The piles of shoes, the mounds of hair ... I saw them. The shoes of neighbours, the hair of mothers

WW2 was more than Dunkirk and El Alamein - Retired diplomat Nigel Thorpe, in a Guest Post, writes on history, accurate, peoples' history, why it matters - & sloppy journalists.

Diplomat in a Trabant: Nigel Thorpe, when ambassador in Budapest, enjoys the comforts of a genuine German Democratic Republic-built Peoples' Car. (The car behind, judging by the plate, looks suspiciously like the British embassy's Jaguar.)

We are about to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of the War in Europe, on 8 May, and I am increasingly irritated by BBC journalists who insist on referring to this as the end of the Second World War.

This is inaccurate: sadly the War had another three months to run before the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki forced the Japanese surrender and saved the Allies from a second major landing on hostile territory, and one which would have cost countless American lives. 

It is of course the D Day landings, as well as Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, El Alamein and other great battles like Arnhem which most people in Britain will recall, if they know anything of it at all.

Most of those who fought in the War have left us now. Instead of ensuring that their great achievements are known to every school child, we teach history so poorly now that our younger generation, to whom the War is just that, history, know very little about it. 

But the War was of course much more than these major events. Born in 1945, I grew up with the experience of my parents and their friends, who lived in the only European combatant nation not occupied at some stage by the Germans, or fought over by vast land armies.

But having spent much of my professional life dealing with Central Europe, I am deeply struck by the horrific experience of those countries and peoples not so fortunate. 

My education began in Poland in 1970, just 25 years after the war, but not realising that I was in the country most affected by its predations. For all Poles, and especially Polish Jews, the War was torrid.

When the Germans captured Warsaw in 1939 their first actions included arresting the leaders of Warsaw society. These people were taken to Powsin Forest just outside Warsaw, and shot.

Men and women, mothers, fathers, teachers, judges, engineers - some of the best of the Polish nation, simply murdered, en masse.

Job done. Third-Reich efficiency.

But it wasn’t just the Germans behaving brutally. Under the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact (the Soviet- German non-aggression treaty of August 1939*), the Soviet Union and Germany split Poland between them.

When the Red Army captured its eastern share of Poland they took prisoner large numbers of Polish soldiers, including 15,000 officers. The latter were held for a while in camps and then, on Stalin’s order, all taken to prepared pits, their hands tied behind them and shot in the back of the head.

Job done. Soviet efficiency.

These latter massacres, known as the Katyn massacres from the site of the main killing location, were of course denied by the Soviet Union and, shamefully, never attributed to the Russians by successive British governments, in spite of overwhelming evidence as to their perpetrators.

But even the appalling general suffering of ethnic Poles could not compete with that inflicted on the Jews. The 1944 Warsaw Uprising was preceded by the 1943 uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, where hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews were confined in appalling conditions.

This uprising was crushed and the survivors mostly gassed. The killing in the camps was relentless. 

I often chatted to my landlord in Warsaw, who lived in an annex to the house we rented. He was about 20 years older than me, and had grown up in Warsaw during the War. He told me how the Germans had behaved, in what was effectively a lawless regime.

In a frightening sentence he said that if a man left his home in those days, he could never be sure he would return safely: the Germans could easily detain him, shoot him, deport him to a camp: you never knew.

When in Hungary some years later, a Minister in the first Orbán government, who had been a child when the Red Army entered Budapest in 1945, told me how he and his family (parents and several children) were sheltering from the street fighting in the cellar of their house. Suddenly a Soviet soldier enters. He looks around and sees the father there. He motions to him to leave the house and join the lines of men being rounded up to go to labour camps or worse.

At that moment a Soviet officer enters. He sees the children and tells the father to stay. Such a chance of life or death, at a whim. 

It was like this throughout the War. As the Red Army advanced into Budapest the Arrow Cross fanatically pursued its hatred of the Jews, rounded Jewish people up and marched them to the banks of the Danube, where firing squads would shoot them so that their bodies fell into the river, to be washed away. 

A Hungarian woman, Jewish, told us how she, as a baby in her mother’s arms, was taken there to be killed. Only when the soldiers saw her with her mother did they say that even this was too much, and they turned the pair away. Again, a whim that saved their lives. 

Nigel Thorpe lays a wreath at the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery, just outside Budapest, in 2002. As he notes: "A lot of the graves are of RAF crew shot down while flying to supply the insurgents in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, including a lot of Polish crew."

Returning to Poland, by this time, the Warsaw Uprising by the Polish resistance (August 1944) had been crushed by the Germans, while the Red Army waited on the east banks of the Wisła river, deliberately allowing the destruction of these pro-Western Polish forces.

My good friend Zofia Kuratowska was a teenager at the time. She worked as a runner for the Uprising’s Information Bulletin, taking its daily editions between the groups of insurgents, separated by German units and always risking her life.

At the end she and her mother were rounded up and put in a cattle truck on a train heading south out of Warsaw. In the chaos of the German retreat, they were able to escape and return to the ruined city. 

Zofia’s husband was one of few surviving Polish Jews. I don’t recall any Poles talking to me about the Holocaust, nor indeed any Hungarians.

Of course, both peoples had their own troubles during and after the war to deal with, but even so it is a symptom of the trouble they have addressing the way that Jews were treated by the non-Jewish communities. Both countries had large Jewish populations- about 3 million in Poland and 500,000 in Hungary.

Both groups suffered terribly in the War. Poland was the home of all the main death camps – Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec and Majdanek.

It was to Auschwitz that Adolf Eichmann sent Hungary’s Jews to die. I twice visited Majdanek, the only other camp after Auschwitz still extant, as it was when liberated. It has all the things we read about: the piles of shoes, the mounds of hair and so on ...

It is, I think, memories like these which we should never allow to slip away. We all want there never to be another Second World War in Europe. And as the missiles fall on Kyiv, let us do everything to ensure that it cannot happen. 

Nigel Thorpe, May, 2025

• The Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact gave Hitler the freedom to not only invade Poland in September '39, but – knowing Stalin was not going to attack from the east - also The Netherlands, Belgium and France in May 1940 – ed.

Nigel Thorpe diplomatic career included stints as in Warsaw (1970-72 and 1985-88), as Ambassador in Hungary (1998 - 2003) and Head of the FCO’s Central European Department (1992-96). Retired, he now lives in London, and takes time out to talk about living history in schools in the UK.

He has also contributed to this blog previously – see for example:

https://www.perspectives-budapest.com/post/meeting-lech-wa%C5%82%C4%99sa-a-british-diplomat-s-real-time-polish-adventure

https://www.perspectives-budapest.com/post/thoughts-of-the-handbag-britain-s-margaret-thatcher-asks-to-visit-communist-poland

Nigel's memoir, An Accidental Diplomat, is available on Amazon at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Accidental-Diplomat-Nigel-Thorpe/dp/1915023017/ref=sr_1_4?crid=383U23Q8C7MKU&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.YzS5GPshIlORxXd4tr3VnJztI-0wYgEyTLcRF8Y_FZSN7m5KPkOAQM7FQ4mmktPJsgtr4lk5sTR-Meso3l7cD7JRYu_EZ4DSHyiYCJEpHI8LtpzgKJ6t8TPIvIigMCmo.tvg7SF8hRsfeVIRltheQpk4xSI1M0dxuv15u7-Wjsw8&dib_tag=se&keywords=An+Accidental+Diplomat&qid=1746183007&sprefix=an+accidental+diplomat%2Caps%2C112&sr=8-4