Gulag to Spitfire E-Book

Andrew Hubert von Staufer

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 443

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Stalin is quoted as saying 'One man's death is a tragedy, a thousand deaths is a statistic'. This is the story of a man who was determined to be neither. Kazimierz Tomasz 'Tomek' Hubert was 17 when the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939. Despite his young age, he was quickly deported to the Vorkuta Gulag in the Arctic Circle, for the crime of being the son of a military governor. Here he would survive torture, starvation and even the threat of cannibalism, before he managed to escape and set off on a 6,000km walk to freedom. In this moving tale of endurance against all odds, Andrew Hubert von Staufer traces his father's footsteps from the gulags of Siberia to flying Spitfires in air battles against the Luftwaffe. This is a remarkable account of the Second World War and its long-reaching impact.

Leseprobe

First published 2024

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Andrew Hubert von Staufer, 2024

The right of Andrew Hubert von Staufer to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 80399 522 9

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

To the memory of my father,Kazimierz Tomasz (Tomek) Hubert:17 September 1921–1 January 2006andMy remarkable mother Angela (née Oakeshott):24 August 1923–19 March 2022Who remained faithful and endured so much, yet was the repository of so many memories

And to the thousands of other Poles who suffered atrocities, betrayal and disappointment.Sadly, even at time of writing, others are treading a similar path in Ukraine.

Nihil novis sub solum!

(‘There’s nothing new under the sun!’, one of Tomek’s favourite sayings.)

Contents

Author’s Note

Foreword by Andrew Jelinek

Prologue: The Bird’s Eye View

Part One: Capture!

1    The Realities of War

2    Torture

3    Vorkuta – The City Built on Skulls

4    Break-up!

5    Rape and Abuse

6    The Criminals Take Over

7    Another Year of Misery

Part Two: Escape!

8    Saved by an Ancestor?

9    Where Are Your Papers?

10   Disappointment in Tashkent

11   Frustration and Fever

12   Iran and the Aviateur

Part Three: Spitfires!

13   Scotland to Brighton

14   Life-Changing Tea and Cake

15   The Hazards of Fire

16   Marriage and Disappointment

17   Spitfires at Last!

18   Dogfights and Rockets

19   The Sting in the Tail

20   Aftermath

Postscript

Appendix: In His Own Words

Acknowledgements

Further Reading

Notes

Author’s Note

War is a shared trauma and what is frequently overlooked is that trauma is not just shared laterally across the same timeline but sequentially, with the effects of historical failures and individual PTSD being passed on to future generations. Their suffering, often undocumented by those who were its victims with no access to paper, pen or film, is seared into a collective memory, often ignored, suppressed or dismissed as the fantasy of plainly damaged veterans with a bitter axe to grind. This simply leaves their families to bear the brunt of frustrated anguish.

This is not an official history. It is just a single account from the perspective of one man who endured extraordinary suffering during the Second World War and its effects on him. He was by no means unique, but it is a story that has been largely glossed over since 1945.

He never had the literary and linguistic gifts of Joseph Conrad, who wrote so effectively in an alien tongue. Instead, my father Tomek lashed out with often heart-rending and occasionally terrifying accounts of what happened to him.

His memory was photographic and his often broken English created an almost high-definition ongoing documentary in his older children, of whom I was the eldest. He would quote verbatim, first in Polish or Russian, never varying his subsequent translation of who said what to whom and its effects.

In many ways his trauma became our living nightmare. As so often happens, the wounds opened by war endure to be passed on to children and grandchildren living with the consequences of lives burned in the wildfires of war. The pain, distress, hopelessness and frustration had become contagious.

The Second World War generation has largely passed. We, their children, were brought up on the memories of veterans who only had personal experience to go on, often without understanding the broader view or the political realities and compromises that are the inevitable legacy of war. We are now in our late sixties and seventies and are the remaining custodians of their experiences.

The one advantage of my own creeping Anno Domini is that subsequent personal experiences in Eastern Europe, where the Russian threat has been very real, have reinforced many of the fears and opinions my father passed on to me decades earlier.

Please read on and hopefully see, through his eyes, the bitterness, cruelty and sheer indifference of Stalin’s Russia, via the brief hope of being an effective operational Spitfire pilot, to the ultimate betrayal of a pre-war Poland Tomek knew and loved.

Where possible, Tomek’s accounts have been cross-referenced with service records, pilot’s notes and logbooks together with extensive reading of the few official histories on the subject of Stalin’s deportations, General Anders’ recruiting of Polish forces in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and the Polish Air Force in exile.

Conversations are based exclusively on Tomek’s frequently quoted memories, which hardly varied over more than sixty years.

Andrzej Roman Hubert(aka Andrew Hubert von Staufer)2023

Foreword

by Andrew Jelinek

Andrew Jelinek is a former Captain in the Household Cavalry, who was severely injured in Afghanistan. He has since trained Local Defence Volunteers in Tomek’s hometown of Lwów (modern-day Lviv).

In setting down the story of his father’s remarkable life, Andrew Hubert von Staufer has given us a personal lens through which to view a profoundly dark chapter of Polish and Eastern European history.

We first join Tomek as he glides above the Tatras Mountains, the tranquil and serene vista stretching away from the cockpit analogous to a young boy’s future about to be derailed by cataclysmic events. As Poland is savagely torn apart from both east and west, we follow Tomek as he is catapulted along dusty roads, choked with refugees, under screaming air attacks, and into his panic-stricken home city of Lwów. Poland falls, Tomek goes into hiding, is arrested and transported into the depths of Siberia. Throughout his ordeal, he is repeatedly beaten and questioned in a Kafkaesque nightmare of pseudo-justice, where his only ‘crime’ is to be of a class and nationality which is to be liquidated.

This brutal story is told without sentimentality, and is the more powerful and impactful for it. In an almost throwaway sentence we learn early on that Tomek will never, ever see his home again. There is almost no time to appreciate the deep sadness of this before we are bundled into the depths of Soviet Russia.

This is a tale of a man subjected to all the punishments of a violent, tyrannical regime, of the sadistic and desperate men such systems create, and of nature’s own cruel capacity to imprison, injure and kill. But through this unrelentingly bleak odyssey shines humanity, humour, and the extraordinary capacity of man to endure, survive, and ultimately fight back.

Gulag to Spitfire is a cautionary tale, but sadly not one from a Europe of a dim-and-distant past. The themes of invasion, annexation, deportation, ethnic cleansing, atrocities and violence are, sadly, ‘live’ ones. Indeed, the very same sirens that Tomek would have heard in Lwów warning of air raids are wailing again today, heralding the approach of Russian cruise missiles.

Prologue

The Bird’s Eye View

It was a warm afternoon in late August 1939. Before him the rolling foothills of the Tatra Mountains gave way to the wide open plains of south-eastern Poland. Seventeen-year-old Tomek was aloft in a very low-performance Salamandra1 glider, which surprised him, as following a bungee launch, where two teams of volunteers ran down the slope pulling long elastic ropes to catapult him into the air, his normal flights always resulted in, at best, a five-minute glide to the bottom of the green valley below.

Something had happened this time and the brisk breeze blowing up the slope had not only allowed him to soar along, waving to the other Boy Scouts lining the ridge, but to gain several hundred extra metres.

It looked peaceful below, but as he already knew, following the death of his father more than a year before, all was not well. A cousin had been shot by the Russians trying to smuggle Polish literature to those still cut off from their homeland, despite the territorial gains by Poland in 1921.

His father, Kazimir, had been a friend of the father of modern Poland, Josef Piłsudski,2 and was a pallbearer at his funeral in 1935, a singular honour for those few who had served in the legions with him up to the war of 1919–21 against the Russian Bolsheviks. Kazimir had been one of the instigators, organising the revolt of those Polish officers who had been forced to serve the Tsar up to his overthrow in 1917.

Everyone knew that Russia was a permanent threat. Its revolutionary chaos resulted in what would now be described as war crimes. Several of Piłsudski’s men had been captured and tortured, with one unfortunate crucified and skinned alive by Tatar tribesmen.

Small wonder that Tomek’s father, who was effectively the military governor for south-eastern Poland, was a hard, uncompromising martinet at home. He was no longer able to calm his fractured nerves by playing the piano, his scarred hands being in constant pain from shoving burning charcoal in the face of the Tatar chieftain who had committed that atrocity. A mad action that had caused enough shock and awe to allow his men to escape.

He may well have loved his long-suffering wife Stefania, but home life under his thunder cloud was difficult. She had borne him two girls older than Tomek and a younger son, Bartek, who had been killed in infancy when their Ukrainian maid dropped him on a stone-flagged floor. Tomek remembered the screams of anguish from his mother, followed by the wailing and screams of the maid as his father whipped her.

No, Tomek’s life was easier now since the old man had died of a stroke. His family never called him Kazimierz, or the diminutive Kazik, as it was probably a reminder of his very difficult and overbearing father. Tomasz was his second name, Tomek being the affectionate pet name that somehow allowed more informality and a more relaxed atmosphere among the family.

Without fear of censure or over-expectation from a father who was determined that his son should become a surgeon, Tomek could now indulge his passions for skiing, radio and flying, as the de facto man of the family. His life was now so much better.

From his exposed, lofty perch in the creaking wood-and-canvas glider with its open cockpit, Tomek looked down at the club with amusement. Someone, probably the chief flying instructor, had rigged the sleek high-performance Orlik,3 obviously in the hopes of gaining yet another badge or record. If something so basic as Tomek’s Salamandra could stay aloft for so long, surely the Orlik could do so much better.

To his sheer delight the Orlik was catapulted off, and despite weaving left and right in a frantic search for lift, it was soon stranded in the long grass of the valley floor. Tomek was going to revel in this later. If he kept this up, he might even get his long desired ‘C’ badge to wear on the lapel of his Scout’s tunic, the envy of his mates.

It was then that he noticed something was going on next to the clubhouse. Everyone was mustering round and pulling out long canvas sheets that they arranged into a large ‘O’. That meant: Land Immediately! Tomek grinned to himself; he was certain it was sheer jealousy. If the advanced pilots couldn’t stay up, they were not going to stick around for a cheeky Boy Scout with a sense of his own superior abilities. No, he would risk their wrath and land when he felt like it.

All good things had to come to an end eventually. The sun had moved inexorably down to the horizon as the shadows of the clubhouse and windsock lengthened. Besides, his bladder was hurting now.

Reluctantly he made a reasonable approach and landed a short distance from the clubhouse. To his disappointment, none of his mates came out to greet him, it looked quite deserted. Surprised, he made to tie down the glider, but as he looked for the pegs and rope the CFI came out with another of the older pilots. They did not look at all happy.

‘You stupid young fool. Think you’re a god? You should have come down over two hours ago. There’s been a general mobilisation. You’re to report to your nearest military reserve unit!’

This was the end of Tomek’s youth. Everything now had changed.

PART ONE

CAPTURE!

1

The Realities of War

Getting back to his home in distant Lwów1 turned out to be far more complicated for Tomek than his arrival at the gliding club. The instructors were going in a completely different direction and Tomek soon discovered that if he was going to get home, it would be entirely by using his own resources.

He had been dropped by what passed for a main road and pointed in the general direction of his home town nearly 200km away. The weather was hot and he was thirsty. He saw a couple of military lorries going in the opposite direction and his wave was met with little response. The faces that stared out looked strained and resigned. For the first time his natural self-confidence was beginning to ebb away.

A policeman on a bicycle stopped Tomek and asked for identity papers. This was unusual and he argued back. The policeman just shrugged: ‘It’s war.’ He pointed out that, having given his name as Tomek, his identity card recorded him as Kazimierz Tomasz Hubert: ‘Stick with Kazimierz, whatever they call you at home. Some of the militia are very nervous, shooting at anything that worries them. There are all sorts of stories going about infiltrators and German soldiers parachuting down dressed as nuns. Everyone is in a panic. Keep your story simple. You don’t want to be shot by accident.’

Tomek was now beginning to get very worried.

A farmer took pity on him, giving a lift in a hay cart. He had no idea what was going on, but told Tomek that he reckoned that the war had either started already or would begin in a matter of hours. He passed that first night in an outhouse having eaten black bread and quenched his thirst with flat yeasty beer.

The next day he fared slightly better at hitching lifts but even so the journey was tiring, depressing and often lonely, with no chance of phoning ahead to let his mother know he was OK. He had never thought of it before, but the countryside was so empty. Not all the hamlets were Polish as some of the poorer farms were owned by Jews, who clustered together for mutual support and, unlike the polyglot population of his home town, tended to be insular and fearful of strangers. For the first time Tomek had the uncomfortable feeling that maybe those in charge, like his late father, should have been more open to the realities of this part of Poland and not so obsessed with rallying nationalist feeling behind the shield of a Polish version of Roman Catholicism, where national identity, statehood and religion made an uncompromising and probably toxic mix.

He was tired, smelly and in pain by the time he reached his home, thirty-six hours after leaving the club. If he had hoped for a warm and sympathetic welcome, he was out of luck as his older sisters were already in uniform and, far from listening to him as the man of the house, they were preoccupied with orders they had received by phone.

His mother wasn’t really bearing up to the strain. Still unsure what was going on, he turned on the radio the next morning hoping to hear a news bulletin. Instead there was static, interrupted occasionally by what sounded like grid references, and what he guessed to be coded movement orders.

Things were not much better when he reported to the city hall. There were queues of young men and women. Nobody seemed to know what was going on. Finally his old Scout master spotted him and pulled him out to join a few younger lads who looked terrified. Within an hour they boarded a bus that took them westwards to a tented camp, where they drew very uncomfortable, ill-fitting uniforms.

Tomek might have expected to be given some sort of enhanced training or fast track, given his family background, but any hope of being an officer cadet, trainee pilot or even using his experience in ham radio disappeared within a matter of days. He was told he would be assigned duties once he reached a forward position.

It was now obvious that the only training was that of surviving in the crucible of war.

In that late summer of 1939, Germany was well prepared for invading a Poland that Hitler argued should not exist. Even his arch rival and equally cruel despot, Stalin, could agree with that. Stalin was once quoted as saying: ‘The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.’ There was little doubt that an independent Poland would not be allowed to survive.

Hitler’s ‘experten’ were pilots who had the advantage of lessons learned supporting Franco in the Spanish Civil War. The Poles had no chance of achieving air superiority over their home soil. Their PZL P.11s were at least 30mph slower than many of the German bombers and too lightly armed to knock them down with anything less than a very long machine-gun burst at very close quarters. When it came to taking on the Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters, the P.11s, known as Jedenastka by the Poles, were almost 100mph slower.

Tomek didn’t really appreciate how badly equipped the Polish Air Force was until his reserve training unit was surprised by a P.11 landing in a rough field near their tents. The heavily muffled pilot got out, took off a helmet and unwrapped a scarf to reveal it was a girl not much older than himself, who asked to see their maps as she had lost her way and had no radio. He watched her take off again and for the first time realised that they probably wouldn’t win.

The next day, he was given a map and a grid reference and told to take a group of younger lads in leading several horse-drawn waggons to another camp about 30km away. It was now obvious that they were heading towards where the war was being fought.

He had heard the German Stuka dive bombers in the distance, their sirens shrieking as they bombed villages and columns of both soldiers and refugees. Their sirens, known as Jericho Trumpets, were designed to cause fear and panic. Even at this distance, the effect made his unit’s horse-drawn transport scatter. Many of the reserves were nervous, diving into ditches at the sound of any approaching aeroplane, then spending anything up to an hour trying to re-muster the horses and set off again along the road before the whole chaotic carousel began again.

Tomek was shocked the first time he came across a column that had been bombed. As he later told my mother, the smell made him gag and retch. Horses lay on either side of the road, some with limbs blown off or almost eviscerated by the blast, while others plainly had been put out of their agony by a single bullet wound to the head. Wounded men had already been removed and temporary graves littered the surrounding field. From now on things changed rapidly.

A very worried-looking man in uniform, who announced he was a medical officer, arrived in a large car and asked for volunteers. Tomek was among the first, thinking he was about to see action at last. To his surprise he and five others were taken off to the east, away from the still very distant fighting, in the direction of Lwów. They had barely gone a few kilometres when a farmhouse in the distance seemed to mushroom, instantly exploding into an expanding boletus of mud, dirt and clouds of smoke. The blast hit a second later. Tomek had never experienced anything like this before. It slammed the breath out of his body. The officer continued driving and didn’t appear to flinch. One of the younger boys on the back seat was now crying.

The officer turned to Tomek. ‘Can you drive?’ Tomek shook his head. ‘I suggest you watch me, you’ll have to learn quickly.’

The next week was spent moving to one place then another without being sure where they were or what they were supposed to be doing. This was complicated by columns of refugees blocking the roads as they moved east. Many of them were orthodox Jews, women with their heads covered in scarves or something that looked a bit like a turban, while the men wore long black coats and wide-brimmed hats, despite the heat, and curls in ringlets down the side of their faces. Those who were not showing signs of fear were stone-faced. Women and children were crying; from a distance it sounded like a constant, nerve-jangling, keening wail.

An old sergeant at a crossroads looked grim. ‘Poor bastards, I’ve heard stories of mass executions by the Nazis. They’ll be the first to go.’ Tomek later heard that some of the younger men had shaved off their curls, ditched their wide-brimmed hats and headed into the forests, saying they’d fight the Germans. This was greeted by the dismay of their parents, who were afraid it would only make matters worse for them.

Not yet knowing how far the Nazis were prepared to go in their hatred of the Jews, this didn’t make a lot of sense to Tomek. Sure the Jews were always a people a bit apart, but by and large they were no threat. They usually played the best music at weddings and sold the best bargains at the market. Although they spoke Polish, they preferred to converse in Yiddish or even Russian. Tomek wasn’t too sure about this, as sometimes he thought they were talking about him. Even so, he never met one in the Scouts or among the reservists.

His first field hospital was another shock: one doctor, two orderlies and more than 200 patients, many of them dying with horrendous injuries. He had not realised before, but blood and spilled guts smelled.

Not having any real medical experience, his first task had been to bury the dead in their makeshift graves. Every morning there were more, every afternoon ever greater numbers of wounded appeared. Those capable of walking were sent on while the worst were given morphine, if available, to kill the pain and wait either for them to get better or die. There were no operating facilities at all.

He lost all sense of time or place. He was now dog tired, numb and utterly bewildered. There were a couple of older men who seemed to know what they were doing. Most days were spent obeying the last order, emptying slops, digging new latrines or occasionally being called over to hold down a screaming, struggling man as disinfectant was sluiced into an open wound, then bandages wound tightly.

He saw gangrene for the first time and was horrified at the look and stench of it. Fortunately they had no bone saws, so he didn’t have to assist or witness any amputations. Those poor sods were wheeled outside for collection as and when any transport of any kind passed by.

By his second week (or so he thought) he began to notice aircraft flying from the north-west towards the Rumanian frontier that lay approximately to the south and east of his latest field hospital posting. He had no means of knowing, but from 14 September orders had been given for the evacuation of all Polish Air Force units to neutral Rumania. The air battle over Warsaw and Western Poland was already lost.

On 17 September (the day before his 18th birthday), the Polish Commander in Chief and his staff evacuated to Rumania as well.2 Although it had not been recorded, it is probable that Polish intelligence were aware that the Russians had agreed on the 14th to initiate an immediate attack on Poland from the east.

Tomek was completely unaware of any of these developments. The first he knew of it was seeing, in the distance, some very large and slow unfamiliar aircraft that seemed to hang just above the horizon for ages. They were, most likely, Russian transports being used to move troops to forward positions. What is known is that on the 18th, Russian aircraft were engaged by a few Polish stragglers among the few airworthy Polish P11s, with a couple of Polikarpov I-16s and I-15bis being claimed as shot down. These were followed by Tupolev SB-2 bombers carrying out raids on targets untouched by the Germans.

From Tomek’s perspective matters had quietened down on his uncelebrated birthday and everything had almost gone silent. The stream of casualties had all but dried up and nobody knew what was happening. It was then that the rumours began. There were no messages or radio contact. Traffic was few and far between, seemingly heading south to Rumania rather than the usual east or west.

The older orderlies were looking very worried and began hurrying anyone capable of moving under their own steam out from the tents and away to the south as well. When asked by Tomek or any of the younger boys what was going on, they were greeted with the one word, ‘Russians’, and nothing more.

Finally one of the more senior orderlies suggested that Tomek ought to find his way back home without suggesting how he could do it.

The question was answered later that same day. A commandeered van arrived and Tomek was offered a lift. Unsure what to do, the sound of machine-gun fire made his mind up for him. As he jumped in he saw a soldier running towards them with what looked like a missing foot. He was screaming at them to get away, before he collapsed in a heap on the recently ploughed field.

The driver hesitated, then moaned as he doubled over and fell out of the cab. Tomek leaned across to help and to his horror was waved away as the driver appeared to be trying to stuff his own intestines back into his body. Terrified, Tomek slid over to the driver’s seat and drove off, crunching the gears. He heard shouts from the back of the van and guessed that others were jumping in.

His last view of the field hospital was as he breasted a ridge. Two tanks were driving rapidly over the field hospital tents. He had no idea what happened to the wounded who couldn’t move. He guessed they were crushed. Fortunately, as he was driving east, the Russian tanks seemed not to be interested in him.

Initially, upon the advice of his passengers, he joined a stream of other vehicles that shared petrol as they drove south to the Rumanian border, crossing it at night. Not knowing what to do, they waited around for instructions, only to be told that all military vehicles and weapons were to be surrendered to the Rumanians. Any officers or men would be moved further into Rumania and interned awaiting a decision as to their fate. Rumania’s neutrality was already under threat.

Tomek wasn’t at all happy about this, as he didn’t really qualify as military personnel, so he slipped away once more and recrossed the border back into Poland, in the hopes of finding out what had happened to his mother and sisters.

He was very lucky in being picked up by a mixed group of students and service veterans, who announced that they were going to stay behind and start a resistance movement. To his surprise he recognised a face from his college who had got hold of a heavy machine gun, announcing to all that he was going to find a church tower somewhere and pick off any Russians or Germans. That was the last Tomek saw of him.

He got to Lwów early the next day and found his mother alone in the house. Everything seemed almost normal, if unusually quiet. She had no idea what was happening. The local police had been replaced by Ukraine-speaking militia wearing Russian uniforms who directed traffic. Nobody was keen to engage with them.

A curfew was imposed and anyone picked up after hours disappeared. There was a rumour that all churches were closed and locked by the new Russian-appointed officials. Tomek thought about going to Rumania again but his mother thought it was too risky.

Within a few days a general order went out ordering the population to report to their schools, colleges and places of work. Tomek, in common with many, was reluctant, especially as over the next few weeks the most popular teachers were replaced by others who were either dedicated socialists or, in a few cases, did not seem to speak much Polish, lapsing into Ukrainian, which was just about understandable, if accompanied by technical drawings on the blackboards. Lectures in philosophy and history had been stopped for those who had not yet matriculated.

Tomek had sat his exams before the summer and was hoping to go on to greater things. Instead he was back at his old college marking time, while technical subjects such as engineering and the sciences that preceded entry into university or technical institutes were peppered with communist propaganda and speeches on political theory.

Rumours were beginning to circulate about secret meetings and more than once a note had been passed to Tomek telling him to stay at a particular street corner, noting any military vehicles or squads of Russian soldiers. He would report back in the bustle between lectures, when he would have a tap on the shoulder and be told not to turn round. Any initial excitement paled with a growing sense of menace as groups of civilians were rounded up and loaded into lorries. New faces speaking Ukrainian started to appear, taking over shops and businesses. Tomek had never heard the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ but he was witnessing the beginnings.

Tensions were racked up when notices went up announcing that elections would be held to choose spokesmen for each class, workshop and so on. Everybody was suspicious of this order, but few saw any sense in disobeying it.

Tomek was soon to find out the reality of what the Russians planned.

When he duly reported to his college class, he quickly heard that the Russians were indeed carrying out elections and those voted in were promptly arrested and disappeared. His worst fear now bore out the stories his late father had told him about how the Russians in the Tsarist times did exactly the same thing in the past, using what was then the Cheka (Secret Police).

This rerun of elimination was now being carried out, with even greater efficiency, by Stalin’s head of the NKVD, Lavrentiy Beria. His agenda was to eliminate all political leaders, intelligentsia and officer class, an action that would ultimately culminate in the Katyn massacres, where thousands were shot in the back of the head and shoved into mass graves. Beria would later complain to Stalin that such mass executions were exhausting for his men!

Tomek’s class refused to hold any such election. They were soon confronted by a uniformed officer who would only speak to them in either Russian or Ukrainian, insisting that the students would understand him. This resulted in uproar, which had already begun elsewhere in the college. The numbers were such that even if the Russians present had drawn their weapons, they would have been overrun in seconds. The chaos was a successful diversion for Tomek, who made his escape in the confusion and hid until nightfall.

His first inclination was to make for his home, but recognising a friend of his in the street, he risked talking to him. The news was not good. His friend was walking out of town that night as he didn’t think it was safe. Tomek thought this was a crazy idea as his friend had no real idea of where he was going beyond saying he would make for Rumania. Even when Tomek told him what he had found when he got there, his friend wasn’t to be dissuaded. Tomek never saw him again and never knew if the lad ever got to his stated destination.

More by good luck than judgement, a friend of his mother took Tomek in, having found him hiding among some bins on a street corner. Bewildered, tired and hungry, he was still debating whether to risk going back to his own family home.

‘You’ll be safer in my house. We have a secret room hidden behind a wardrobe.’ It sounded like a better bet.

Having given him some tea and hard-boiled eggs, she introduced him to her daughter, who had only been married a couple of weeks. Her new husband had been spared military service, though it was never explained why.

They gave him a bottle of water and took him up to the secret room. It was more like an attic just off the top bedroom. There was a chair, a mattress on the floor and two blankets. Tomek was shut in there. Once settled in, he could hear the large and ornate free-standing wardrobe being pushed across the floor and up against the door. It sounded as if it took the efforts of mother, daughter and new husband to make everything secure.

The only problem was that in the dead of the night, Tomek could hear giggles and the creaking of a bedstead coming from the bedroom. He vowed that whatever happened he wouldn’t disturb them in the night.

At first everything went well. At about 5 a.m., the wardrobe was pulled back, the door opened and, after relieving himself, Tomek was able to stretch his legs, have a wash, and eat a substantial breakfast before being reinterned. The same happened around 9 p.m. every evening. He realised that this could only be a temporary measure and was fearful of what would happen to his hosts if the NKVD ever found out. The woman’s own husband had already disappeared and nobody had any idea if he was alive or dead.

It all fell apart late one evening. The food and drink routine had been varied and for some reason the usual chamber pot had not been returned to the attic room. Tomek had no wish to interrupt the sounds of amorous activity coming from the bedroom beyond the door and wardrobe, yet his bladder thought otherwise.

Finally, out of desperation, he opened the little attic window and relieved himself. To his horror, he heard shouts in furious Russian from below and, quickly retreating and pulling the window quietly shut behind him, he was horrified to see an NKVD guard emerge from the shadows into the street light below. He was looking directly up at the top-floor windows. Tomek could not have chosen a worse person to widdle on. He realised that the game was up.

As soon as the guard walked away to report it, Tomek banged on the door. He had to leave at once. Interrupted lovemaking would be the least of his hosts’ problems if they were found to be sheltering him.

Very scared, hungry and thirsty, he made his way carefully, under the cloak of darkness, keeping to unlit alleyways avoiding patrols looking for anyone breaking the curfew. He needed shelter but was out of ideas.

Reluctantly he returned to his home, where his mother, with an almost psychic maternal intuition, opened the door before he knocked. She looked pale, drawn, anxious and unwell. Holding back any questions, she fed him before he collapsed into an exhausted sleep.

The next day she explained that the NKVD had been to the house several times over the past week. She had not understood at first what they were after, until she realised that they were looking for Tomek’s father, who had been dead for two years. She wasn’t sure if they had realised that she had a son of the same name. Tomek thought that her optimism in believing that they did not yet know about his existence was misplaced.

Reluctantly, he agreed with her insistence that he should hide in yet another wardrobe during the day. He managed it for a short while, coming out to sleep in his own bed at night then stripping it before dawn to give the impression that he wasn’t staying there. So far there had not been any more raids in his street and his mother retained an almost faith-driven optimism that they had got away with it.

That all changed after one midnight, when Tomek was woken by being prodded with a rifle barrel. There were several uniformed men in his bedroom, while his mother was protesting loudly outside, asking why it took so many men to arrest one boy.3

After a brief interrogation, he found himself outside, then bundled into the back of a lorry with half a dozen other men he didn’t recognise. He finally caught sight of his mother running down the road with a pot of jam that she tried to throw to him. She was pushed back roughly by a couple of rifle butts. This would be the very last time in his life that Tomek saw his home, his street and his city.

2

Torture

There is a book in Polish that details all those deported from Lwów. It is based simply on research among those interviewed, underground documents and what few of the original public records survived.

This will surprise many historians who are prepared to troll exhaustively through reams of paperwork, trying to get to the facts of what happened in the past. The problem with Lwów and almost all of south-eastern Poland is that, as far as the Russians were concerned, it should never have existed as Polish territory.

Ethnic cleansing purged all such records.

Poland had gone from a vast commonwealth in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that went from the Carpathian Mountains to Estonia and from almost the Oder River in the west to beyond Smolensk in the east, covering much of what would be Belarus and Ukraine today.

Through mismanagement, poor administration and internal bickering instead of having a dynastic monarchy, they elected kings from the royal families of other countries. Inevitably they all had their own agendas. Through this political dog’s dinner of conflicting political and strategic stresses, Poland all but disappeared under a series of partitions between Russia, Prussia and the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. Interference by the Swedes trying to invade from the north did not help either.

Part of the problem was that, beyond a few rivers, Poland did not really have any natural borders running east to west, while the south was only guarded by the Carpathian Mountains. Although forests and the Pripet Marshes occasionally slowed up some invading forces, they were not natural bastions against the enemy. For instance, as the Mongol hordes under Genghis Khan had discovered, a great deal of the country was sparsely populated, open and ideal for cavalry, and in much later years, tanks.

The Poland that Tomek knew was relatively modern, having been won back after the chaos of the First World War and the Russian Revolution. The Poles, under Josef Piłsudski, had defeated the Red Army in 1921. They had been aided by the fighting between White Russia and the Bolsheviks. The simultaneous intervention of the British Expeditionary Force sent by Churchill to attack from the north of Russia all helped to dilute Bolshevik forces’ efforts in the west against the Poles. The Poles succeeded in winning back territory that had a mix of races and languages, much to the horror of such Western Allies as Britain, France and the USA, who wanted the Poles to adhere to the far more conservative and Russia-friendly Curzon Line drawn far to the west of their recent gains.

All in all, Tomek had grown up against a background of tension that had involved his father, Kazimir Hubert, who as a colonel was in a position of extraordinary power and influence, as there was no higher rank in the peacetime army. Regarded as a hero of the legions and recipient of the Virtuti Militari, the ultimate medal for bravery, he was frequently summoned, with a chartered aeroplane laid on by the government in Warsaw, for conferences about the state of Poland’s armed forces and political stability. Against this background, the whole family well understood that a strong military presence was the only thing that stood between them and another partition.

Sadly, Poland’s economy could not sustain the modernisation of its armed forces of any size to compete with a rearming Germany and a steadily industrialising Russia under the vicious iron fist of Stalin. Few Poles of Tomek’s father’s generation had any illusion that the war clouds were gathering. Their only hope was a series of alliances that would pull in France and Great Britain, should the worst happen. The reality was that neither country had the appetite for taking advantage of Germany’s attack on Poland to invade the now unprotected Rhineland in the west. This indecision sealed Poland’s and Tomek’s fate.

He was about to learn the difference between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ Russia. Officially Russia had not invaded Eastern Poland, it had simply mounted a special operation of sorts to stabilise the situation and allow refugees to go home. This was not unlike the situation today with Putin’s ‘denazification’ of Ukraine, and like its counterpart of 1939 is a cover for a great deal of cruelty and war crimes that they hoped would never see the light of day.

The Russian invasion involved no charm offensive, or attempts to win hearts and minds, but simply the crushing of opposition, the transportation of others to undisclosed fates and the complete dismantling of civil authority. Basically, it used brutal criminals, gave them weapons, and told them they could do what they liked. Behind them lay the NKVD, the dreaded secret police, which was there to make sure that were no exceptions, humanity, or deviations from the master plan. They were to take over all occupied territory and expunge any memory of Poland from the historical record.

Tomek, inevitably with his background, was possibly in line to be expunged, if he did not co-operate.

Interrogation began with no clue as to what he was accused of. The entrance to his interrogator’s office had a tapestry of Our Lady of Częstochowa laid on the floor and he was ordered to wipe his feet on it. He refused, which resulted in the first of many clubbings by rifle butts.1

This was how they intended to change Tomek’s heart and mind.

He was dog tired, he had not been allowed any sleep, and every time he closed his eyes he had been prodded awake. Once a bucket of water had been thrown over him. He had lost all sense of space and time. He had been blindfolded, moved from one building to another and even taken in a lorry somewhere. He wasn’t even sure if he was still in Lwów.

He had been kept in solitary confinement and, although he could hear other prisoners shouting in Polish, he saw nobody as he was blindfolded and taken off to yet another interrogation.

Most of the time he was screamed at in Russian, then punched or beaten when he either didn’t or couldn’t answer.

Once he was denounced in badly accented Polish. He couldn’t see who it was, as he was still blindfolded. The same statement was made again and again. He was an enemy of the proletariat, his father had oppressed the Ukrainian peasants, and he had been a war criminal. All Tomek had to do was accept that his Catholicism was wrong, his father was wrong, renounce God and accept that Marx and Engels were right. Religion was the opiate of the people, communism was unstoppable. It would take over the whole of Europe, he was a fool to resist.

This was followed by more beatings. His cell stank; there wasn’t even a bucket for him to relieve himself. There was no schedule or mealtimes; when he least expected it, he would be given coarse black bread and a tin mug of water. Occasionally a hose was turned on his cell to sluice out the filth and urine. The subsequent soaking was bitterly cold but a relief from the stink.

He heard shooting and women screaming. After a while the number of Polish voices diminished. If he asked the guards what was going on, they said nothing and more often than not pointed their weapons at him, cocking them as if they intended to shoot. At first he was terrified, but after a while he became inured to it. His next punishment was to be put into something they called the Karza: a very small cell, too low to stand up in and too narrow to lie or sit down. His body was cramped and painful.

It was after that he was brought in to his final interrogation before being moved on. A weaselly man with a bald head had started the interrogation. He seemed to be enjoying it. That all changed when a tall woman walked in and said something in Russian. The man looked worried and immediately left the room. She was wearing a black uniform Tomek had not seen before. She looked as if she might have been Jewish, or even Georgian, but there was no glint of compassion or sympathy in her eyes. Her manner was that of someone who was out to prove unswerving loyalty to the Stalinist terror machine. Previous interrogations had been brutal; this, for a change, was cold, efficient and almost robotic.

She asked, in clipped Russian, Tomek’s name, address and about his immediate family. Tomek refused to answer, so she just shrugged and made a note before reading out what sounded like an indictment. She handed him a large document printed in Russian, before giving Tomek a pen, indicating a space at the bottom of the page. She said just one word in Polish: ‘Sign!’ He shook his head. She snatched it back then signed it for him.

He was then dragged to his feet, hurried outside past a wall that had bullet marks on it and shoved into the back of a lorry. There were several other unkempt men all shackled together. A young armed guard climbed in after them and they drove off.

Tomek, by now, had no idea of his fate, what he was accused of, how long he had been confined or even if he would stand trial. He was now in that twilight world of ‘unofficial’ Russia. What little can be deduced from post-war research reveals that he was officially arrested on 27 October. It is almost certain he was never told he had been formally arrested. This pattern was to be repeated over the next two years.

There is now some confusion as to where Tomek was taken next. The pattern was the same, shouts and threats followed by interrogation then thrown in a lorry, or marched off in the middle of the night, with no idea of where he was or what he was charged with. This was deliberate.

Disorientation is a stress technique used even today to make prisoners amenable to interrogation, prone to agree to anything and, of course, to break any vestiges of spirited resistance. In his book Spare, Prince Harry describes enduring similar treatment in training exercises designed to toughen up officers, should they ever be captured. Tomek had no such preparation.

Even today, volunteers and Ukrainian PoWs have described similar treatment, having been taken in eastern Ukraine during the Russian invasion.

Often Tomek was reliant on other prisoners telling him what was happening, but of course there was no guarantee that this was anything more than guesswork. There are, however, a few stories he told that have been since repeated in similar form by others who survived.

It might have been in Kiev where Tomek was thrown, quite literally, into an already overcrowded cell. Nobody had washed, probably in weeks, and lice crawled everywhere. Some of the men were already quite ill, probably with typhus.

After a few hours they were taken out in groups, stripped naked then doused with paraffin and left standing outside in a bitterly cold courtyard. Their clothes were burned. Other prisoners who had already been shaven were then ordered to shave all body and head hair from each of the new batch of prisoners. For the first of what would be many times, Tomek felt violated, as this treatment didn’t spare the pubic and anal areas. It was painful as the shaving was inexpert, done with already well used razors of various descriptions, and many of the men, my father included, had areas of their body that were left as an untreated, bloody mess.

They were then hosed down with freezing water and given a coarse, evil-smelling soap, which didn’t lather, to wash off the paraffin. They were then issued with a kufeika (a sort of padded jacket), padded trousers, coarse socks and ill-fitting boots. They were then herded into trucks and sent off elsewhere. There were rumours that the sick men were all shot.

At their new destination, they were put into small cells with a single bucket serving as sanitation for upwards of a dozen prisoners. They were allowed out into an open courtyard once a day to be hosed down again, but beyond any small rags they had secreted about their bodies, there was nothing in the way of toilet paper or flannels.

Tomek was later convinced that he was taken to Kharkiv, then Gorodnya, before being taken to Moscow.

That was the last that Tomek saw of anything approaching natural daylight. Now the interrogations happened at any time with no warning. Sometimes they were left in total darkness, possibly for days, as there was no way of telling the time. This would change, as a single bulb might go on, then be extinguished after just a few minutes, or a few hours, often when they were all trying to sleep. There was no sense of day or night, and being denied any view onto the outside world simply confused their body clocks.

The pattern of interrogation was the same. The Russians called Tomek ‘Gubert Kazimir Kazimirovich’, mistaking the Western ‘H’ for the Cyrillic equivalent of ‘G’. A whole list of spying charges (or so it sounded to Tomek), followed by a denunciation and a beating. Any answer at all resulted in more beating, usually with rifle butts, lengths of rawhide with a knot on the end, which the Russians called a knout, or wooden battens, which Tomek ruefully said made a pleasant change, as they often had a break mid-beating.

On one occasion, Tomek’s left jaw was smashed with a rifle butt. The interrogator looked up and said, ‘We must do something about that,’ and one of the guards smashed his right jaw. His face would have a slight twist to it for the rest of his life.

He believed that he was taken to the Lubyanka jail in Moscow just before Christmas 1939. What is certain is that now the beatings and interrogations were carried out by the NKVD rather than Russian militia or regular soldiers. For one thing, the rifle butts were gone and this time it was almost exclusively the use of what are almost laughingly called rubber truncheons. These rarely broke limbs but caused severe internal bruising, sometimes with fatal consequences.

The Russian dissident lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, after trying to pursue the theft of public money through the state courts, was beaten to death with rubber truncheons on the night of 16 November 2009. Evidently these are still the weapons of choice in ‘unofficial’ Russia.

Tomek could see the effects of severe beating for himself when a young naked man, bound hands to feet, was thrust unconscious into his cell. He had been beaten to an ugly purple and black, from his kidneys and around the exposed testicles and buttocks, through blue to yellow, down the back of his legs and up his spine. Tomek had no idea if he survived as he also had a beating due shortly afterwards.

One evening, someone, somewhere, who bravely thought it must be Christmas Eve, started singing Polish Christmas carols – a refrain that was taken up almost immediately by other Poles whom Tomek couldn’t see. His cell soon joined in, and despite the guards taking off individuals for further beatings, the singing continued, blocking out the sounds of thuds, shouts, screams and occasional shots.

Soon afterwards, in severely freezing weather, Tomek was taken out with a few other Poles, and after a brief journey to some marshalling yards was herded into cattle waggons. Others told him that any doctors, lawyers, teachers and university graduates had been left behind, probably to be shot.