sumptuous banquet at the Kremlin before its members left for Warsaw, was a somewhat
lop-sided affair, in which the key positions were held by pro-Soviet Poles; but it was the best the Western Powers could achieve in the circumstances, and they hastened to
recognise the new Polish Government. In his speech at the Kremlin that night, Stalin spoke of the harm Poland and Russia had done each other in the past, and admitted that Russia's guilt had been greater than Poland's; he even suggested that a new generation of Poles would have to grow up before all the bitterness disappeared. Germany, he said, would continue to be a threat to both Poland and Russia, and their alliance was essential, but it was not enough in itself, and both countries, therefore, needed the alliance of the United States, Britain and France.
[ Ibid., p. 157.]
(e) Close-Up: Civil War Undertones in Poland
This was for foreign consumption. Stalin and all other Russians knew that an acute
struggle was going on in Poland between "East" and "West". When I spent ten days in Poland soon after the formation of the new government, I found there something not
unlike a civil war atmosphere. The arrival in Poland of an unusually large group of
Western correspondents gave rise to some sharp anti-Russian demonstrations for their benefit. One of them was particularly grim: at Cracow, to show us that the "underground"
was active, two unfortunate Russian soldiers were shot outside the hotel where we were staying. Any meetings we had with the "intelligentsia"—whether with writers in Cracow, or with members of the Radio Committee at Katowice—were invariably marked by
violent denunciations of the Russians and of their "stooges"— "NKVD" Bierut, Osobka-Morawski, or Gomulka.
Faute de mieux, Mikolajczyk became a symbol of Polish patriotism of the right kind: soon after his arrival in Poland, many thousands staged a tremendous demonstration in his honour at Cracow, which had become like the capital of the old-time and pro-Western Poland, and the stronghold of the Peasant Party, the PSL, and also of all that was most clerical and "reactionary" in the country. The city, with its famous baroque churches, and Pilsudski's tomb—an "anti-Russian" shrine which thousands visited every day —had suffered less damage than most Polish cities. But although the Russians had saved
Cracow from destruction, the hostility to them was greater here than anywhere else. The Russian soldiers in Cracow, for their part, were particularly nervous, boorish and defiant, and among those who had come from Germany with all its lawlessness, discipline was far from good, and the Poles wallowed in stories of Russian robbery and rape.
The atmosphere in Warsaw was distinctly better. The city was, of course, a tragic sight.
Practically all governmental and other activity was centred in Praga, on the other side of the river, and the Vistula could be crossed only by a temporary wooden bridge. In
Warsaw proper, among the few "live" places were the Hotel Polonia and a few blocks of houses behind it; here the Germans had lived till the end, while the rest of Warsaw was burning. Around, for miles, was the desert of burned-out houses and mountains of rubble.
There were cigarette vendors outside the Polonia selling mostly UNRRA cigarettes, and the "fourteen flower stalls" of Warsaw were considered a pathetic small beginning of the restoration of life. A few pre-fabricated houses and a few buses and tramcars had been presented to Warsaw by the Soviet Union, and there was much talk that Russia was going to "rebuild half of Warsaw"; but, whether true or not, all this was still in the future.
Meantime, most of the workers of Warsaw were busy clearing rubble and patching up
houses that could still be made more or less habitable. What was striking in Warsaw, though, was the faith that the city would be rebuilt; the "Lublin" Poles had announced that this would be done, and this was psychologically, a great point in their favour. This reconstruction of Warsaw and the Oder-Neisse Line were the two points on which all
Poles were agreed.
One day when I was in Warsaw, about 20,000 workers, and some peasant delegations,
held a great demonstration in the Krakowskie Przedmescie—all of it in ruins, and from the balcony of the burned-out Opera-house overlooking the street, the members of the government, complete with Mikolajczyk, were there to greet them. There was a great deal of cheering from the demonstrators—but it was not necessarily meant for Mikolajczyk
only. Many of these workers, carrying red banners, were PPR and PPS, Communists and
Socialists.
[The pro-Russian Poles, as I noticed particularly at Katowice, the centre of the Silesian black country, were doing their utmost to build up, among the miners, a large trade-union organisation with a strong communist slant, which was expected to be one of the main pillars of the new régime.]
"Amazing, amazing," Mikolajczyk was saying, "such vitality among our people, living, as they do, among the ruins, and hungry, very, very hungry..." A girl, in national costume, representing the PSL, the Peasant Party, presented him with a bunch of flowers.
Mikolajczyk then recalled the "wonderful reception he had been given at Cracow—an ovation, a real ovation." (At this point somebody whispered that it wasn't really a pro-Mikolajczyk ovation, but an anti-Bierut ovation).
In 1945, Poland's "Western Territories" were still a desert. Nearly all the Germans had gone, and the villages were mostly empty. Polish and Russian troops were being used to bring in the harvest. Here and there new settlers were coming in in driblets, some from the Lwow areas, some from tiny "uneconomical" farms in central Poland. Some came without cattle, and although they had been given good German farmhouses—in which
they had already installed then-holy pictures—they were living on potatoes and little else.
Some, between the Oder and the Western Neisse, were saying: "Here we have been given more land than what we had at home, but we have nothing to work it with—we've no
horses—and this isn't our country, anyway." Two years later, both the general picture in these parts and the people's mentality had changed completely. By 1947 they looked
upon it very much as their country. Gomulka, the minister then in charge of the Western Territories, had played a leading part in this process.
A few Germans were still living here in 1945. I remember the local miller's son, a sturdy youngster with turned-up nose and freckles. He looked bewildered. "I don't know where they will send us. We have nowhere to go. I have lived here all my life." On a road we met a procession of several hundred Germans, men, women, children, carrying bundles, and the old folks sitting in horse-carts. Polish soldiers, who were escorting them,
bellowed at them when they started telling us some tale of woe. The Germans had had no pity for the Poles; now the Poles had none for the Germans.
Danzig—now Gdansk—was hideous in its destruction. The fighting here had been very
heavy, and there were dozens of Russian mass-graves along the coastal road between
Gdynia and Danzig. Outside Danzig we saw an experimental factory for making soap out of human corpses, which had been run by a German professor called Spanner. It was a
nightmarish sight, with its vats full of human heads and torsoes pickled in some Hquid, and its pails full of a flakey substance—human soap. A slow-witted Germanised young
Pole, who had worked here as a laboratory assistant, and who now looked very scared, said that the factory had not gone much beyond the experimental stage, though what soap had actually been made was good. It had smelt bad, until some chemical had been added which made it smell of almonds. His mother had liked it. He said that, Professor Spanner had told him that after the war, the Germans would set up a soap factory in each