Siedlce, a town back home. Not so to the future rank-and-file soldiers, in whom the camp by the Oka River, deep inside the Soviet territory, âprovoked distrust.â16 The military camp lay a few kilometers outside the village. Within days after arrival, Naszkowski found himself standing âwith a pounding heart,â in front of âa scowling, distrustful, silent crowd of people.â17 In a system that resembled the Soviet one, political officers were responsible for the ideological education of the troops. Naszkowski became one of them. Others included Putrament and Wiktor Grosz, a Polish-Jewish radical activist who had transferred from the Red Army. Their task was to transform the recruits who poured into the camp into âconscious fighters for a Peopleâs Poland.â18 The quasi-religious language with which the Polish political officers enshrined their early experiences in Selâtsy reflected their political ...