Victims of Stalin
and Hitler
The Exodus of Poles and Balts to Britain
Thomas Lane
Victims of Stalin and Hitler
Also by Thomas Lane
LITHUANIA: Stepping Westward
Victims of Stalin
and Hitler
The Exodus of Poles and Balts to Britain
Thomas Lane
Victims of Stalin and Hitler
© Thomas Lane 2004
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Contents
Foreword viii
Introduction 1
1 ‘A Timeless and Magical World?’ 9
2 Defeat 21
3 German Colonies 33
4 Soviet Fiefs 56
5 Deportations 78
6 Penal Camps and Settlements 96
7 Release 114
8 Soldiers and Refugees 137
9 ‘Midway to Nowhere’ 158
10 Resettlement 179
11 Communities 204
12 Identities 224
Notes 238
Bibliography 260
Index 269
vii
viii
Foreword
My earliest interest in the movement of peoples across national
boundaries arose out of research into United States’ labour history, since
the American labour movement was in the vanguard of immigration
restriction movements in the United States in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. While examining the reasons for this, I was drawn
into a study of immigration from the south and east of Europe which
accounted for around 80 per cent of immigrants to the United States in
the two decades before the First World War. I later had the opportunity
to meet a number of ‘immigrants’ to Britain from the east of Europe,

exiles, an historian colleague asked me to join him in bringing out a new
edition of a classic work on the Polish deportations, Zoe Zaidlerowa’s
The Dark Side of the Moon, published in 1946 with a foreword by T.S. Eliot.
A later request further stimulated my interest in learning more about
this exile community. I was asked to edit the memoirs of a Polish émi-
gré who had, after his arrest by the Soviets, spent some time in the noto-
rious Lubyanka prison in Moscow, was transported to a penal labour
camp in the north of Russia and rather miraculously, perhaps even
uniquely, escaped over the border into Afghanistan, from where he
moved to Britain, becoming a parachutist and a courier for the Polish
Government-in-Exile in London.
At around the same time, the late 1980s, my colleague John Hiden
and I founded the first Baltic Research Unit in Britain based in the
Department of European Studies at Bradford University. This brought us
into touch with the Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian communities in
the city. Their experiences were different in many respects from those of
the Poles but equally remarkable. They shared with the Poles the expe-
rience of arriving in Britain at the end of the Second World War, seek-
ing, or being directed to, employment, and saving assiduously to buy
their own homes. Both the Poles and the Balts developed their own
community institutions, and strove hard to preserve their cultures and
identities in a quite alien environment. The experiences of some of
them are narrated in the archive of the Bradford Heritage Recording
Unit, which contains a series of informative interviews, some tran-
scribed, some not, with East Europeans in the city. These are helpful to
anyone interested in the Polish and Baltic communities in Britain.
Unfortunately they did not provide answers to some of the questions in
which I was particularly interested.
Gradually the idea of writing a history of the Polish and Baltic exiles
in Britain began to take shape. There were of course already some books

Wojciechowski for their enlightening conversations. I received a warm
welcome and great help from Dr K. Stolin´ski, Chair of the Polish
Underground Movement Study Trust in Ealing Common, London, from
their archivist Mr K. Bozejwicz and secretary Ms S. Zarek. Mrs Schmidt,
Chief Librarian of the Polish Library in Hammersmith, kindly gave me
access to the papers of Dr Jósef Retinger. I am also grateful to the Public
Record Office at Kew for access to the papers of various British
Government departments. My warm thanks go to my son Nick Lane and
my daughter-in-law, Ana Hidalgo who read the entire manuscript at a
time when they themselves were very busy with their own writing obli-
gations, and made many helpful suggestions both as to content and
style. El
.
zbieta Stadtmüller kindly offered me her expert comments, par-
ticularly on the first half of the manuscript, and saved me from a num-
ber of errors, for which I am most grateful. Her parents Ludwik and
El
.
zbieta Stadtmüller, who experienced both the Soviet and Nazi occu-
pations of their city, gave me a first-hand account of life in Lwów
between 1939 and 1944. A number of lengthy conversations with
Kazimierz Mochlinski provided much valuable information about the
Polish émigrés in Britain. As usual I benefited from the efficiency and
helpfulness of the staff of the J.B. Priestley Library at Bradford
x Foreword
University, particularly Grace Hudson, the European Studies librarian.
My editors at Palgrave Macmillan, Luciana O’Flaherty and Daniel
Bunyard, offered excellent advice and rapid responses to my questions,
as well as maintaining a tight timetable which was to my benefit. My
final, and very warm thanks go to Jean Lane both for her encourage-

to totally artificial categories, supposedly on social scientific grounds
but often arbitrarily and capriciously and, to use a familiar euphemism
in this context, eliminated the categories which found no favour with
history. But the Polish and Baltic victims of Stalin were not enemies of
1
the people, they were the people. And the people were enemies of
Stalinist Communism and Nazism alike. In the Leninist terms of power
relationships, Who, Whom? they had to be repressed. Moscow and
Berlin were able to dispose of them because power, not decency, spoke.
In disposing of them, they converted them into victims and set off an
extraordinary chain of events which culminated in the re-settlement of
a large number of them in different parts of Europe and the rest of
the world.
The Nazis’ repression of their subject peoples is well known in the
West. Their destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust is a unique
example of the genocide inflicted on one ethnic group by another.
Everyone who knows about the Holocaust, and that is virtually every-
one, is stunned by its scale, awesome ambition and contemptuous rejec-
tion of humane values. The Holocaust is not a laughing matter, as
Martin Amis has remarked. Certainly the Polish and Baltic exiles in
Britain don’t joke about it. But neither do they laugh about Bolshevism
either, the former ruling dogma of that ‘inhuman land’ beyond their
eastern borders. In that respect they would disagree with Amis’s claim
‘that laughter refuses to absent itself in the Soviet case’, and that the
later Bolshevism of Brezhnev and Chernenko was ‘painfully, unshirk-
ably comic’. While we can admit that Poland was alive with jokes about
the later Communist masters in the Kremlin, this was a type of gallows
humour under the ever present threat of force from Moscow. The impo-
sition of martial law in 1981 was probably implemented to forestall
direct Soviet intervention against Solidarity. But even if the Soviets

punished for it’. Many Baltic leaders regret the fact that the crimes of
the Soviet Union remain less known than those of the Nazi regime, and
are now attempting to place a resolution before the European
Parliament to condemn totalitarian Communism. Many see this as the
first step in the direction of demanding financial compensation for the
occupations and deportations imposed on the Baltic states by the Soviet
Union.
2
This leads to a second question: why doesn’t the West demand
the same standards of contrition and compensation from Russia as it
expects from Germany? This requires a rather complex answer embrac-
ing questions of power politics, calculations about nuclear security and
economic advantage, and the role of interest groups. However, it is
surely indisputable that Western public opinion has not yet fully come
to terms with the atrocities which were a central feature of Soviet rule.
Communism remained, in Pryce-Jones’s words, an ‘enormity too awful
to be dealt with’. Two recent works, Anne Applebaum’s Gulag and Amis’s
Koba the Dread, tackle that enormity by advancing and summarising
recent scholarship. The Russian press since the fall of Communism has
admitted that Stalin, during his time at the helm, ordered the killing of
some 50 million Soviet citizens. Coming to terms with such an enormity
is difficult enough, but it was made more difficult still by the gratitude
felt in the West for the Soviet Union’s heroic military efforts during the
Second World War. As Solzhenitsyn remarked, the West forgave Stalin
his purges ‘in gratitude for Stalingrad’. This gratitude nourished Western
left-wing idealisation of Soviet Communism for decades after the war,
and inhibited a clear-eyed re-assessment of the Soviet record.
3
It has often been said that the Bolsheviks waged war against the
Russian people. It is equally true that they waged war against non-

tell their story. Some of the Polish and Baltic victims did so. There are
many accounts of their experiences made soon after their escape from
the Soviet prison. Those accounts were not the books of witnesses, of
which there are not a few in English, but unpublished testaments taken
when memory was fresh and raw. And then there are the other accounts,
told into tape recorders after decades of living in the West, in which the
interviewees try to make sense of the dramatic and cruel experiences
which shaped their lives. I was fortunate enough to capture around forty
of these stories on tape. Fortunate also to be able to make use of
the records of the City of Bradford Heritage Recording Unit, which in
the 1980s taped the stories of a large number of East European exiles.
Both sets of recordings are uneven in length; some people are more talk-
ative, others are laconic, still others express themselves very vividly.
Some are more quotable than others and it is inevitable that these will
figure more prominently in the reported extracts. Yet the more prosaic,
even if they do not feature so often in the text, offer a necessary check
on the accuracy of other accounts. Taken together these records enable
historians to reconstruct the experiences of a limited group of people
4 Victims of Stalin and Hitler
who suffered under both Stalinism and Nazism, and who were exiled or,
more precisely, exiled themselves because they could not stomach living
under the Soviet regime for a single extra day.
These accounts are not the testimonies of a self-exiled intelligentsia
and upper class, such as the Polish exiles in Paris after the abortive
revolts against Tsarism in 1830–31 and 1863, or the fugitives from the
Bolshevik revolution in Paris, London or Berlin like Vladimir Nabokov
or Isaiah Berlin. Or even the Polish leadership groups in London after
the Second World War. Rather, they reflect the ordinary lives of ordinary
people, musicians, farmers, students, engineers, pharmacists, ministers
of the church, frontier guards, chauffeurs, foresters and soldiers. And the

Introduction 5
happened? Why did many of them come to Britain and how did they
make new lives for themselves there? How were they employed? Where
did they live? How did they build their communities? What were their
ambitions for their children? How did they see their identity and how
did their children see theirs? Will the citizens of Polish and Baltic extrac-
tion eventually assimilate under the pressures of conformity, or will a
separate sense of identity and community remain with the third or
fourth or later generations? So this book is about uprooting, journeys,
exile, resettlement and, finally, community building. But before the
onset of the violent traumas of the war years which were almost incom-
prehensible both to the exiles themselves and to Westerners who read
about them, there were the more prosaic interruptions to the ordinary
lives of the people who were caught in the crossfire of war and invasion.
The book, therefore, begins with a chapter on the last days of peace in
Poland and the Baltic states on the eve of a period of massive turbulence.
This book does not claim to be an ‘oral history’. To be sure, it employs
some of the techniques of the genre such as formal taped interviews and
numerous conversations with the participants in these outlandish
events. But it depends equally on conventional written sources, schol-
arly articles, books, reminiscences and government documents. These
are absolutely necessary to give a perspective on events, and to place the
individual accounts in a broad and, so far as possible, accurate context.
At the same time the scale of these events, the millions of people
involved, the terrible fate which so many suffered, numb the sensibili-
ties and defy comprehension. So personal accounts are essential if we
are to grasp the impact of these events on individuals. How, for exam-
ple, do we get to grips with the following statistics? In four mass depor-
tations in 1940–41 around one million Polish citizens were sent to
northern Russia, Siberia or Kazakhstan. Smaller deportations, arrests,

need the help of personal accounts if we are to understand.
Finally, we cannot ignore the question, which will undoubtedly be
asked, about the reliability of memory. How can we be sure that what we
hear is accurate and ‘true’, particularly when the interviews take place sev-
eral decades after the events described. The short answer is that we can-
not. Yet the events described were so traumatic, so formative, so
impressionable on youthful minds, that it is unlikely they would not
be remembered in detail. If inaccuracies creep in, or memory slips, then
the narratives can be checked against many other accounts, and against
evidence collected by governments and their agents. Sometimes one has
the impression that the collective memory has been absorbed by the indi-
vidual who then repeats it as his own, though he was not a direct witness
of the events in question. This does not necessarily falsify the account,
but again it requires that it be checked against other evidence. One of the
striking features of the interviews was the matter of fact, self-deprecating,
unemotional tone in which the most extraordinary and ‘out of this world’
experiences were conveyed, as though the interviewee were conscious of
his or her obligation to go on the record for posterity. An Estonian
samisdat document to mark the fortieth anniversary of the deportations
of 1941, which reached the West in 1981, confirms this. It was, it said,
‘the foremost duty of all middle-aged and older people toward their
past and toward the young generation to tell the truth about their expe-
riences … frankly and without omissions’. It went on: ‘Do not let us
delude ourselves. Even if we try to forget the injustice done to us during
out lifetime, the KGB will never delete it from our biodata and files, and
the KGB will never forget that these youngsters are our children …’
Introduction 7
Another factor to be taken into account in assessing oral interview
evidence is the possibility that the narrative can be shaped by the line
of questioning of the interviewer, and perhaps distorted in the process.

them from the chaos and violence that followed. In her recent inter-
views with Latvian citizens deported to the Soviet Union during and
after the Second World War and, much later, released to their country
of birth, Vieda Skultans found that the narrators evoked a ‘timeless and
magical world’ of childhood and youth which formed a yardstick
against which all subsequent events were measured.
1
By contrast, it is
rare to find this characteristic among the interviewees of Polish and
Baltic origin in Britain, whose descriptions of pre-war life are muted and
generally unidealised. Nonetheless, the unemotional nature of the nar-
ratives is still revealing of a lost way of life and of opportunities fore-
gone. The impact of these interviews is made as much by implication or
indirectly as by the overt expression of emotion. The necessity of
the exiles in Britain to describe their experiences in a second language,
English, while the Latvian group could speak in their native tongue,
partly explains the difference in tone. Moreover, the Latvians, after
returning to Latvia after many years, had to endure the rigours of the
imposed Soviet regime and to witness the dismaying transformation of
their country, demographically, economically and ecologically. Their
day-to-day experiences would inevitably have sharpened the contrast
between contemporary Latvia and the pre-war Latvia of their youth.
Those in exile abroad had less reason to idealise their youthful lives;
they could see that life in Britain was generally satisfactory, and pro-
vided opportunities for their children, if not for themselves, which were
at the very least comparable with those of the pre-war world.
Conceivably, too, interviewees might think it impolite to lavish too
much praise on their home countries since this could, by implication,
9
appear ungrateful to the country which had received them. On the

great powers of Germany and the Soviet Union would be more danger-
ous to their interests. These were common topics of conversation. But
the war, when it came, took a totally unexpected turn. Most of the inter-
viewees in Britain recalled the surprise, indeed amazement, of their fam-
ilies and local communities when they heard that the two great powers
on their flanks, the Soviet Union and Germany, had formed an alliance
to carve out their respective spheres of influence in the Baltic area. This,
in brief, was the backdrop against which people lived their lives. For
individuals, the war and subsequent events meant not only chaos and
disruption, but also the abandonment of expectations. When the war
ended in 1945 the people of most of the belligerents could determine
10 Victims of Stalin and Hitler
how they would reshape their collective and individual lives. In the
Baltic countries and Poland, they could not do this for two generations.
For them the Second World War did not end until the fall of their
Communist regimes.
The stories of the Baltic and Polish exiles in Britain are about inter-
ruption, like so many others which describe the onset of war. The par-
ticular poignancy of these accounts lies in the finality of the interruption.
Compare their circumstances with those of conscripted soldiers from
Western Europe, for example. If the latter survived the war, they could
expect to return to their former homes and lives, to their relatives and
friends, to their old jobs and careers. The Polish and Baltic exiles, by
contrast, could not normally resume where they had left off since the
careers they had trained for, or the educational opportunities they were
pursuing, were generally not available to them in their new countries of
settlement. Unavoidably they had to make a fresh start and grind out a
living in order to build new lives for themselves and their children. To
be sure, for some years after the war they had hopes of returning home,
but the Soviet monolith did not crack, as they had supposed it might,

his father who was a policeman at the beginning of the war. Arrested at
the onset of the Soviet occupation, he somehow escaped but was not
heard from after 1943. His son presumed that the Soviets captured and
deported or killed him when they returned in 1944.
Another man whose life was turned upside down was a native of
Cieszyn (Teschen), a disputed area between Poland and Czechoslovakia.
Having studied at a textile college in southern Poland he subsequently
worked for the Polish government as a buyer of textiles. When the war
started he returned to Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia where he was
employed in a tailor’s shop. Eventually he was sent to forced labour in a
steel mill in Germany before conscription into the German army. Posted
to the south of France, he deserted from the army and joined the French
Resistance, eventually slipping over the border into Italy 1944 where he
enlisted in the Polish Second Army Corps under General Anders.
5
A large number of the exiles came from farming families in Eastern
Poland. Sometimes the families had been settled there for generations
but frequently they were military settlers, people whose fathers had
fought in the Polish army against the Russian Bolsheviks in the war of
1919–20 and were rewarded for their service by grants of land in the
Eastern borderlands, or kresy. These veterans were particular targets of
the Bolsheviks when they occupied Eastern Poland in 1939 since the
defeat of the Red Army outside Warsaw in 1920 still rankled with Stalin.
What the Poles called ‘the miracle of the Vistula’ was bitterly resented
in Moscow since it put a stop to the Bolshevik advance westwards in the
name of international revolution. The veterans’ punishment, and that
of their families too, was deportation to the freezing wastes of northern
Russia. One young man lived on his parents’ farm in the eastern border
areas. His father owned two farms, one inherited from his parents and
the other granted as a reward for serving in the Polish army against the