Nine decades ago, the war between Russia and Poland and its watershed
episode known as the Miracle at the Vistula bred tens of thousands of
human tragedies and defined the terse atmosphere between the two
countries for years to come. The elusive truth is that the painful
complexities in the relations between the Soviet Union and Poland in the
run-up to and in the wake of World War II can largely be traced back to
the 1919-1921 Polish-Soviet conflict.
Poland's independent statehood was established in 1919. Shortly
thereafter, the Versailles Conference, under pressure from France,
authorized the Polish occupation of East Galicia (West Ukraine), which
did not mean that the fate of the territories was sealed on a permanent
basis at the time. On December 8, 1919 the Entente Supreme Council
passed a declaration setting Poland's provisional eastern border, and on
April 25, 1920, Polish leader J. Pilsudski, a paragon of untamed Polish
territorial expansion, launched a military campaign against the Soviet
Russia regardless of the provisional status of Poland's eastern frontier
that thus came into being. The Polish incursion culminated in the
taking of Kyiv on May 7, 1920 but, hammered by the Red Army, the
attackers had to leave the city on June 12 and start retreating. By
August 13, the Red Army led by M. Tukhachevsky reached the suburbs of
Warsaw, where the Polish army launched a crushing counter-attack under
W. Sikorski's command and forced the Soviets to roll back.
Victims of the Miracle
Around 157,000 Red Army soldiers and officers were taken captive by the
Polish forces in over 20 months of fighting. The August, 1920 debacle
in the proximity of Warsaw was the costliest episode for the Red Army,
with 45,000-50,000 Soviet servicemen seized as a result of the Polish
counter-attack known as the Miracle at the Vistula. Many of the people
died in captivity.
The collection of documents titled POLISH-RUSSIAN FINDINGS ON THE
SITUATION OF RED ARMY SOLDIERS IN POLISH CAPTIVITY (1919–1922) [1] was
prepared by Russia's Federal Archive Agency, the Russian State Military
Archive, the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the Russian
Socioeconomic History Archive, and the Polish State Archives in the
framework of the December 4, 2000 bilateral agreement, with the Polish
part of the preface written by Prof. Z. Karpus and Prof. V. Rezmer. The
treatise provides reliable evidence that the death toll among Russian
prisoners of war in just two of Poland's POW camps - Strzałkowoand
Tuchola - topped 30,000.
According to Polish sources, the people were not executed but in the
majority of cases died of the Spanish flu, typhus, and dysentery
epidemics. As stressed in an opinion piece in Poland's Wprost, millions
of people in the exhausted post-war Europe died of the same causes.
Admitting that the conditions in the camps were severe and that
incidents of abuse indeed took place, Wprost attributes those to the
scarcity of resources and loss of moral standards which were common to
Poland and other countries immediately following the war. Moreover, the
author of the piece argues that in Poland the spill of cruelty never
reached the same proportions as in Russia where mass killings of
civilians took place at the time against the backdrop of the revolution
and the civil war.
To rule out allegations of bias, I will illustrate the theme of the
loss of moral standards exclusively with excerpts from the 1919-1920
Polish documents and the report which resulted from an October, 1919
tour of the Brest-Litovsk camps by envoys of the Red Cross International
Committee, who were accompanied by a doctor from the French military
mission.
The Red Cross envoy wrote in his report: “Intolerable stench emanates
from the former guardhouses and stables used as detention facilities.
The captives cluster around an improvised stove in which only a few logs
are burning and which serves as the sole source of heat. At night, they
lie down to sleep in tightly spaced rows in groups of 300 people as the
only defense against the season's early cold. Prisoners sleep without
mattresses and blankets in dark unventilated accommodations. Most of the
captives are dressed in rags. Two terrible epidemics - of dysentery and
typhus – mowed down most of the camp inmates in August and September.
Consequences of the epidemics were aggravated by the fact that
accommodations are shared by healthy and infected prisoners, as well as
by the lack of medical assistance, food, and clothing... Mortality
peaked in the early August when 180 people died of dysentery within the
term of one day... The number of inmates in the fortress, if the data
can be trusted, gradually reached 10,000 but was 3,861 as of October
10”. The Brest Fortress camp eventually had to be closed due to the
extreme conditions to which prisoners in it were exposed.
The situation in other camps where Soviet POWs were held was similarly
terrible. In a report submitted to the Polish defense minister, Head of
the Sanitation Department of Poland's Defense Ministry Lt. Gen Z.
Gordynski cited K. Habicht's November 24, 1919 letter describing as
follows the situation in the Bialystok camp: “I visited the camp for
prisoners in Bialystok and, under the first impression from what I have
seen, wish to address you as the main doctor of the Polish army with an
account of the terrible picture confronting every visitor to the
facility. Similarly to Brest-Litovsk, criminal negligence perpetrated by
the camp's authorities is inflicting disgrace on our name and the
Polish army. Everywhere in the camp, one encounters filth and disrepair
that are impossible to describe along with human hardships that will
draw Heaven's ire against those responsible for what is happening. There
are excrements right in front of barrack doors as infected inmates are
too weak to walk to toilets... The barracks are heavily overpopulated
and many of the reportedly healthy inmates are evidently infected. From
my perspective, neither of the 1,400 inmates can be regarded as healthy.
Dressed in rags, the people bunch together to stay warm. There is stink
in the air from inmates suffering from dysentery and gangrene, and from
those with feet swollen as a result of starvation...
The situation is due to the country's overall difficult situation
created by the bloody and exhausting war and to the resulting shortages
of food, clothing, and shoes, to the overpopulation of the camps, to the
delivery from the front line to the camp of infected inmates in mix
with those healthy, without quarantine and disinfection, and, finally
– which is something the guilty should repent for – to the inaptness
and indifference, to direct neglect for service obligations which is
typical of our time”.
One might object that the above was explainable under wartime
conditions and cannot count as loss of moral standards, but I dare say
the inescapable conclusion is that the problem had a distinct moral
dimension.
Already in June, 1919 medical service officer Cap. Kopystyński sent a
memo regarding the Strzałkowo camp conditions to the Polish defense
ministry's sanitation department. The document read: “Two circumstances
complicate the struggle against the typhus epidemic: (1) recurrent
confiscations of inmates' underwear; (2) the practice of punishing whole
groups of inmates by denying them exit from barracks for three days or
longer”.
In 1919, a group of Latvians who voluntarily surrendered to the Polish
army were subjected to extremely severe and degrading treatment by
Malinowski's crew. “The punishment began with every one of them being
sentenced to 50 barbed wire lashes. In the process, the people were told
that the Latvians, as ”the Jewish mercenaries”, would not be allowed to
survive in the camp. Over ten of the POWs died of sepsis after the
lashing. As the next step, the inmates were left without food for three
days and threatened with death for attempts to leave the barracks to get
water. Two prisoners – Latzis and Shkurin – were killed for no apparent
reason”.
Commander of the Brest-Litovsk camp said to the inmates in the fall of
1920: “You, Bolsheviks, came to take away our land, so I'll give you the
land. I have no right to kill you, but I will feed you so that you all
will be dead in no time”.
The approach to POWs adopted by Poland's supreme authorities was laid out in the July 28, 1921 protocol of the 11th
meeting of the commission set up by the Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish
delegations. According to the document, “whenever the camp
administration deemed it possible to create more human conditions for
inmates, the initiatives were banned by the Center”.
Nameless Graves
Since the 1970ies, a concrete factory has existed on the site of the
former Tuchola camp for the prisoners of the 1919-1921 Soviet-Polish
war, with a sewage outlet running nearby. According to a report
submitted on February 1, 1922 to the Polish defense minister by chief of
II Department of the Polish staff Lt. Col. I. Matuszewski, 22,000
Soviet POWs died of inhumane conditions in the Tuchola camp alone.
…The burial site left from the distant epoch does not look like a
cemetery in the full sense of the word. With garbage freshly removed, it
is a small piece of land with some two dozen white poles, plaques on
them reading: “Russian, 1920/1921”. A label marking the whole site says
laconically: “Captive Bolsheviks from Russia are buried here”. No names
or further information are available around. Asked a question about the
place, a Tuchola resident responded bluntly: “Must we care about the
Russian dead?” Well, at least, credit must be given to us for caring
about the Polish dead…
These days, old grievances have a tendency to crawl back into the
political agenda. I anything but believe that conflicts over graves
should be allowed to factor into today's relations between Russia and
Poland, but getting a serious memorial built in Tuchola would clearly be
appropriate. Putting a dot in the story of the loss of moral standards
and finally letting it sink into oblivion is not the point – simply,
victims of the old war deserve compassion and respect.
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