356 GOLGOTA
by the 'Panzer Platoon' of Capt. 'Vatsek' Mitsuta, the watchtowers were shot
up, the gates of the camp were rammed, the barbed-wire fence was smashed, the
SS were driven off, and the inmates freed. As 'Vatsek' climbed from his tank, he
found at least a hundred prisoners drawn up military-syle in the middle of the
camp's parade-ground:
'Attention! Eyes Left!', a voice called out. [One of the prisoners] came up to me and
saluted. 'Sergeant Henryk Lederman, Sir!,' he reported, 'and the Jewish Battalion ready
for action!'.
One example of the solidarity of civilians must suffice. The Benedictine Sisters
of the Perpetual Adoration of the Holy Sacrament belonged to a closed, con-
templative order of nuns, who had broken their own rules by opening their con-
vent to hundreds of refugees. In early September, they found themselves on the
front line; and they received an order from the Germans to evacuate the convent
within 30 minutes or to take the consequences. The prioress sought the advice
of the commander of a nearby Home Army strong point. She was told that the
soldiers would be disheartened to see the sisters leave. So she urged her charges
to congregate in the convent's chapel, and to pray. After half an hour, the
unmistakable drone of a Stuka bomber was heard overhead. A single high-
explosive bomb fell through the roof. The chapel collapsed. And one thousand
people perished.
The exact role of the Soviet government cannot be ascertained without refer-
ence to documents that have not been fully published. It was widely believed
that Stalin deliberately urged Warsaw to rise in the sure knowledge that his
political rivals in Poland would thereby be destroyed by the Germans. Certainly,
the USSR made no effort to assist the Rising for at least five whole weeks, and
thereafter in only the most halfhearted and grudging fashion. Indeed, Soviet
forces were not only ordered to refuse landing rights to British and American
aircraft flying to Warsaw's aid from Italy but also were apt to shoot at them. An
Australian pilot flying through Sovit flak on his approach to Warsaw from the
East vowed to return to base over the Reich. 'We preferred to be killed by the
enemy,' he would later recall, 'than by our so-called friends'.^42 At the time,
Churchill described the Russians' behaviour as 'strange and sinister'. On
16 August, in Moscow, the US Ambassador was told that 'the Soviet
Government do not wish to associate themselves directly or indirectly with the
adventure in Warsaw.' On 22 August, in a letter to Churchill and Roosevelt,
Stalin denounced the leaders of the Rising as 'a group of criminals'. Everything
pointed to calculated treachery. Yet other factors must also be borne in mind.
Rokossowski's initial failure to advance against Warsaw can be partly
explained by the fierce counter-attack of the Panzer force launched on
2 August, and by Soviet military priorities dictated by Stalin's decision to invade
the Balkans in the middle of the month. (Rokossovsky, who was half-Polish,
had prepard a plan for liberating Warsaw in late August, but was overruled.^43 )
The misleading broadcasts of Moscow Radio, which first called on the