The General Langfitt Story
Chapter 1 - Pre-War Poland (continued)
This part of Poland was destroyed by the first war. There was nothing but the land. All of them started from scratch. We had a lot of neighbours and in the twenty years when Poland had freedom we all got on quite well. There were more Byelorussians than us Poles in the area, but we all learnt and spoke Polish at school. My father was a very good organiser and he had done so well that he bought another property. (Krystyna Jarzebowska)
Irena Makowiecka (nèe Glowacka) was 9 years old when the Second World War started.
I was born in a small town near Tarnopol in eastern Poland and I spent the first seven years of my life there. My mother, who came from Warsaw, always said that she spent the happiest years of her life in Grzymalow. This part of Poland is called Podole. It is a very fertile land with black soil. My father was in the police force but we had a bit of land too. We used to go there for Sunday walks and I remember the orchard with cherries and apples, the bubbling brook, lots of forget-me-nots and the huge lilac tree under the kitchen window. In spring their fragrance was over powering. I have always associated lilac with Poland. My father didn't work the farm, somebody else did that. It was share farming but we would get fruit and, in autumn, potatoes and carrots. The wheat went to the mill and we would get a bag of flour or a bag of porridge oats whenever we needed. When the war started all those products were in the mill and we couldn't get them because all our property was confiscated. The shops were empty and we found ourselves without any food resources.
The Build-up to War
The Nazis seized power in Germany in 1933 and in March 1934 Pilsudski signed a treaty of non-aggression and friendship with Germany. This was far from an alliance since it intended to do no more than lessen the tension which had remained since the corridor to the Baltic and the creation of Danzig as a free city in 1918. Germany had consistently maintained its interests in land west of the corridor.
Hitler started to threaten Poland, demanding access to the Free City of Danzig and a corridor between Germany and Danzig through Polish territory. It was only an excuse to start the war. While Josef Pilsudski, the Polish marshal and a good politician, was in charge, he gave a feeling of security to the general public. When he died in May 1935 there was nobody of equal stature to take his place. There was a feeling of uncertainty, a feeling of doom. Everybody was waiting for the war to start. It seemed to be inevitable. Austria was taken by Hitler in March 1938, followed by Czechoslovakia in March 1939. We were next on the list. Poland didn't prepare for war because we were told not to provoke the Germans by arming, to be weak so they wouldn't have that as an excuse for attacking. That was the rationale of Neville Chamberlain: don't provoke anybody, cooperate with Hitler and he will cooperate with you. So, while war was in the air, no one expected Russia to attack Poland because we had a pact of non-aggression with Russia which Marshal Pilsudski had signed in 1934. (Irene Makowiecka)
By October 1938, when Hitler renewed his demands for the 'return' of Danzig and territorial rights in the Polish corridor it was clear that conciliation was not working. Over the following months the Polish government began to mobilise its armed forces. Stanislawa Jutrzenka-Trzebiatowska (Adamska at the time) remembered how her husband was called to duty three months before Germany invaded Poland.
It was part of a secret mobilisation in which many men, mainly professional men, were taken. For three months I did not know where he was; then he sent me a letter telling me that he would be free for two days. I received a telegram to meet him in Pinsk at the Hotel Pina. We expected to have these two days to ourselves. Two hours later he received a telephone call from his superiors calling him back. It was the sixth of September 1939. This was the last time I saw him.
Under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a defensive alliance signed by Hitler and Stalin on 23 August 1939, a 'secret additional protocol' agreed that the two powers would carve Poland up between them. The Soviet sphere of influence was to include Finland, the Baltic states of Estonia and Latvia, the Rumanian province of Bessarabia and eastern Poland while the German sphere of influence would include Lithuania and western Poland. Poland was thus divided along the Bug River - the Curzon Line of 1920. Hitler invaded the west of Poland on 1 September 1939. Urszula Paszkowska (nèe Trella), who was 12 years old when war broke out, recounted the situation which confronted her family at the time:
My father died as a result of post-influenza complications two weeks before war broke out and my mother moved us back to her parents in Drohobycz. Drohobycz was a district city in what was then eastern Poland. It was famous for the oil refinery which was the largest in Poland, and one of the largest in Eastern Europe.
As far as the war was concerned, we were all fearful of it. We knew that the Germans were encircling us. They were not only on the western and northern borders, where East Prussia was, but also in Czechoslovakia, so they were to the south of us. When we first heard about the war it was a shock to us, but we were hoping that our army would be able to withstand the German invasion. Little did we know the disparity in the armaments of both armies or that there was a secret clause in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which Russia and Germany had signed in August 1939. We did not know that the Soviet Union would attack us from the east.
The oil refinery in Drohobycz was bombed a few days after the beginning of the war. The oil burned for a few days and then they bombed our city a second time, not far away from where we were living. First of all the German army came into Drohobycz. They stayed there for about a week and in that time the lorries were transporting goods from the stores westward. Then on the seventeenth of September the Russian army crossed the eastern border of Poland and started to advance. The Germans moved back and the Russians came in and the same thing happened again. The lorries started going to the east.
According to historian Neal Ascherson (1987, pp. 90-1), at half past three in the morning of 17 September 1939, the Polish Ambassador in Moscow was informed that as the Polish state had ceased to exist (which was not true), steps had become necessary to protect the Ukrainian and Byelorussian minorities in the 'former' Polish territories. An hour later, Soviet troops crossed the frontier. There was little resistance to the invasion, the eastern border being almost unprotected. Irena Makowiecka, reflecting upon the situation as it appeared to many Polish civilians, elucidated:
The Russians claimed that they came as an ally, as helpers, but as soon as they came they disarmed the Polish army who were moving east, away from the German panzer divisions. The Soviets took the retreating army as prisoners of war. Only a small number managed to cross the frontier through Rumania and then on to France, following the Polish government.
As the Soviet forces moved across eastern Poland to a demarcation line along the Rivers Bug and San it became clear that a fourth partition of Poland was taking place. Some individuals from all the major political parties in Poland, including President Ignacy Moscicki, managed to escape via Rumania. These people reassembled in Paris where a coalition government under the lead of General Sikorski, also the head of the remaining Polish army, was formed. Seventy-eight tons of gold from the Polish state bank was also transported to the Rumanian port of Constanza, where it was then taken by a British ship to Turkey, by train to Beirut and from there transported to France by a French cruiser.
The new government was recognised by the British, French and Americans but not by the USSR, which had not yet declared war. Sikorski and his aides had to flee when the Germans attacked France in May 1940. They took up residence in London, which remained their headquarters for the remainder of the war. From this base the Polish government in exile operated for the duration of the war, financed by the state gold which had been smuggled out of Poland in September 1939.