International: The Frightened Poles

Last week in Moscow’s Dom Soyuzov (House of Unions), the SovietGovernment put 15 Polish politicians and under ground fighters on trial (the 16th of the famed “16 Poles” was ill). The ensuing stream of confessions, self -denunciations and one heroic defense made the non-Communist world remember the tragic, psychopathic exhibitions at the ill-famed purge trials of 1937. Three anti-Soviet Poles in London, reading accounts of last week’s testimony, solemnly averred that their compatriots in Moscow must have been doped. Often the exiled London Polish Government, rather than the Poles in the courtroom, seemed to be on trial. And the whole proceeding was clearly part of Soviet strategy in the negotiations for a new Warsaw Government.

TIME Correspondent Craig Thompson, looking and listening throughout the trial, wrote this account: The prisoners’ dock was a picket-fence pen knocked together out of boards salvaged from packing cases. It contained four rows of seats, four to a row. Around the dock there was a plethora of blue-and-red-capped, uniformed guards of the NKVD. Between the dock and the audience stood two guards, immobile with rifles grounded, leather cartridge cases on their belts, unbuttoned bayonets glinting like polished silver under the batteries of Klieg lights.

The 15 on trial sat, each with a white, paperbound printed copy of the indictment in his hand, some making notes, some staring out at the audience, some studying the court.

Under the Light. The court consisted of three judges and one alternate, all from the Red Army Judicial Service. The President Justice was Colonel General Vassily V. Ulrich, a round-faced, double-chinned man with twinkling eyes and a merry grin which sometimes seemed on the verge of becoming a sneer. The two prosecutors were Major General Nikolai A. Afanasyev and State Counselor R. A. Rudenko. Four movie cameras—two rigged for sound and two silent—eight Klieg lights and a restless dozen still photographers, each festooned with two to five German made cameras, recorded the scene.

Soviet court procedure is different from that of the U.S. At the very start the indictment, also called the accusation, not only stated the charges against the defend ants as a group and as individuals, but also cited most of the evidence.

The charges against these 15 fell into five major divisions. They were that: 1) in the Red Army’s rear, they organized and armed detachments of the under ground army called Armja Krajowa, or Home Army, and known by the initials AK;

2) as an outgrowth of AK they organized a military political organization called Niepodleglosc, which means independence and is known as NIE;

3) that NIE and AK carried out acts of terror, sabotage, espionage and anti-Soviet propaganda in the Red Army’s rear, killing 277 Red Army officers and men in the last five months of 1944;

4) that they maintained forbidden radio stations to communicate with the London Polish Government and with scattered AK or NIE units;

5) that they laid plans for forming a military bloc with Germany to fight the Soviet Union.

Any one of these crimes could be punished by death. Among the accused:

¶ AK’s commander, short, purse-lipped General Leopold Bronislaw Okulicki (rhymes with Ritz key), 47, who claimed to be a peasant’s son, but was born in a village near Cracow which bore his family name.

¶ Billiard-bald, pince-nezed, Jan Stanislaw Jankowski, 63, agronomical engineer and vice premier in Poland of the London Government since April 1943.

¶ Bold-eyed, unkempt, partly bald Adam Bien, 46, lawyer, politician and member of the presiding body of the Peasant Party, who since January 1944 had been vice president of the Polish underground’s Council of Ministers.

¶ Tall, slack-jowled, deliberate Stanislaw Jasiukowicz, 63, Cracow University professor of history and political economy who, since 1943, had been an underground minister.

The rest were all members of one or another of Poland’s political parties; all held positions in the underground government and had been lawyers, journalists and labor leaders. Seen together, the 15 looked neither like national leaders nor like hardened felons. What they did look like was a small-town Rotary Club reduced to a condition of bewilderment and fright. That was also the way they acted. Only one, a harelipped, sad-eyed lawyer named Zbigniew Stypulkowski, pleaded “not guilty.”

The court sat from 11 a.m. until midnight, and on the third and final day almost around the clock, from 11 a.m. until 5 the next morning. Witnesses brought from Poland by the prosecution included an underground commandant from the Lvov district, a woman radio operator, other functionaries typical of a clandestine organization committed to violence.

The witnesses stood with backs to the spectators and talked into two microphones (for the movie cameras and the courtroom amplifiers). The hands of some shook uncontrollably, as did the knees of others. But their voices were clear and steady. They told of ambuscades in which Red Army men had been killed and acts of sabotage which also resulted in the deaths of Red Army men. But not a word of this direct testimony was directly connected with any of the defendants.

In a U.S. court the case would have collapsed on that one point. But here was one of the trial’s surprises. For by their admission of moral and political responsibility as leaders of the underground, the 15 men in the dock had supplied links which tied them with these acts of violence. Their pleas of partial guilt, in other words, now became proof of total guilt.

To an American this was an odd way for persons charged with crime to behave. But this case was not crime so much as politics. Among the Slavs, politics is a very peculiar game.

The General and the Flame. During the trial the Russian press had been particularly bloodthirsty. Thus Russians were more than a little startled when the prosecutor, in a burst of magnanimity toward the defendants and pride in the Russian victory over Germany, announced that he would not ask for death penalties.

Okulicki proved himself the toughest, most determined fighter among the defendants, some of whom had presented a far from pretty picture. He was utterly without fear. Now he made a remarkable speech:

“The Polish underground fought the Germans for five years. Now for some reason we are being deprived of this capital. I understand this but what pains me is that it has cost us a lot of victims—not fascists but democrats and patriots. . . . The accusation being tried here is not against single individuals. The Armja Krajowa was 300,000 strong. . . . The prosecutor gave the figures for the number in the Red Army killed. I bow in commiseration for their fate as victims. The prosecutor sneers. He thinks this is a maneuver on my part. No! It is sincere. There were also numerous victims in the AK. And I am very sorry for them too. But what was the reason for this struggle between the Red Army and AK?

“One of the reasons was that there was no regular diplomatic relation between the Soviet Government and the government in London, which we considered our legal government. Our soldiers acted thinking their acts were correct and for the good of their country. This is the real reason, the real source of the dispute which started the flame.

“Of course a big role was played by distrust of the Soviet Government’s plans for Poland. The AK trusted those whom it believed to be its legal leaders. The roots of this distrust go back several ages. For only 20 years has Poland been a free and independent state. For 130 years before that we were dependent, and we could not forget that our 130 years of dependence was an infliction from Russia. We did not know how much Russia had changed her policy toward nations. How could we believe you were not a threat to us? …

“The prosecutor practically made me a German collaborator. I actually feel no enmity toward the Soviet Union. My actions were not directed by enmity but distrust. I know the Polish people want friendship with the Soviet people. I would be a traitor to my people if I did not want it too. I was fighting only for the independence of my country. I personally said I was for taking the Crimea decisions [to reorganize the Warsaw Government] as the basis for a new democratic Poland, but I continued my activities because the decisions alone were not enough. I am deeply sure there is no force that can prevent friendship between the two countries unless the Soviet Union wants to enslave Poland. The Polish people have many bad features but they have one good one. It is their love for freedom. History has many proofs of that.”

The Motive. The Soviet prosecutor must have foreseen that Okulicki could and would make this defense. And it would have been impossible for him to make this defense if he had not entered a plea of partial guilt. He did not talk of whether he committed certain crimes, but of why he committed them. Since the Russian Government threw the trial open to the world press, it follows that the Russian Government wanted the world to hear what Okulicki had to say.

Okulicki received ten years imprisonment, while Jankowski got eight and Bien and Jasiukowicz five each. Eight got minor sentences, ranging up to one and a half years. Three were acquitted.