Marcin Zwolski
“The Polish command was in a big building made of brick. With great affection, I noticed that the Polish flag was flying over it. I know that this made a huge impression on those who had arrived from prisons and labour camps. You have to understand: after hopeless years of slowly dying, the Polish flag is fluttering over the headquarters in Buzuluk” (W. Anders, Bez ostatniego rozdziału. Wspomnienia z lat 1939–1946, London 1959 [Without a Final Chapter. Memories from the Years 1939–1946, London 1959]).
The attack of Nazi Germany on the Soviet empire on 22 June 1941 changed the situation on the front in World War II. The Wehrmacht was effortlessly destroying Red Army units, taking over huge areas of the Soviet Union in a flash. Joseph Stalin saw that in order to survive he needed to find help. The British also wanted Soviet help in the fight against the Germans, but there was one obstacle which made this alliance very hard to form: Poland was still in a state of unspoken war with the USSR.
British diplomacy was working very hard to reconcile these feuding countries, mostly thanks to which Polish–Soviet discussions started in London at the beginning of July 1941. The Polish side was led by General Władysław Sikorski, while the Soviets were led by Ivan Maisky, the ambassador to the USSR in Great Britain. After a month of negotiations, although there was no guarantee that Poland would keep all its eastern lands after the war, and with the objection of almost half of the members of the government and the President of the Republic of Poland, Sikorski decided to sign the agreement. “You know, when I was about to sign this agreement, wrestling with whether I should wait a bit longer, I heard something like a whisper of a thousand lips – hurry up, save us!” This is how he explained this move later, and this sign was indeed a rescue, or at least it gave a chance for hundreds of thousands of ‘wanderers’.
You can go wherever you want
The “Sikorski-Mayski agreement” – as the Polish-Soviet agreement, signed in London on 30 July 1941, was commonly called – restored diplomatic relations between these two countries and announced the creation of a Polish Army in the USSR. The Soviets declared that their agreements with Germany from 1939 were no longer in force, and in an additional protocol they were obliged to announce an “amnesty” for Polish citizens: prisoners, prisoners of war, inmates of forced labour camps, and deportees. Use of the term ‘amnesty’, which is associated with an act of mercy for criminals, raised strong objections from the Polish authorities in exile and, to a lesser extent, from Poles in Soviet Union, but General Sikorski had no doubts: “Some people are bothered by the use of the word amnesty in the agreement, but only those who live here free and well-fed, not those who will be liberated and returned to human conditions by this word”, he explained.
A decree about the amnesty was issued on 12 August. People under the amnesty now had the right to move freely around the USSR and to live in a location of their choice. This information about their regained freedom reached the larger groups of Poles within a few days. This is how this moment was remembered by Marian Stecyk: “Sharkov held an assembly, where which he said: «I am no longer needed. WAR. And within the amnesty you will be given documents, you will be free like everyone in our country. You will be able to go wherever you want». It was the beginning of August 1941. An ecstatic joy spread around; people were raising their hands to the sky; they would be free, as if they had been waiting not seventeen months but seven years for those documents – the documents of salvation”!
Despite the fact that the news about freedom came later or even not at all in the more-remote regions of the USSR, it was officially reported that, by 1 October 1941, 332 thousand Polish citizens has been released, rising to 389 thousand by the end of the action. The joy of being free again combined with concerns for the future. Everyone was waiting for the opportunity to return home, to Poland, but it was out of the question. People were wondering where they should go. How could they be sure that their fate would be better somewhere else?
Ready to serve
On 14 August 1941, a Polish–Soviet military agreement was signed. “A Polish Army will be formed in the shortest possible time in the USSR”, the document said. For this one time in the history of the USSR, the Moscow authorities agreed to have a foreign army forming and functioning on their lands. They were even obliged to give military equipment to the Poles before deliveries from the West arrived. They were also supposed to look after the Polish recruits (the ‘bill’ was to be settled by the Polish government after the war).
One of the candidates to lead this Polish army was General Władysław Anders, who had been released from the NKVD Lubyanka prison in Moscow a couple of days before the agreement was signed. In his first letter to General Sikorski, Anders resolved any doubts about the state of his health: “Even though it has been long and very difficult, especially for me as I was seriously wounded three times in September 1939, a 20-month stay in prison has not broken me. I feel morally strong and the wounds are bothering me less… I am ready to serve”. On 10 August, General Sikorski officially appointed Anders the leader of the Polish Army in the USSR. After a few days, the nomination was accepted by Joseph Stalin.
The pace of work on the Polish army was unbelievably fast. Organisational centres ready for 30 thousand soldiers were prepared in Saratov and Chkalovsk Oblasts, on the territory spreading from the Volga River to the Urals, and in Buzuluk, Totskoye, Chkalovo and Tatishchevo. Recruiting committees headed to NKVD prisoner-of-war camps, and by the middle of the September around 25 thousand recruits had arrived at the centres, to which tens of thousands of volunteers, liberated across the whole territory of the USSR, were also travelling. They were mostly young men who did not have families to provide for, but later fathers, husbands and women also joined. Gradually, more families with children decided to start their journey into the unknown, believing that they would have greater chances of survival with the Polish army.
“I don’t know how we received the news that the Polish government-in-exile in London had done some kind of a deal with the Soviets, that Polish forced labourers were being liberated from the camps, that we are no longer forced to stay and work in designated areas, that somewhere in Russia a Polish army was being formed”, Edward Pieńkos recollects. “This last piece of information was of particular importance for me. I had been dreaming about the army since I was a child, and now this dream was connecting with the war, with the willingness to liberate my homeland, with the desire for retaliation, not against the Germans, whom I had never seen, but against the resented Soviets. These desires took control over me in such a way that I was unable to think about anything else”.
The Polish flag on Soviet lands
People were travelling by any means of transport they could – by barges, trains, and on foot… No matter what the vehicle was or if there was none at all, the provisions possessed by the travelling families were shrinking fast. Getting hold of food bordered on the miraculous, and the stops were filthy and disease-ridden. As a result, not everyone reached their destination. The dead were left in city morgues or even by the roads as it was very often impossible to bury them. Those who manged to survive went into raptures over the sight of the Polish flag and uniforms. As General Anders himself recollected: “The Polish command was in a big building made of brick. With great affection, I noticed that the Polish flag was flying over it. I know that this made a huge impression on those who arrived from prisons and labour camps. You have to understand: after hopeless years of slowly dying, the Polish flag was flying over the Polish military headquarters in Buzuluk”.
The recruits’ joy at joining their compatriots where Polish flags fluttered could not reduce the hunger. Sick and exhausted people needed care and food, and this started to become increasingly problematic. By the end of September, the number of recruits had exceeded the 30 thousand that had been expected, and the amount of very irregularly supplied food rations did not increase. In October, there were more than 40 thousand people in the camps. Despite that, all the requests to increase the supplies remained unanswered. General Anders consistently refused to send back the surplus recruits from the camps, as was requested by the Soviets. He knew that it would mean death for the people thrown out of the camps.
The leaders of the Red Army expected to direct Polish units to fight against the Germans, but Anders did not accept this, pointing to the need to feed and train the soldiers. The Soviets got impatient and started to make it hard for the Poles to reach the mobilisation points. Moreover, they started to draft representatives of ethnic minorities living in Poland into the Red Army. As a consequence of the Polish protests, the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs of the USSR issued an official note which denied the right to the amnesty and regaining Polish citizenship – and, as a result, the right to join the Polish Army – for Ukrainian, Belarussian or Jewish Polish citizens. This did not mean that those people stopped joining the so-called Anders’ Army: they just started to appear at the mobilisation points without documents because they “had lost them”.
Not to allow needless death
During the first days of December 1941, General Sikorski and General Anders met with Stalin in Moscow. They discussed the further drafting of Belarussian, Ukrainian or Jewish Polish citizens, the incomplete execution of the amnesty agreement, as well as the missing officers from the camps in Starobilsk, Kozelsk and Ostashkov (those who, according to Stalin, “escaped to Manchuria…”). However, they devoted most time to discussing the organisational matters of the Polish Army. Sikorski and Anders recounted the dramatic situation of the recruits. Sikorski was trying to speak diplomatically: “Current difficulties in terms of alimentation, equipment and training concern me because formations created under such conditions will be completely useless. Instead of devoting their health and life to the common cause, these people are vegetating or dying pointlessly”. Anders directly, as a soldier, added: “This is just miserable vegetation and lost months. It is absolutely impossible to form an army under these conditions”.
General Anders saw the suffering and death of these people every day. He felt responsible for them, so without embarrassment he told the Soviet dictator about the lack of food, armour, fodder for horses, stoves for tents, soap, tools or medicines. He added that a typhus epidemic had broken out in the camps. Stalin calmly accepted all of these remarks, finally saying that further enlargement of the Polish army and more supplies were possible only if there was greater commitment from the Western countries. Sikorski was prepared for such a declaration and informed Stalin about the promise of the United States and Great Britain to transfer a sufficient amount of supplies on condition that the army formation points were moved to areas where they would be easier to deliver to…
In the face of these arguments, Stalin agreed to move the Polish army south – to Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Transcaucasia. The climate would be better for the Polish soldiers, and the closeness of Iran, which was controlled jointly by the British and Soviets, could facilitate shipments of supplies from the West. Further details were established with the Soviet leadership, without the participation of Stalin.
Apart from the awaited decisions, which were supposed to save thousands of recruits, Anders brought a special guest from Moscow to the army centre in Buzuluk: General Sikorski, who wanted to see the units he had heard so much about. On 13 December 1941, he inspected the parade of General Mieczysław Boruta-Spiechowicz’s 5th Infantry Division – the first from the formed units which was armed. Hungry and ragged soldiers proudly presented themselves in front of their leader, and the legends about this parade live on to this day. One participant in the parade, General Marian Kukiel, described it to General Tadeusz Klimecki as follows:
“Poles in Russia consider Sikorski a legendary personage sent by divine forces to save them… The soldiers of Spiechowicz’s division went to the inspection and parade wearing whatever they had. There were mainly old, tattered and worn-out Polish army coats, some overcoats, jackets, sheepskin coats and wadded jackets (called fufaika), unbelievable beggars’ tatters. Some of them were barefoot, some had some scraps of shoes tied with strings, some had their feet wrapped in cloths (the British uniforms and equipment had not reached them yet). But – he said with his voice trembling – you only see this kind of parade once in your lifetime. The frost was severe on the day when Spiechowicz’s division of more than ten thousand men stood in an open field ready for inspection, fixed like guards from the past. If you could put your heart into the rhythm of the parade march, into the foot soldiers’ steps – that is what Polish soldiers did in Saratov near the Volga river. Yesterday, they were people without their homeland and a future, doomed to a slow death, so they paraded to show gratitude towards the man who had changed their fate…”
General Anders’ staff left Totskoye on 15 January 1942. Their new stop was Yangiyoʻl near Tashkent in Uzbekistan. The transport of all the units to Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan lasted until March. Help from Britain, including uniforms and weapons, started to arrive at the new camps. This is also when new recruits started to appear, and soon the army was 70 thousand soldiers strong. However, not everyone who was heading to Anders’ Army had received the news about the relocation of the Polish mobilisation points, while others did not believe the Soviet information. What happened to those who arrived at the Volga River and Ural after 1942 – after weeks and months of travelling – only to find out that they were too late? Unfortunately, no one provided them with food for the additional thousands of kilometres they had to cross. Witnesses of such journeys said that corpses were dragged out of the carriages at every railway station. The wanderings of those who reached the South Asian Soviet republics had begun…
Marcin Zwolski – Sybir Memorial Museum
This article was prepared of the basis of the book Krajobraz z Sybirem w tle. W stronę Polski 1941–1959 [Landscape with Sybir in the background. Towards Poland 1941–1959], which was prepared and published by Sybir Memorial Museum in 2023.
All the photographs come from the archive of Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum.