THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC 415SS-camps became branches of the Gulag; and the concept of 'Liberation' became
a mockery. As one set of prisoners was released, new sets of prisoners were
rounded up. It was not unusual for survivors of Nazi camps to be re-arrested on
the grounds that collaborators alone could have survived. By the same twisted
logic, members of all non-Communist resistance organizations were ipso facto
'Fascists'. People with dollars or other foreign currency in their pockets were
manifestly 'speculators'; people caught corresponding with their families
abroad were obviously 'spies'; and people who co-operated with the new
authorities with anything less than total enthusiasm were treated as 'saboteurs'.
Anyone returning to Poland from service in the West was immediately suspected
of being an agent provocateur. Residents of districts where opposition was
encountered were liable to wholesale removal. Numbers are impossible to cal-
culate. But, at the lowest estimate, tens of thousands simply disappeared; tens of
thousands were deported to Russia; and tens of thousands were condemned by
rigged courts on imaginary charges.
The NKVD scored its biggest triumph through a classic manoeuvre of decep-
tion. Informed in March 1945 that the leaders of Poland's wartime underground
were hiding in the vicinity of Pruszkow near Warsaw, NKVD agents issued a
request to parley with them and accompanied it with a formal guarantee for their
safe conduct signed by a senior Soviet commander. They were shortly rewarded
by the appearance of General Leopold Okulicki, who had recently ordered the
disbanding of the Home Army, of Stanislaw Jankowski, the Chief Delegate of the
Polish Government, and of fourteen others, all leading figures of the underground
'parliament'. These men would have formed the core of any initiative to carry out
the Yalta agreement and to integrate democratic representatives with members of
the Soviet-sponsored organizations. Without more ado, however, they were
arrested, and secretly flown to imprisonment in the Lubjanka. Six weeks later, the
world learned that the 'Sixteen' were to face trial in Moscow. At a stroke, the
most significant rivals to the Communist camp were removed from the scene, and
all hopes of building a democratic post-war order in Poland were dashed.
In this atmosphere, the PKWN's own security grew rapidly and flourished. As
pupils and appointees of the NKVD, they adopted the same goals and the same
methods. They attracted all manner of misfits and hoodlums. Their chief was
Jakub Berman (1901-84), a pre-war lawyer, who reached Poland with the Soviet
Army. He was the brother of Adolf Berman (1904-78), who chaired the post-
war Central Committee of Polish Jews before heading off for a political career
in Israel. As he would openly admit when interviewed forty years later, the
Communists had no serious popular support. So democratic methods were
impossible. Moreover, since the Party comrades had decided to exclude Jews
from the movement's economic and cultural cadres, considerable numbers of
Jewish recruits had no option but to join the security services. 'All or nearly all
of the directors were Jewish'.^5 This fact was repeatedly denied by official
sources. According to an enquiry published in 1947, the Ministry of Security
employed only one Jewish officer - presumably Jakub Berman himself.