by starvation and disease. Then they had deported more than a quarter of a million Jews from the ghetto to the gas chambers of Treblinka, shooting some seventeen thousand more during these deportations. Then they had liquidated the ghetto, their own creation. They suppressed the resistance that this brought, shooting some fourteen thousand more Jews. Then they had burned down the buildings of the Warsaw ghetto. Finally they built a new camp within this nonplace.
This was Concentration Camp Warsaw. It was an island of very conditional life located within an urban zone of death. All around were blocks and blocks of burned buildings, with human remains rotting within. Encircled broadly by the walls of the former ghetto, Concentration Camp Warsaw was encircled narrowly by barbed wire and watchtowers. The inmates were a few hundred Poles and a few hundred Jews. These were not, for the most part, Polish Jews but, rather, Jews from other parts of Europe. They had been deported from their home countries to Auschwitz, selected for labor there rather than gassed, and then sent to Concentration Camp Warsaw. They came from Greece, France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, and the Netherlands, and in 1944 from Hungary. The conditions that they found in Concentration Camp Warsaw were so appalling that some of them asked to be sent back to Auschwitz and gassed.40
The Jewish laborers of Concentration Camp Warsaw were to perform three major tasks in the ruins: destroy the buildings in the former ghetto that still stood after the arson of April and May 1943; search for valuables that Jews might have left behind; and bait Jews still in hiding to come and surrender themselves. Some of the Jewish laborers were also sent, in their striped uniforms and wooden shoes, to labor beyond the walls of the former ghetto. Friendships grew up between these foreign Jews and Poles in Warsaw, despite barriers of language. One of these laborers remembered a scene beyond the ghetto walls: “A Polish boy, maybe fourteen years old, badly dressed, was standing just next to us with a little basket, in which there were a few small apples. He looked at us, thought for a moment, and then grabbed his little basket and threw it to us. Then he ran to the other boys selling food, and suddenly bread and fruit rained down on us from all sides. At first the SS-men guarding us didn’t know what to do, they were so surprised by this unexpected expression of solidarity. Then they began to scream at the boys and point their machine guns at them, and to beat us for accepting the food. But that didn’t hurt us, we paid no attention. We waved our thanks to those boys.”41
After October 1943, the Jews of Concentration Camp Warsaw were forced to perform yet another task: the disposal of the bodies of Poles taken from Warsaw and executed in the ruins of the ghetto. Poles were brought in trucks in groups of fifty or sixty to the terrain of the former ghetto, where they were executed in or near Concentration Camp Warsaw by machine gunners of the local SS and another police unit. Jewish prisoners then had to form a Death Commando that would eliminate the traces of the execution. They would build a pyre from wood taken from the ruins of the ghetto, and then stack bodies and wood in layers. Then the Jews poured gasoline on the pyres and lit them. Yet this was a Death Commando in more than the usual sense. Once the bodies of the Poles were burning, the SS-men shot the Jewish laborers who had built the pyre, and tossed their bodies into the flames.42
Milosz’s poem “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto,” written in 1943, speaks of an unearthly power able to undo the grey of rubble and soot and distinguish “the ash of each man.” No earthly agent could sort the Jewish ashes from the Polish ones.
In summer 1944 in such a city, resistance was all but inevitable. Its form and its direction were not. The commanders of the Home Army, and the Polish government in London, had a very difficult decision to make. Their people suffered more than those of any Allied capital, but they faced an unforgiving strategic position. Poles had to consider the present German occupation in light of the threat of a future Soviet occupation. After the success of the Red Army’s Operation Bagration in late June, German soldiers could be seen streaming through Warsaw in July. It seemed as if the Germans were about to be defeated, which was good news; it also seemed that the Soviets would soon replace them in Warsaw, which was not. If the Home Army fought the Germans openly, and succeeded, they might greet the arriving Red Army as masters of their own house. If they fought the Germans openly, and failed, they would be prone and powerless when the Soviets arrived. If they did nothing, they would have no bargaining position with the Soviets—or with their western Allies.43
Although their British and American allies could afford to have illusions about Stalin, Polish officers and politicians could not. They had not forgotten that the Soviet Union had been an ally of Nazi Germany in 1939–1941, and that its occupation of eastern Poland had been ruthless and oppressive. Poles knew about the deportations to Kazakhstan and Siberia; they knew about the shootings at Katyn. Stalin broke off diplomatic relations with the Polish government over the Katyn discovery, which was one more reason not to trust the Soviet Union. If Stalin would use his own massacre as a reason to end relations with the Polish government, how could he be expected to negotiate in good faith about anything? And if the Soviet Union would not recognize the legitimate Polish government during a common war against Nazi Germany, what were the chances that it would support Polish independence when the war was over and the Soviet position much stronger?
The British and the Americans had larger concerns. The Red Army was winning the war against the Wehrmacht on the eastern front, and Stalin was a more important ally than any Polish government. It was more comfortable for the British and the Americans to accept the mendacious Soviet version of the Katyn massacre and blame the Germans. It was much easier for them to encourage their Polish ally to compromise than it was to try to prevail upon Stalin. They wanted the Poles to accept that the Germans rather than the Soviets had killed the Polish officers, which was false; and would have preferred that Poland grant the eastern half of its territory to the Soviet Union, which was an unlikely action for any sovereign government.
For that matter, London and Washington had already agreed, in late 1943, that the Soviet Union would reclaim the eastern half of prewar Poland after the war. The western Soviet border accorded Stalin by Hitler was confirmed by Churchill and Roosevelt. London and Washington endorsed the Molotov-Ribbentrop line (with minor changes) as the future Soviet-Polish frontier. In that sense Poland was betrayed not only by the Soviet Union but also by its western Allies, who urged Poles to make compromises at a time when less was to be gained by them than Poles might have thought. Half of their country had already been conceded, without their participation.44
Left alone by its allies, the Polish government in London ceded the initiative to the Polish fighters in Warsaw. Seeing little other hope to establish Polish sovereignty, the Home Army chose an uprising in the capital, to commence on 1 August 1944.
The Warsaw Uprising of August 1944 took place within the framework of Operation Tempest, a long- planned national uprising that was meant to give Polish forces a prominent role in the liberation of prewar Polish territory. By late July, however, Operation Tempest had already failed. The Home Army had planned to engage German units as they retreated from the Red Army in what had been eastern Poland. It had been impossible to make prior political arrangements with the Soviet Union about the terms of this cooperation, since Stalin had broken diplomatic relations. Polish commanders did make local agreements with Soviet counterparts in summer 1944, but at a heavy price. Negotiation meant leaving hiding places and revealing identities, and the Soviets exploited Polish vulnerability to the maximum. Poles who revealed themselves to join the common fight against Germans were treated as people who might resist future Soviet rule. The Soviet Union never had any intention of supporting any institution that claimed to represent an independent Poland. The Soviet leadership and the NKVD treated every Polish political organization (except the communists) as part of an anti-Soviet plot.45
In July 1944, Polish units were allowed to assist the Red Army in attacks on Vilnius and Lviv, the major cities of prewar eastern Poland, but were then disarmed by their ostensible Soviet allies. The Polish soldiers were given the choice of Soviet command or prison. After the disarmaments, the NKVD arrested everyone with a political past. Soviet partisans were allowed to take part in the victorious campaign against the Germans; Polish partisans were not. Indeed, in some cases Soviet partisans were turned against the Polish fighters. The partisan unit of Tuvia Bielski, for example, took part in the disarming of the Home Army. The tragedy of Operation Tempest was triple: the Home Army lost men and its arms; Poland’s government saw its military strategy fail; and Poles lost their lives or their freedom fighting for lands that Poland could not regain in any event, since Churchill and Roosevelt had already ceded them to Stalin.46
Still, news from Germany gave some hope to Polish commanders in Warsaw. On 20 July 1944, German military officers tried (and failed) to assassinate Adolf Hitler. The news led some Home Army commanders to
