35° GOLGOTA
established by the Nazi-Soviet Treaty of 1939 (now re-named 'the Curzon Line')
was still valid. All non-Soviet underground groups, including the Polish AK,
were ruthlessly suppressed. In Wilno, for example, the Soviet Command bene-
fited from AK attacks on the retreating Germans only to see the NKVD arrest
their would-be allies and shoot their officers.
In the southern provinces of this zone, especially in Volhynia and the former
Eastern Galicia, the period preceding the return of the Soviet Army was ren-
dered still more fraught by a murderous campaign of what would later be called
'ethnic cleansing'. Historically, the region had been inhabited by Ukranians,
Poles, and Jews. But after the elimination of the Jews by the Nazis, a radical
Ukranian organization, the UPA, seized their opportuniy in 1943-4 to eliminate
the Poles. Thair aim was to create 'a purely Ukraininan Ukraine.' Armed gangs
toured the towns and the villages, usually at night, burning Polish homesteads,
slaughtering Polish men, women, and children without mercy, murdering
Catholic priests, forcing the remnants to flee, and terrorising all non-compliant
Ukranians. The murdered victims must be numbered in the hundreds of thou-
sands. The resultant refugees, who flooded westwards in the wake of the Soviet
Army and who were quaintly classified among the 'repatriants', numbered 2-3
million. The episode, which finds no place in conventional accounts of the
'Holocaust', remained largely hidden from the history books for fifty years.^36
In terms of the fighting on the territory of the future people's Republic, the
'Liberation' lasted from crossing of the River Bug on 19 July 1944 to the
capitulation of Breslau on 6 May 1945. In the first critical period, in the
absence of a binding international agreement on the future of the Polish lands,
the Soviets were free to treat them as they thought fit. For practical purposes,
they always treated districts east of the Bug as part of the USSR, and districts
to the west of the old German frontier as part of the defeated Reich.
Inevitably, there was a great deal of confusion. And there was a great deal of
destruction. As the Front lurched unsteadily westwards, district after district
was subjected to the same succession of events. When the Wehrmacht pre-
pared to hold its chosen line of defence, it would be harried in the rear and on
the flanks by partisans of all sorts — by one or all of the various Polish for-
mations, by local peasant guerrillas, by Ukrainians and Byelorussians, or by
Soviet groups parachuted behind the lines. Then the Soviet Army would
attack, and an overwhelming surge of tanks and battle-hardened troops
would drive the Germans from their positions. Immediately behind the reced-
ing front line marched a tidal wave of assorted human flotsam - exhausted
German soldiers separated from their units, stranded partisans who wished to
submit neither to the Germans nor to the Soviets, deserters, camp-followers
of both sexes, escaped prisoners and criminals living off the land, and civilian
refugees who did not know which way to turn. Finally, driving the stragglers
before them, came the disciplined ranks of the Soviet Special Forces — the
'blocking' regiments to catch deserters, the reparation squads, the requisi-
tioning brigades, the military police, the political services, and proudest of all,