Wasilewska in Lwów, then Moscow

Wanda Wasilewska, 34, was one of Poland's most committed intellectuals of the twentieth century. Daughter of Leon Wasilewski, foreign minister from 1918 to 1919 and a personal friend of Piłsudski, she had nonetheless broken with her father's legacy to join the Polish communist movement in the 1930s. A recognised writer — she had produced Ojczyzna ("The Fatherland") in 1935 and Ziemia w jarzmie ("The Earth Under the Yoke") in 1938 — she was one of the major voices of the country's revolutionary left. A member of the PPS-Lewica, the left wing of the Polish Socialist Party, she had then become a sympathiser, without joining, of the Polish Communist Party that Stalin had dissolved in 1938.

When the Soviet invasion came on 17 September 1939 she was in Lwów. Her fame and her communist past at once made her, in the eyes of the NKVD, a political asset of the first order: a recognised Polish intellectual and the daughter of a former minister.

In October 1939 she was invited to Moscow, where Vyacheslav Molotov received her in person. In March 1940 she was elected a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR as the representative of the Belorussian SSR (Western Belorussia) and became one of the key interfaces between the Poles in the USSR and the Soviet government.

Wasilewska had to choose the political strategy for those first months under occupation.