Russian captives were exploited as a replacement for horse traction or sent to work as lumberjacks, road construction workers, or plowmen in many of the Polish prisoner camps. It was known that inmates, not horses, hauled carts when cesspits were cleaned in Strzałkowo.
Russia's official envoy to Poland wrote on January 6, 1922 that “inmates were on a daily basis taken outdoors, and the people extremely weakened physically were ordered to run, drop into mud, and rise. Those who refused to or were unable to stand up after falling were systematically beaten with riffle butts”. The envoy's August 10, 1922 report from Warsaw read that “the punishments imposed on prisoners of war in Poland are deliberately barbarian. The lock-up cells are abnormally small and as dirty as pigsties, and are routinely used to contain 10-17 people. The inmates frequently suffer beatings with fists or clubs. The Polish side serially neutralized our delegation's attempts to get the camp administrations to soften the regime”. It must be noted in the context that Polish communists, of whom several thousands perished in Poland, were subject to similar treatment in the camps.
Summarizing the complaints collected across Poland's camp network, Russia's envoy E. Ignatov sent a message to Moscow, to the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs and to the Evacuation Agency, saying that the situation with the regime in many of the facilities had improved minimally and actually became worse in some, and that the practice of beating inmates persisted. He stressed that the Polish higher command generally stopped beating prisoners, but the guards continued to.
Famine and exhaustion. Nominally, the daily ration of an inmate in Poland was supposed to comprise 500 grams of bread, 150 grams of meet or fish (beef – four times a week, horse meat – twice a week, dried fish or herring – once a week), 700 grams of potatoes, various spices, and two servings of coffee. Every inmate was to get 100 grams of soap monthly. Healthy prisoners could be sent to works given their consent, within the military industry or, later, in civilian institutions and private possessions requiring large amounts of labor, such as railroad construction or loading/unloading. The wounded and sick had to be given the same treatment as Polish army servicemen, with Polish hospitals receiving the same pay for the medical assistance. In reality, the above norms were completely ignored and, as the bulk of documentary evidence convincingly demonstrates, the conditions in the Polish prisoner camps used to be extremely severe.
Regardless of the declarations churned out by the Polish administration, deaths due to malnutrition were commonplace in Polish camps. A. Valden (Podolski), who survived the nightmare of the 1919-1920 Polish captivity, wrote in 1931 in a paper that, paradoxically, sounds as a contribution to the present-day debate: “I can imagine outraged Polish patriots cite official reports spelling out the nutritional value of a typical inmate diet. No doubt, the opportunities for corruption were the lure that attracted so powerfully the Polish officers to positions in camp administrations”. Polish researches write that in the epoch the camp guards lived on roughly the same subsistence as inmates and food shortages used to be a problem confronting the entire Poland. Neither of the authors, however, seems to be under an impression that the guards had to eat hay or peelings. There was no famine in Poland in 1919-1921, the above norms were not beyond the country's means, and the inmates actually got the meals as prescribed on the days when inspectors toured the camps. For example, a team of inspectors dispatched by the Polish army to the Modlin camp drew a conclusion that the prisoners' nutrition in the facility was satisfactory. On the day, the inmates got “sufficient portions of tasty and nutritious soup with beef”, a pound of bread per prisoner, coffee, and marmalade. It should be taken into account, though, that a telegram was sent to Warsaw from Modlin days earlier with the information that 900 inmates with gastric and other problems had to be placed in the camp hospital and that 58 died, the causes being the eating of unprocessed peelings and total absence of shoes and clothing.
A protocol of a December 20, 1919 meeting of the Polish army's supreme command on the conditions facing the prisoners of war said: “In response to the charges, Lt. Ludwig says that neglect for orders is the cause of the problems cited. The existing orders should be enough to maintain proper conditions for inmates, but tend to be neglected. The disastrous conditions are entirely due to corruption and abuses. The military administrations ignore instructions. Captives and even refugees or repatriates are all being robbed. Captives from the past war continue to be illicitly detained, and that hurts Poland's international prestige”.
Cold and Disease. Cold and lack of clothing or shoes, along with the state of camp barracks which in many cases were unlivable were other causes of multiple deaths of prisoners of war in Poland. Heating and light were absent in most camp barracks, plus many of them were not equipped with plank beds, not to mention that no mattresses or blankets were supplied to the inmates. According to a September 10, 1920 report, the inmates were too cold to sleep at nights and had to keep moving around to stay warm. The above was true of the living conditions in at least 50% of the barracks where prisoners of war were held in Poland. The other 50% lived in small groups in accommodations described in the majority of accounts as dark, stuffy, dirty, and cold, in many cases with leaking roofs, with broken windows or without windows.
Epidemics which raged across Poland during the war further told on the conditions the prisoners of war had to endure. Available documents contain references to typhus, dysentery, Spanish flu, typhoid, cholera, smallpox, scabies, diphtheria, scarlet fever, meningitis, malaria, venereal diseases, tuberculosis. Over the first six months of 1919, the incidence of typhus in Poland measured 122,000, around 10,000 of the cases being lethal. The Polish army recorded 40,000 cases of the disease in July, 1919 – July, 1920. Infectious diseases spread over prisoner camps or, oftentimes, the facilities were the epicenters of epidemics. A document circulated by the Polish defense ministry in 1919 said that the result of sending prisoners of war from the periphery of Poland to its central part without elementary sanitary norms being observed was the rise of contagious diseases in practically all prisoner camps.
No medical assistance whatsoever was provided to the inmates. The wounded had to stay without having their bondages changed for as long as two weeks, so that parasites bred in the wounds and the people died of blood poisoning.
At certain periods of time, the mortality rate among prisoners of war in Poland reached shocking levels. The Red Cross data showed that 1,124 of the 4,165 Soviet and Ukrainian inmates (27%) died in the Brest-Litovsk camp, one of the scariest in Poland, in September 7 – October 7, 1919. A grim record was hit in August when 180 people died in the facility within 24 hours. When an epidemic of typhus broke out in Babruysk in 1919, 933 inmates – around 50% of the total – died in December and January. The average mortality rate used to be lower than the above – Poland's army department of sanitation said the “normal” death rate in February, 1920, the time when the inflow of new prisoners of war subsided, was 7% (it is unclear whether the number was calculated on a monthly or the annual basis).
A December, 1919 report by Poland's army department of sanitation to the military minister, which offered a picture of the disastrous situation in the camps and called for an urgent response, carried striking examples in quantities and stated that the sufferings of the prisoners of war forever left a spot on the reputations of the Polish army and nation. In Strzałkowo, anti-epidemic efforts were inefficient due to the lack of shower rooms and means of disinfection, but also to the facts that the guards confiscated underwear from the inmates and often kept them indoors for three or more days in a row as punishment.
The monthly mortality rate of 100-200 was an ordinary phenomenon and peaked to reach thousands in the winter of 1920-1921 in Strzałkowo. The number of deaths in Brest-Litovsk in the second half of 1919 was 60-100 daily, and 400 died over the period of two months in the late 1920 in Tuchola.
Vpered, a paper published in Lviv, wrote on December 22, 1920 that 45 Russian inmates died in Tuchola on December 9 after being taken to a bath with concrete floor on a frosty day and then being left – with no clothes and shoes – in a basement with no floor whatsoever. The Polish administration opened a probe in response to the protests the Russian delegation voiced in Riga based on the publication and claimed to have found that the newspaper report was wrong. The Polish account was that the death toll was 10 and was attributable to typhus, the bath was warm, and afterwards the healthy inmates were placed in disinfected barracks, while those in need of medical care were taken to hospital. Vpered was closed in the wake of the investigation for having allegedly supplied distorted information.
The conditions in Polish camps deteriorated considerably following the Battle of Warsaw, when over 50,000 Red Army servicemen were taken captive. The number of Soviet captives in Poland further grew as the fighting unraveled.
The level of supply and the sanitary conditions in Polish camps went down dramatically again in the late 1920 – the early 1921, with famine and infectious disease taking hundreds of lives daily. Poland's commissar for the struggle against epidemics E. Godlewski sent a letter to defense minister K. Sosnkowski in December, 1920, warning that the situation in the camps for prisoners of war was below all sanitary and cultural norms. Mattresses and blankets still were not to be found in camp hospitals, where the numbers of medical staff were clearly insufficient and the doctors and nurses from the ranks of inmates had no conditions to perform their professional duties.
As an attempt to detail the abhorring conditions under which captive Red Army servicemen were held, chairman of the Russian-Ukrainian delegation A. Joffe sent a lengthy letter on January 9, 1921 to Polish delegation chairman J. Dąbrowski. Joffe listed an array of cases of inhumane treatment and mentioned that, contrary to frequently repeated pledges, no improvements followed. According to the October 20, 1920 YMCA report, prisoners lived in completely unfit accommodations with no furniture, nothing to sleep on, no mattresses and blankets, no glass in windows, and with holes in walls. The inmates had practically no shoes and underwear and not enough clothes. In Strzałkowo, Tuchola, and Dąbie, the people had no change of underwear for three months and many had no underwear at all. Most captives in Dąbie had no shoes, and the inmates in the camp run by the headquarters of Poland's 18th division mostly had no clothes. The Soviet side stressed that the above was absolutely unthinkable as far as the treatment of Polish prisoners in Russia and Ukraine was concerned, and demanded immediate improvements for Red Army servicemen in Polish captivity and the dismissal of the administration officers responsible for the abuses.
The death toll was expressed in tens of thousands. Polish researcher I. Mechik wrote: «The point made in present-day papers is that the captives brought lethal epidemics of typhoid, diphtheria, cholera, and Spanish flu to the camps. That is impossible to deny, but if the captives had no clothes, were underfed, and slept without mattresses and blankets, while those who were ill and had diarrhea were not separated from the healthy inmates, the striking death rate was imminent. Russian authors typically stress the above and assert that the practice was — on the level of camp administrations if not the government — that of deliberate extermination. That is also hard to deny».
The following conclusions appear completely warranted. Captive Red Army servicemen were exterminated in Poland by means listed below:
(1) By executions and mass murder. Many of the captives never made it to camps as they were:
– doomed to death with no official verdicts, the wounded being left to die on the battlefields without medical assistance and others – transited to detention centers under murderous conditions;
– executed based on sentences issued by various courts and tribunals;
– shot for defiance.
(2) By the deliberate creation of conditions which were impossible to survive. Those confronted inmates in concentration camps where they suffered from
– humiliating treatment and beatings;
– starvation and exhaustion;
– cold and diseases.
Overall, over 50,000 Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian prisoners of war perished in Polish captivity. Of the number, 10,000-12,000 were killed without being placed in camps, and 40,000-44,000 – 30,000-32,000 Red Army servicemen plus 10,000-12,000 civilians and members of anticommunist or nationalist groups – died in camps.
