Reflections on the 75th Anniversary of the Start of World War II and the Invasion of Poland
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75 years have gone by since Germany's armies crossed the Polish border, Sept. 1, 1939, the official start of World War II. My father, who had been imprisoned and released from a Nazi prison in Brno, Czechoslovakia, soon found himself on a one-way cattle car ride to the German-Soviet demarcation line.
This essay, taken from the book, Courage of the Spirit, recounts the events of the first months of World War II as seen from the perspective of a Jewish refugee fleeing the Nazis.
First Stop, Lwów
Lwów,
with its western European influence, has been dubbed the “Little Paris of the
Ukraine.” It has a long history as a major center of culture in then Poland and
now Ukraine. It could also have been called the Little Paris of Poland, or of
Austro-Hungarian Galicia and Lodomeria, as well, as it was passed to different
rulers repeatedly. It has been renamed many times since its founding in the thirteenth
century by King Daniel of Halych (Galicia) in honor of his son, Lew. Lwów is
the City of Lions; hence, the many lions that appear on city seals and motifs
in Lwów literature. Under the Austrians, it became Lemberg and took on a
decidedly German flavor. Lemberg remained a popular name, as my father referred
to it by that name decades later. With the independence of Poland after WWI, it
became Lwów, then, under the Soviets, Lvov, and now, under the Ukrainians,
Lviv.
The
varied names reflect the particular tensions among the resident populations
over the years, a mix of ethnic German, Polish, and Ukrainian. In the midst of these
groups dwelt a large Jewish population, some 140,000, almost 30 percent of the
total population. Of this large number, only two or three hundred would survive
the Holocaust.
As
I recounted in previous chapters, my uncle Munio had managed to buy his way out
of Czechoslovakia by train to the nearest destination heading east in which he
felt safe—the city of Lwów. Shortly thereafter, when the Germans invaded
Poland, my father was expelled, as were numerous other non-Czech Jews, to the
new ceasefire lines facing the Soviets, who now sat on the eastern half of
Poland.
The
first days of the German invasion were carried out with the lightning-strike
swiftness that would come to mark the style of future German warfare—the
blitzkrieg.
On
September 1, 1939, the Germans dumped the bodies of dead concentration camp
prisoners dressed in German army uniforms at the Gleiwitz radio station on the Polish
border and declared that they had been viciously attacked by the Polish army.
With this pretext, the Nazis rushed in with tanks and dive-bombers against an
overwhelmed Polish military of infantry and cavalry. The Poles put up a stiff
resistance and counted on their allies, the British and the French, who had
assured the Poles that they would not tolerate the demolition of a free nation
as they had tolerated the devouring of Czechoslovakia. However, the German
blitz was as its name implies, and Poland’s allies could not mount a
counteroffensive in time. By September 6, Krakow had fallen, and by the sixteenth,
Warsaw was fully surrounded.
On
the seventeenth, the ultimate betrayal took place—the Soviet forces invaded
Poland from the east, so that Poland was now caught in a vise. Three days
later, German and Russian forces met at Brest-Litovsk, and by September 21, the
Soviets had taken Lwów.
A
mere twenty-eight days after the outbreak of hostilities, what was left of the
Polish government fled to exile in France. Poland, as a country, ceased to
exit.
The
Soviets claimed that they had rushed in to protect their Ukrainian brethren in
Poland. That was but a thin pretext, as they had carved up Poland with the
Germans shortly before the outbreak of fighting, in the Molotov-Ribbentrop
pact. Poland’s clock was set back a century and a half to the time when Poland
had first been carved up by the Prussians, Austrians, and Russians.
It
has become clear, in the perspective of history, that Russian imperialism drove
the Soviets, despite their claim to have shucked off that mentality in their
quest to attain a communist state. They never made peace with the concept of a
Poland that had gained its freedom in the aftermath of World War I; they still
smarted from the brief war with Poland after that independence. They rounded up
some of the cream of Polish military and political leaders and summarily
executed them in the Katyn forest in the spring of 1940 to guarantee that none
would remain to contest their hegemony.
In
the first days of the cessation of fighting, the line of demarcation was fluid
and ill defined. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, my father was rounded
up and put on a train with other Polish Jews from Brno, and all of them were
sent to what amounted to a no-man’s land. The original plan, concocted by
Eichmann, was to establish a Jewish reservation.
In
the confusion following the opening days of the war, however, my father, like
many other refugees, was able to get away from the German captors on the one
side and from the Soviet liberators on the other and make his way to the
nearest major city, Lwów, where his brother awaited him.
There
was another benefit for the brothers in heading to Lwów: family. They had both been
born in Dolina, some forty miles to the south, so they were familiar with the
region; my uncle, after all, had been traveling frequently to the region on
business. Even more directly, they had second cousins, Irene and Karol
Gottdenker, through a common great grandfather.
As
I wrote in an earlier chapter, my father’s grandfather, Moses Zarwanitzer,
through his first wife, was great-grandfather to Irene. Her father, Norbert
(Nachman) Gottdenker, was in Dolina as well, and had worked in the lumber
business for his and my father’s cousin, Judah Zarwanitzer. Later, when my
father was a young man of thirty living in Vienna, Norbert Gottdenker and his
wife Helena had come to visit with their young children Irene and Karol, who
were ten and nine at the time. By 1939, when my father and uncle showed up in Lwów
as refugees, they were aged thirty-eight and forty-one, hardly of romantic
interest to the young and vivacious seventeen-year-old Irene. (Seven years
later, they would meet again under different circumstances.) At some point,
they must have told their relatives what had transpired in Germany, Austria,
and Czechoslovakia and to be prepared in case the Germans turned on their
Soviet allies—a likely possibility, if the Germans’ decisions in the recent
past were any indication.
The
Soviet occupiers needed to come to grips with governing not only their newly
liberated Poles and Ukrainians but also with handling the needs of so many
refugees that had now come into Lwów. Well over 100,000 Jews had made their way
there along with countless others fleeing the German occupiers in western
Poland. This presaged the beginning of the largest waves of mass migrations in
any time in history, numbering in the tens of millions, in Europe and Asia, throughout
the following decade.
Beyond
the logistics of feeding and housing so many was a political concern: many of
these refugees were politically active socialists, Zionists, and communists—true
believers whose ideals of communism did not match the reality of the Stalinist
system. All of these posed a potential threat to a paranoid regime. (It is
interesting to note that in 1940, the leading communist opponent of Stalin,
Leon Trotsky, was murdered in distant Mexico, and Menachem Begin, a Zionist
leader, was arrested as an agent of “British Imperialism.”) The last thing that
the regime could tolerate was an infestation of problematic political refugees
on the border with their temporary German allies. Hence, the Soviet police
rounded up refugees for transportation to the far eastern regions of the Union
such as Siberia or Central Asia. My father and uncle were caught in the roundup
and herded to the train station to be boarded on cattle cars for destinations
east.
Nothing
was well organized at this time, and the numerous refugees included families
with children that needed to be fed. An officer in charge let a few leave to
buy some food, relying on them to return faithfully to their children. My father
and his brother sensed an opportunity and volunteered to fetch water. The
official in charge of this impromptu encampment sent a soldier to follow them
to make sure they returned. The two intentionally kept going off route, first
to the right, then to the left, getting lost intentionally, until the guard became
frustrated with them and shouted, “How stupid are you?” My uncle Munio pleaded
with him. “You have been posted here before; surely, you know the way better
than we do. Why don’t you lead, and we’ll follow you.” The guard, weary of
herding them, marched ahead of the two brothers. As they approached the next
wall, Willi and Munio jumped over the railing without the guard paying notice,
and they made it into the city. They had left behind whatever meager
possessions they had managed to save at the camp; these would better serve some
other refugees.
This
bought them more time. They continued to improve their mastery of chemistry,
particularly in the field of chemical engineering, as this would be their only
means of support in a regime that had no room for businessmen, attorneys,
Zionists, and students of political science, and certainly no room for rabbis. Lwów
was still too full of refugees, so the Soviets initiated massive deportations
in June of 1940. They once again caught the two brothers in their dragnet. The
brothers had hoped to go to Stanislawow (now Ivano-Frankivsk), as it was the
regional capital for their hometown of Dolina. They were sent off to Tarnopol
instead. This was, unknown to them, a boon, as it was much nearer to the Soviet
border and a future route of escape. They had another year during which they
could better understand the strategies for survival under the Soviet system.
When the Germans advanced in the summer of 1941, they headed post-haste to a
place the German forces would never reach: Stalingrad.
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