The General Langfitt Story
Chapter 4 - Amnesty and the Journey South (continued)
Leaving the USSR
People were desperate to leave the Soviet Union and many mothers took advantage of the Polish army's 'ploy' of enrolling children in the army as cadets, regardless of age or gender. While this was no doubt a pragmatic decision in the face of continuing uncertainty, it was clearly not an easy decision for many mothers to make. Like Ryszard Pawlowski's mother, these women had battled so hard to bring their families to safety and now the best prospect of saving their children was to hand them over to the care of the army.
Mother was getting desperate because it became obvious that only people who had somebody in the army would be allowed to leave Russia. We had no-one in the army so she went to the army chaplain in Vrevskoy for advice. He told her that her first obligation, her duty, was to try to save the children and advised Mum to enrol us into something like army cadets, only for kids a bit younger. It was mainly a means to get as many children out of Russia as possible. My brother and I left Russia with the army and mother remained in Russia. She told us later how she stood crying as she watched the red light of the train disappear into the distance, not knowing if we would ever see each other again. We went to Krasnovodsk and were loaded onto a crowded ship. In the morning we arrived in Pahlavi and a few days later the mothers were also permitted to leave Russia so we were reunited. From there we went to one of the camps near Tehràn. We were no longer with the cadets. That was just a way of getting us out of Russia.
Throughout 1942, General Anders had increased pressure on the Polish government in exile to allow the evacuation of Polish troops to Iran where, along with their families, they would come under British control. General Sikorski, leader of the Polish government in exile, was reluctant to evacuate all the Polish forces because he wanted a free Polish army in the east to inhibit Soviet intentions in Poland. He also believed that the presence of the Polish army would 'act as a magnet and refuge for thousands of Poles still missing' in the Soviet Union (Ascherson, 1987, p. 121). Stalin understood this and encouraged Anders' evacuation plans, while Churchill needed more troops in Egypt, so he also urged Sikorski to evacuate as many Poles as possible.
Quetta, 1942: Polish children evacuated from
Aschabad,
USSR, to India (Courtesy of Tadeusz Dobrostanski)
A few hundred children, mostly orphans, left the Soviet Union in army trucks organised by the Polish government in exile and the Red Cross. Their epic overland journey to India left Aschabad in Turkmenistan, took them over the border to Mashhad in Iran, then around the southern border of Afghanistan to Zahedau and Quetta in present day Pakistan. At the invitation of the Indian government, they then travelled by train to Bombay and then Jamnagar (see Chapter 5).
But the vast majority of Poles, totalling between 114 500 and 115 000 soldiers and civilians (Królikowski, 1983, p.67; Ascherson, 1987, p.120), left the Soviet Union during the summer of 1942 in transports which left from Krasnovodsk on the Caspian Sea. Camping on the sand along the edges of an oil polluted Caspian Sea, conditions in Krasnovodsk were as poor as anything most refugees had experienced, eased only by the prospect of imminent departure. Forced to leave most of their few remaining possessions behind before they boarded the ships, only a few survivors managed to smuggle out any documentary evidence of their time in the Soviet Union. Helena Lancucka described the circumstances in which she and her son left the Soviet Union:
We were taken to a place that was surrounded by barbed wire. It was very hot, there was no water and the Caspian Sea was very dirty. Children who drank that water became very ill. Afterwards they put us on a merchant ship with very deep holds. They were not for people. It was so crowded and I was still very sick with dysentery so we stayed on the deck, with all the sick people. It was awful. Worse than animals. You could not move and some people were so sick they couldn't control themselves. There were a lot of accidents. The smell was terrible and nobody could clean it up. Nobody cared because we were just happy to be on the ship. We were just waiting to go.
While 'the evacuation to Iran was seen by many Poles as a divine mercy, a flight from Babylonian captivity', over a million Poles remained in the Soviet Union (Ascherson, 1987, pp. 121-2). People who were among the last to leave remembered the desperation of those who could not get aboard the last transports:
This ship was the last transport from Krasnovodsk and people were packed on board in the coal holds. Polish soldiers started to remove possessions so that more people would fit, but still some were left behind. Everyone was aware that this was the last boat so people jumped into the water to swim after the boat. They all drowned. (Zbigniew Patro)
For Poles who had not managed to leave the Soviet Union during the evacuations of 1942, chances of doing so diminished. Relations between Stalin and the Polish government in exile deteriorated still further until, after the discovery of the bodies of Polish officers at Katyn in April 1943, the Soviet Union broke off relations with the Polish government in exile completely. Although further uncertainty awaited the Poles who had managed to escape the Soviet Union, they at least had hope of something brighter. Janusz Smenda summed up the sentiments of many of his compatriots when they knew they were to leave the Soviet Union:
I was absolutely joyous when I knew we were going to be freed. I was eleven and a bit, but even at that age I knew that people who stayed in Russia led an impossible life. I was frightened that all of a sudden I would have to become a labourer all my life, living in a system that I absolutely hated, with people who had persecuted my mother and prosecuted my father, even though I didn't know then that he was dead. I saw no future and that was frightening. When we finally got on to Persian soil I knew we were out and that they couldn't change it. It was a total sense of relief and rejoicing. After that I didn't actually care where we went as long as it was as far away from Russia as possible.