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 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2004 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–3220–4 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lane, A.T. Victims of Stalin and Hitler: the exodus of Poles and Balts to Britain / Thomas Lane. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 1–4039–3220–4 1. Poles – Great Britain – History – 20th century. 2. Balts (Indo-European people) – Great Britain – History – 20th century. 3. Baltic Sea Region – Emigration and immigration – History – 20th century. 4. Poland – Emigration and immigration – History – 20th century. 5. Political refugees – Great Britain – History – 20th century. 6. Great Britain – Ethnic relations – History – 20th century. 7. Immigrants – Great Britain – History – 20th century. I. Title. DA125.P6L36 2004 940.53Ј089Ј9185—dc22 2004044793 10987654321 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne. For Tommy This page intentionally left blank 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, mainly Poles and Lithuanians. These people had originated from the ter- ritory which, in the eighteenth century, was called the Commonwealth of Poland–Lithuania. In the last third of the century the Commonwealth was partitioned and swallowed up by the three predatory states on its boundaries, Russia, Prussia and the Habsburg Empire. After some 150 years of foreign rule, the peoples of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia regained their independence but, disastrously for them, this independ- ent status lasted for only two decades. Starting in 1939 with the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, these states became the victims of Nazi and Soviet collusion, and once again were removed from the map. As a result of these events millions of the citizens of these countries were uprooted and some of them, a small minority, found their way at the end of the Second World War to Britain. They rejected the term immigrants as applied to themselves. They were not, they insisted, economic migrants seeking a better life elsewhere. They preferred to call themselves exiles or political refugees (nowadays we might call them asylum-seekers but without the recent pejorative connotations). This was an accurate term since they had been forcibly uprooted from their country by the Soviet and German occupiers in a series of deportations and imprisonments during the Second World War. They ended up in penal camps and work settlements (the GULAG) in the depths of Siberia, Arctic Russia and Soviet Central Asia. Others fled as a result of the Soviet advance into the Baltic states and Poland in 1944, when the tide of war turned against Hitler. A few years later, a small proportion of these deportees had, by luck and the exigencies of international politics, found themselves in Great Britain where they had remained for the rest of their lives. They refused to return to communist-dominated homelands and, by the time that Communism fell in 1989, they were too elderly or too close to their families in Britain to return. Shortly afterwards, knowing my growing interest in the lives of these 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 and articles on the subject but not in the form I envisaged. My aim was to consider, in roughly equal proportions, the forcible uprooting of the émigrés, their dramatic exodus from their homelands, and the circum- stances of their resettlement in Britain. It would also differ from others in its greater reliance on interviews with the exiles and their children. Indeed, some of the story would be told in their own words. This meant in-depth interviews with those members of the communities who were willing to place their memories on tape. Ultimately some 40 individuals Foreword ix [...]... 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... Hitler, and to the reluctance of the British and French to agree to Soviet terms which compromised the independence of Poland and the Baltic states But the critical factor was the opportunism of Stalin and Hitler, which saw an alliance between these erstwhile enemies as being in their shortterm mutual advantage Once the deal was agreed the fate of Poland and the Baltic states was decided, provided the. .. 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. .. in the Displaced Persons (DPs) camps in Germany But then what 6 Victims of Stalin and Hitler 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. .. 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... are to understand the exile communities in Britain, their motives, values and ideals, we need to know about their perceptions of the events which shaped their identities, made them what they are.7 So we will begin on the eve of the Second World War and follow them, in a succession of chapters, through the catastrophes of the early years and the less eventful period of peaceful resettlement in Britain. .. one of degree The world of the Poles and Baltic peoples was also a multi-ethnic world since the populations of Poland and the Baltic states were composed of many nationalities In Poland barely two-thirds of the population were ethnic Poles, the remainder being mainly Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Jews and Germans, with a smattering of Lithuanians In Estonia and the other Baltic states there were the autochthonous... throughout the Summer of 1939 to try to bring about a tripartite guarantee of Poland and the Baltic states If these had been successful it would have made the success of a German attack on Poland more problematic The failure of these talks could be attributed to the reservations of Poland and the Baltic states about a number of Soviet demands, to double-dealing by the British in seeking an agreement with Hitler,. .. 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 2 Victims of Stalin and Hitler the people, they were the people And the people were enemies of Stalinist Communism and Nazism alike In the Leninist terms of power relationships,... Left To all of them my warm thanks In the preparation and writing of this book I am especially grateful for the kind help and co-operation of members of the British-Baltic Association, particularly Gunars Tamsons, Lia Ottan and Erica Sarkanbardis, and of members of the Latvian, Estonian and Lithuanian clubs in Bradford I am similarly indebted to members of the Polish community in the city and to the . 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. for witnesses to the Soviet penal system to reach the safety of the West to tell their story. Some of the Polish and Baltic victims did so. There are many accounts of their experiences made soon after their. camps and other remote settlements, the disaster of the Warsaw Rising, the sense of betrayal by the Allies at Tehran and Yalta, the collapse of their hopes of return after the war, and the diffi- culties,