Bloodlands

took part in some kind of resistance organization in 1940. True, these organizations were quickly penetrated by the NKVD, and most of these people arrested: but the opposition was real and demonstrable. Beria used the reality of Polish resistance to justify his proposal for the prisoners—“to apply to them the supreme punishment: shooting.”⁴¹

Stalin approved Beria’s recommendation, and the mechanisms of the Great Terror began again. Beria established a special troika to deal rapidly with the files of all of the Polish prisoners of war. It was empowered to disregard the recommendations of the previous interrogators, and to issue verdicts without any contact with the prisoners themselves. It seems that Beria established a quota for the killings, as had been done in 1937 and 1938: all of the prisoners at the three camps, plus six thousand people held in prisons in western Belarus and western Ukraine (three thousand in each), plus especially dangerous elements among noncommissioned officers who were not in captivity. After a quick examination of the files, ninety-seven percent of the Poles in the three camps, about 14,587 people, were sentenced to death. The exceptions were a few Soviet agents, people of ethnic German or Latvian background, and people with foreign protection. The six thousand from the prisons were also condemned to death, along with 1,305 other people who were arrested in April.⁴²

The prisoners of the three camps were expecting that they would be allowed to return home. When, in April 1940, the first groups were taken from the camp at Kozelsk, there were given a farewell reception by their comrades. Fellow officers formed, as best as they could without their weapons, an honor guard as they walked to the buses. In groups of a few hundred at a time, the prisoners were taken by rail through Smolensk to the smaller station at Gniazdovo. There they found themselves disembarking from the train into a cordon of NKVD soldiers with bayonets fixed. About thirty of them at a time entered a bus, which took them to the Goat Hills, at the edge of a forest called Katyn. There, at an NKVD resort, they were searched and their valuables taken. One officer, Adam Solski, had been keeping a diary up to this moment: “They asked about my wedding ring, which I… . ” The prisoners were taken into a building on the complex, where they were shot. Their bodies were then delivered, probably by truck in batches of thirty, to a mass grave that had been dug in the forest. This continued until all 4,410 prisoners sent from Kozelsk had been shot.⁴³

At Ostashkov, a band played as the prisoners left the camp, to lift their spirits. They were taken by train, in groups of about 250-500, to the NKVD prison at Kalinin (today Tver). All were held briefly while their data were checked. They waited, not knowing what would come next, probably not suspecting until the very last moment. An NKVD officer asked one of the waiting prisoners, alone then with his captors, how old he was. The boy was smiling. “Eighteen.” What did you do? Still smiling. “Telephone operator.” How long had you worked? The boy counted on his hands. “Six months.” Then he, like all of the 6,314 prisoners who passed through this room, was handcuffed and led to a soundproofed cell. Two men held him by the arms as a third shot him from behind in the base of the skull.⁴⁴

The chief executioner at Kalinin, whom the prisoners never saw, was Vasily Blokhin. He had been one of the main killers during the Great Terror, when he had commanded an execution squad in Moscow. He had been entrusted with some of the executions of high-profile defendants of show trials, but had also shot thousands of workers and peasants who were killed entirely in secret. At Kalinin he wore a leather cap, apron, and long gloves to keep the blood and gore from himself and his uniform. Using German pistols, he shot, each night, about two hundred and fifty men, one after another. Then the bodies were driven, in a truck, to nearby Mednoe, where the NKVD had some summer houses. They were thrown into a large pit dug earlier by a backhoe.⁴⁵

From the camp at Starobilsk, the prisoners made the trip by rail, a hundred or two hundred at a time, to Kharkiv, where they were held at the NKVD prison. Though they could not have known this, they had been brought to one of the main killing centers of Poles in the Soviet Union. Now it was their turn, and they went to their deaths ignorant of the past, ignorant of what was happening to their comrades in other camps, ignorant of what would happen to them. After a day or so in prison they were taken to a room where their details were checked. Then they were led to another room, this one dark and without windows. A guard would ask “May I?” and then lead in the prisoner. As one of the NKVD men remembered, “there was a clack, and that was the end.” The bodies were piled onto trucks. Jackets were pulled over the heads of the corpses so that the truck platform would not be stained by the blood. The bodies were loaded head first, then feet first, so they would stack.⁴⁶

In this way 3,739 prisoners of Starobilsk were killed, including all of Jozef Czapski’s friends and acquaintances: the botanist whom he remembered for his calm, but also an economist who tried to hide his fears from his pregnant wife, a doctor who was known in Warsaw for visiting cafes and supporting artists, the lieutenant who recited plays and novels by heart, the lawyer who was an enthusiast for a European federation, all the engineers, teachers, poets, social workers, journalists, surgeons, and soldiers. But not Czapski himself. He, like a few others from each of the three camps, was sent on to another camp, and survived.⁴⁷

Fyodor Dostoevsky had set a crucial scene of The Brothers Karamazov at the Optyn Hermitage in Kozelsk, which in 1939 and 1940 became the site of the Soviet prisoner-of-war camp. Here took place the most famous exchange in the book: a discussion between a young nobleman and a monastery elder about the possibility of morality without God. If God is dead, is everything permitted? In 1940, the real building where this fictional conversation took place, the former residence of some of the monks, housed the NKVD interrogators. They represented a Soviet answer to that question: only the death of God allowed for the liberation of humanity. Unconsciously, many of the Polish officers provided a different answer: that in a place where everything is permitted, God is a refuge. They saw their camps as churches, and prayed in them. Many of them attended Easter services before they were dispatched to their deaths.⁴⁸

The prisoners in the three camps, or at least many of them, guessed that they were being filtered, selected for some role that they might play in the Soviet Union. They had little or no idea, however, that when they failed this test they would be killed. They knew nothing of the Polish operation of the Great Terror, in which tens of thousands of Soviet Poles had been shot only two years before. Even had they understood the stakes, it seems hard to imagine that very many of them could have demonstrated any sort of believable loyalty to the Soviets. In the camps they had to see Soviet newspapers, watch Soviet propaganda films, and listen to Soviet news broadcasts over loudspeakers. They generally found it all ridiculous, and insulting. Even those who informed on their comrades found the system absurd.⁴⁹

The two cultures did not communicate well, at least not without some obvious shared interest. During this period, when Stalin was Hitler’s ally, no such common ground could easily be imagined. The possibilities for misunderstanding, on the other hand, were enormous. Collectivization and industrialization had modernized the Soviet Union, but without the attention to the population, or rather to consumers, that characterized the capitalist West. The Soviet citizens who ruled eastern Poland were falling off bicycles, eating toothpaste, using toilets as sinks, wearing multiple watches, or bras as earmuffs, or lingerie as evening gowns. Polish prisoners were also ignorant, and about more fundamental matters. Unlike Soviet citizens in their position, the Poles believed that they could not be sentenced or killed without a legal basis. It was a sign of the great civilizational transformation of Stalinism that these Soviet and Polish citizens, many of whom had been born in the same Russian Empire, now understood each other so poorly.

The chief interrogator at Kozelsk, the man who inherited the residence of Dostoevsky’s monastic elder, put this delicately: it was a matter of “two divergent philosophies.” In the end, the Soviets could extend and enforce theirs. Jokes at the expense of the Soviets in eastern Poland could be answered with the easy retort: what is the country called now? The Poles in the camps would not be made to fit Soviet civilization. They did not live like Soviet people: this was the recollection of the Russian and Ukrainian peasants who saw them, who decades later recalled their neatness, cleanliness, and proud bearing. They could not be made to live like Soviet people, at least not on such short notice, and not in these circumstances: but they could be made to die like them. Many of the Polish officers were stronger and better educated than the NKVD captors. But disarmed, confused, and held by two men, they could be shot by a third, and buried where no one, it seemed, would ever find them. In death, it seemed, they could join the silence of the citizens of Soviet history.⁵⁰

In all, this lesser Terror, this revival of the Polish operation, killed 21,892 Polish citizens. The vast majority of them, though not all, were Poles by nationality. Poland was a multinational state, with a multinational officer corps, and so many of the dead were Jews, Ukrainians, and Belarusians. Some eight percent of the victims were Jews, corresponding to the proportion of Jews in eastern Poland.⁵¹