Muslimov. ‘Millions and millions of people were killed by him. That butcher. He should be put on trial. People have forgotten about him, but because of what he did he should be put on trial. I demand that he be put on trial! He may be dead but he should be put on trial. He should be punished!’
THE RED ARMY RETURNS
In the wake of the attack on German Army Group Centre in Operation Bagration, the Red Army moved forward into eastern Poland and mounted the Lwów-Sandomierz assault. This powerful thrust involved over a million Soviet soldiers of the 1st Ukrainian front under the command of Marshal Konev.
In July 1944 the Soviets approached Lwów, a city they had first seized in September 1939 in agreement with the Nazis. ‘In 1944, when the Red Army came for a second time, it was, of course, worse’, says Anna Levitska, then a teenager living in the city. ‘Because we already had an idea of what the consequences might be, because of all the arrests there had been in 1939 and 1940…. So of course it was terrifying’.
Anna recalls one old man coming up to her and her family in 1944 and saying: ‘This is the second time [the Soviets have come]. It was better the first time’.
‘Why?’ they asked him.
‘Because the first time, they came and they went. But this time when they come there is no way they will be leaving’.
Vyacheslav Yablonsky 82 was part of the great Soviet assault on Lwów that summer. But he was no ordinary soldier: as a member of an elite NKVD squad he had a very specific role. Together with two dozen other members of the secret police, and a squad of Red Army soldiers, he entered Lwów just before the Germans retreated from the city. Travelling in American Studebaker trucks they plotted a route via the back streets of the city to the Gestapo headquarters. The location was familiar to the Soviets, since the German secret police had merely taken over the old NKVD headquarters – a building that in turn had previously housed the Polish secret police and before that the Austro-Hungarian intelligence agency (today, the same building is used by the Ukrainian police).
The task facing Yablonsky and his comrades was straightforward, but considered vital. They had to capture the Gestapo headquarters before the Germans left, and steal intelligenceinformation that their superiors hoped would reveal just who had been collaborating with the Nazis.
They arrived just as the Germans were packing their files into trucks. The Soviet force scaled the wall surrounding the Gestapo headquarters, shot the German guards and prevented the trucks from leaving. Hurrying into the building, they made straight for the cellars, where they knew the intelligence files were stored. While the remaining Germans, panic-stricken, sought to escape, the NKVD swiftly made the building secure and started examining the files they had found. They then immediately sought out anyone whom the German documents had named as an informer. Yablonsky also relied on pro-Soviet informers to tell him who had been collaborating with the Germans or was simply ‘anti-Soviet’: ‘We got to know about the dangerous people from these other people [informers]. They told us that somebody hated Soviet power and was a threat to us and then we would arrest him… they could be saying bad things about us or just thinking we were bad’. Once arrested for the crime of ‘saying something bad’ about the Soviet occupation, Yablonsky recalls, the ‘normal’ sentence was ‘about fifteen years of forced labour’.
‘Now I think it was cruel’, he says. ‘But at that time, when I was young, twenty-two or twenty-three years old, I didn't…. Now I understand that it's cruel because I'm older. I don't think it was a very democratic time. Now you can say anything, but at that time you couldn't. At that time most things were censored and nobody could say anything bad about the Soviet Union. So we all thought it was normal at the time’.
Despite feeling now
THE RED ARMY RETURNS
In the wake of the attack on German Army Group Centre in Operation Bagration, the Red Army moved forward into eastern Poland and mounted the Lwów-Sandomierz assault. This powerful thrust involved over a million Soviet soldiers of the 1st Ukrainian front under the command of Marshal Konev.
In July 1944 the Soviets approached Lwów, a city they had first seized in September 1939 in agreement with the Nazis. ‘In 1944, when the Red Army came for a second time, it was, of course, worse’, says Anna Levitska, then a teenager living in the city. ‘Because we already had an idea of what the consequences might be, because of all the arrests there had been in 1939 and 1940…. So of course it was terrifying’.
Anna recalls one old man coming up to her and her family in 1944 and saying: ‘This is the second time [the Soviets have come]. It was better the first time’.
‘Why?’ they asked him.
‘Because the first time, they came and they went. But this time when they come there is no way they will be leaving’.
Vyacheslav Yablonsky 82 was part of the great Soviet assault on Lwów that summer. But he was no ordinary soldier: as a member of an elite NKVD squad he had a very specific role. Together with two dozen other members of the secret police, and a squad of Red Army soldiers, he entered Lwów just before the Germans retreated from the city. Travelling in American Studebaker trucks they plotted a route via the back streets of the city to the Gestapo headquarters. The location was familiar to the Soviets, since the German secret police had merely taken over the old NKVD headquarters – a building that in turn had previously housed the Polish secret police and before that the Austro-Hungarian intelligence agency (today, the same building is used by the Ukrainian police).
The task facing Yablonsky and his comrades was straightforward, but considered vital. They had to capture the Gestapo headquarters before the Germans left, and steal intelligenceinformation that their superiors hoped would reveal just who had been collaborating with the Nazis.
They arrived just as the Germans were packing their files into trucks. The Soviet force scaled the wall surrounding the Gestapo headquarters, shot the German guards and prevented the trucks from leaving. Hurrying into the building, they made straight for the cellars, where they knew the intelligence files were stored. While the remaining Germans, panic-stricken, sought to escape, the NKVD swiftly made the building secure and started examining the files they had found. They then immediately sought out anyone whom the German documents had named as an informer. Yablonsky also relied on pro-Soviet informers to tell him who had been collaborating with the Germans or was simply ‘anti-Soviet’: ‘We got to know about the dangerous people from these other people [informers]. They told us that somebody hated Soviet power and was a threat to us and then we would arrest him… they could be saying bad things about us or just thinking we were bad’. Once arrested for the crime of ‘saying something bad’ about the Soviet occupation, Yablonsky recalls, the ‘normal’ sentence was ‘about fifteen years of forced labour’.
‘Now I think it was cruel’, he says. ‘But at that time, when I was young, twenty-two or twenty-three years old, I didn't…. Now I understand that it's cruel because I'm older. I don't think it was a very democratic time. Now you can say anything, but at that time you couldn't. At that time most things were censored and nobody could say anything bad about the Soviet Union. So we all thought it was normal at the time’.
Despite feeling now
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