Polish Tragedy

AN ARMY IN EXILE (319 pp.)--Lieut. General W. Anders--Macmillan ($5).

In a bookstore window, this "Story of the Second Polish Corps" may look like just another war book. On the contrary, it is one of the most remarkable personal histories of World War II.

When the Nazis invaded Poland, Author Wladyslaw Anders (who is now living in exiled retirement in England) commanded two divisions of Polish infantry and a cavalry brigade. In no time at all, these troops were trapped between the advancing German and Russian armies. Within a month, General Anders was lying in a Polish forest, half-dead from eight wounds, his divisions broken and scattered.

Sent to a prison hospital, under Soviet guard, Anders was plainly told that he could hope to save his life only by enlisting in the Red Army. He refused--and the Russians went to work.

"More than a dozen NKVD men suddenly rushed into the room and forcibly dragged me from my bed and out of the ward . . . My slow movement down the stairs on my crutches irritated them, and they gave me a push so that I fell down. This was repeated on each flight of stairs.

"I was . . . shoved into a small room with a half-wrecked stove and a barred window without panes . . . The temperature [was] below freezing . . . Occasionally a bit of bread was thrown in to me . . . Every [few] days . . . NKVD men would burst in at night and carry out a most careful examination of the cell and of my person [including] the long beard which had grown during my imprisonment and which was stiff from pus that had run into it from my frostbitten face. I was kicked and beaten on these occasions."

Tea at Lubianka. When Anders still refused to join the Red Army and to confess to crimes he had never committed, he was taken to Moscow's Lubianka prison. Here he was again submitted to the NKVD treatment--sometimes being wooed with cigarettes and tea, at other times being smashed in the face and kicked.

The NKVD, he discovered, knew every detail of his personal and military history. They even showed him photographs of himself "at the Olympic Games in Amsterdam and at the international horseshow in Nice"--snapshots which he had never known existed. "We have such a file for every military and political personage in the whole world," said the proud interrogator.

Anders spent more than a year in Lubianka, much of the time in solitary confinement under an electric lamp so powerful that it nearly made him blind. Then, suddenly, he was summoned before NKVD Chief Lavrenti Beria, who informed him that Germany had attacked Russia, and that Anders had been "elected" commander of all Poles in the U.S.S.R.

Caviar at Home. Without socks, wearing prison pants, and carrying a suitcase that contained only a worn bathing suit (not his), Anders was whirled away from Lubianka in a limousine and ensconced in a luxurious four-room apartment. There he was given two servants and quantities of champagne, cognac and caviar.

Raising a Polish army was something else again. Anders soon found that most of the Polish troops in Soviet hands had been sent to rot and to freeze in forced-labor camps. Accompanied by General Wladyslaw Sikorski, chief of the provisional Polish government in London, he went straight to the Kremlin to see what could be done.

Stalin (his eyes "black, cold and dull, wrinkled into a smile which somehow seemed to be only skin-deep") listened to their complaints with feigned innocence. Molotov was also present; clearly "more ... of a lackey than ... a colleague," he hastened to furnish a match each time Stalin took a cigarette, and dived under the table like a duck when his master dropped some notes.

Death in Asia. "I have ... a list of about 4,000 [Polish] officers," said Sikorski, "who ... are still in prisons and labor camps . . ." "That is impossible," said Stalin blandly, "they must have escaped."

"Where could they escape to?" "Well, to Manchuria."

"[They] are dying under the most frightful conditions." "They have . . . been released, but have not yet arrived," said Stalin.

General Anders eventually raised and took out of the U.S.S.R. a Polish army nearly 115,000 strong. The world may never know exactly how many thousands of Poles were kept to work the mines of Siberia. Anders estimates that when he and his ragged men of the II Polish Corps set out for the Middle East to join up with the British Eighth Army, they left behind approximately 1,500,000 of their captured countrymen; at least half of them, he believes, perished under forced labor.

Hope in Italy. General Anders' II Corps was later sent to Italy, where it spent the remainder of the war, achieving its greatest fame for storming the slopes to make the final capture of Monte Cassino.

"You will be present at the [peace] conference," Churchill assured General Anders. "You must trust us. Great Britain entered this war in defense of the principle of your independence . . . and we will never desert you."

When Anders expressed his deep distrust of Russian intentions toward Poland, Churchill offered him a rose-colored view. "I believe that the situation in Russia has changed," Anders quotes him as saying, "and the men who hold power at present will not keep it to the same degree after the . . . war. The present [Russian] generals and other high ranks . . . will never put up with a state of affairs in which . . . they would have no say. They must come to power . . . and they will certainly be against the [present] regime . . . Hence all your apprehensions are superfluous . . . I and my friend President Roosevelt . . . will never abandon Poland."

The last chapters of An Army in Exile are devoted to the dismal history of how Britain and the U.S. were squeezed into abandoning Poland. "No Englishman or American," says British M.P. Harold Macmillan in his introduction, "can read this record without a sense ... of something like shame." This shame is likely to be heightened by the fact that General Anders' tragic story is written with simplicity, frankness and dignity.

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