The Polish government crosses into Romania

On the night of 17–18 September 1939 the highest authorities of the Polish Republic left the country. The bridge over the Czeremosz between Kuty and Vijnița on the Romanian side was crossed by President Ignacy Mościcki, Prime Minister Felicjan Sławoj Składkowski with his ministers, the foreign minister Józef Beck, and, shortly after midnight, the Commander-in-Chief, Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły. They intended to travel through allied Romania to France and carry on the war from there. Under pressure from Germany, Romania decided as early as 18 September to intern them. The President, unable to exercise his office, resigned it on 30 September in favour of Władysław Raczkiewicz, who was in Paris. Thus was born the Polish government in exile.

The Romanian bridgehead

After the defeats of the first week of the war the state authorities left Warsaw one after another. The government left the capital on 5–7 September, and on the night of 6–7 September the Commander-in-Chief moved his headquarters to Brest. President Mościcki, whom the war had caught at Spała, was at Ołyka in Volhynia by 8 September, and from about 14 September at a manor house at Załucze on the Czeremosz, near Śniatyn. The government had its seat at Kosów, the Commander-in-Chief was at Kołomyja from 15 September, and the diplomatic corps, which had accompanied the authorities from Warsaw, was at Kuty.

The choice of this corner of former Eastern Galicia was no accident. By 15 September, with Warsaw already encircled, Rydz-Śmigły intended to base the remnants of his army on the so-called Romanian bridgehead, an area along the Dniester and the Stryj on the borders with Romania and Hungary. Arms deliveries from France and Britain were to arrive through Romanian ports, above all Constanța, and over the Romanian railways. The plan assumed the benevolent neutrality of Romania, which had been bound to Poland by an alliance since 1921. The alliance, however, was directed solely eastwards: it obliged each party to help the other in the event of an attack on its eastern borders, not in a war with Germany. Bucharest, which had declared its neutrality on 6 September, had been under heavy pressure from Berlin from the first days of the war. On 14 September the Romanian government, under German pressure, decided that if the Polish authorities crossed onto its territory they would be interned.

17 September

At dawn on 17 September the Red Army crossed the eastern border. The plan to defend the bridgehead lost its point: Soviet armoured units were driving south towards Tarnopol and the Romanian border, and within a day they could cut the authorities off from the only route to the west. Poland was still fighting, but the campaign was lost. The government did not call on Romania to honour its alliance obligations, although the Soviet attack formally created a casus foederis. It knew that Romania would not risk war with the Soviet Union and Germany at once, and it was counting on something else: free passage to France.

That day the President, the Commander-in-Chief, the Prime Minister and Beck conferred at Kuty. They decided to cross the border. Mościcki issued a proclamation in which he declared that, “albeit with a heavy heart”, he had decided “to transfer the seat of the President of the Republic and of the supreme authorities of the state to the territory of one of our allies”. Rydz-Śmigły issued a general directive to the army ordering a withdrawal to Romania and Hungary and fighting the Soviets only if attacked or if they tried to disarm Polish units. Beck was arranging the terms of transit through the ambassador in Bucharest, Roger Raczyński (PL). From the Polish point of view the authorities were merely to pass through an ally’s territory, exercising a right of transit that Romania, it was believed, had guaranteed.

The bridge at Kuty

In the evening limousines drove onto the wooden bridge at Kuty (PL), a road and rail crossing more than three hundred metres long over the border river. The President crossed the border at about 9.45 p.m. Behind him came the Prime Minister and ministers, Beck, the Marshal (Speaker) of the Sejm, Wacław Makowski (PL), and the Marshal of the Senate, Bogusław Miedziński (PL), ministry officials, several provincial governors and generals. Thousands of refugees had been waiting at Kuty for several days, and foreign diplomats had already crossed the same bridge earlier.

Rydz-Śmigły hesitated for a long time. According to accounts, he considered staying in the country and joining the units still fighting, but in the end he yielded to the urging of those around him. He crossed the bridge shortly after midnight, on 18 September. According to eyewitnesses, the governor of the Wilno province, Colonel Ludwik Bociański, tried to stop him and, having failed, shot himself, wounding himself in the chest. The scene became a symbol of the mood of that night. For many soldiers who at that moment were still fighting near Lwów (Lviv), at Tomaszów Lubelski or in Warsaw, their commander’s departure was a shock that no later explanation could erase.

Kuty was not the only crossing. Over the bridges on the Dniester at Zaleszczyki, through Śniatyn and at other border crossings, army units, airmen with their aircraft, officials and thousands of refugees passed into Romania over the following days. The gold reserves of the Bank of Poland were taken out of the country through Śniatyn and later shipped from Constanța to the West. According to Polish estimates, by the end of September some 50,000 soldiers had made their way to Romania, including several thousand officers, as well as many civilians.

Internment

Under the Fifth Hague Convention of 1907 on the rights and duties of neutral powers, Romania was obliged to intern soldiers of belligerent armies who entered its territory. Whether this also applied to a head of state and a government in transit was disputed. Bucharest, where King Carol II reigned and Armand Călinescu was prime minister, found itself between the hammer and the anvil. Germany was making threats, while the Soviet Union, which was at that moment occupying Poland’s eastern borderlands, had never recognised Bessarabia as part of Romania. According to Polish accounts, the Romanians were prepared to let the Polish leaders through only as private persons who would renounce all political activity and the exercise of their functions. The President and the government refused, since this would have amounted to the de facto capitulation of the state.

Around midday on 18 September Beck received the Romanian government’s decision: the Polish authorities would be interned and separated. The President was taken to Bicaz in the Eastern Carpathians, where he lived in a royal hunting lodge. Members of the government were placed in the spa town of Slănic in Wallachia, and the Commander-in-Chief at Craiova. All were under police supervision, and contact with one another and with the outside world was difficult. Polish protests, invoking the alliance and the promise of transit, had no effect. Some historians point out that France, too, did not press hard for the release of a team held responsible for the defeat, preferring a new government to be formed in the West.

The soldiers were sent to internment camps, but here the Romanian authorities behaved far more leniently. The guards often turned a blind eye to escapes, and Polish diplomatic missions organised the transfer of men to France via Yugoslavia, Italy and the Black Sea ports. In this way several tens of thousands of soldiers got out of Romania and Hungary over the following months and joined the Polish army being rebuilt in France.

A change of president

The interned President could not exercise his office. The April Constitution of 1935, however, provided that in time of war the President should designate a successor in case the office fell vacant before the conclusion of peace (Article 24). On 1 September Mościcki had designated Rydz-Śmigły, but the interned marshal was now out of the question. The President therefore sent, in a sealed envelope via the ambassador in Paris, Juliusz Łukasiewicz, the nomination of the ambassador in Rome, General Bolesław Wieniawa-Długoszowski. When the nomination was made public on 25 September, it was opposed by the French government of Prime Minister Édouard Daladier, followed by the British, and by the opposition to the Sanation regime gathered in Paris. Wieniawa, a close associate of Piłsudski, was regarded as a symbol of the team blamed for the defeat. In a letter dated 27 September he renounced the succession.

Mościcki then named Władysław Raczkiewicz, a former Marshal of the Senate and governor of the Pomeranian province, who had also crossed the border at Kuty and reached Paris on 27 September. On the evening of 29 September the President, at Bicaz, resigned his office in writing, and on 30 September Raczkiewicz was sworn in in Paris as President of the Republic. That same day Składkowski’s government resigned, and the new President entrusted the task of forming a government to General Władysław Sikorski, an opponent of the Sanation who had also made his way to France through Romania. This procedure preserved the constitutional continuity of the Polish state, even though its territory had been seized by two occupiers.

Place in the history of the war

The crossing into Romania ended the existence of the Second Polish Republic as a state exercising authority over its own territory, but it did not end the existence of the state. Germany and the Soviet Union proclaimed that Poland had ceased to exist and partitioned its lands on 28 September. Yet the government recognised by the Allies – in Paris, and from June 1940 in London – together with the army being rebuilt in the West and the underground state at home, ensured that Poland remained a party to the war until its end. On 7 November 1939 Sikorski replaced Rydz-Śmigły as Commander-in-Chief.

For the interned leaders of the Sanation, September meant the end of their careers. The new authorities blamed them for the defeat and did not want them in the West. In December 1939 Mościcki left for Switzerland, where he died in 1946. Beck, suffering from tuberculosis, died in Romanian internment in 1944. Rydz-Śmigły escaped to Hungary in December 1940, made his way to occupied Warsaw in the autumn of 1941 and died there a few weeks later. The image of a column of limousines crossing the bridge at Kuty by night while the army was still fighting long remained in Polish memory a symbol of the pre-war ruling camp’s responsibility for the catastrophe of 1939. Historians point out, however, that staying in the country would have meant German or Soviet captivity and could have deprived Poland of a legitimate government recognised by its allies.