It was then that mother herself became very ill, and my brother and I had to struggle very hard to get her to the nearest hospital. It is a miracle that we survived, with thousands dead.[12]. Most of the time we survived on one slice of black bread a day. ), This page was last edited on 2 January 2023, at 22:55. Bibliography of Poland during World War II, International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Soviet_repressions_of_Polish_citizens_(19391946)&oldid=1131176828, Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland 19391941, Articles with Polish-language sources (pl), Wikipedia extended-confirmed-protected pages, Articles with unsourced statements from May 2019, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, 500,000 Polish nationals imprisoned before June 1941 (90% male), 22,000 Polish military personnel and officials killed in the, 1,700,000 Poles deported to Siberia in 1939-1941, 100,000 women raped during the Soviet counter-offensive (est. The Red Army had sown confusion among the locals by claiming that they were arriving to save Poland from the Nazis. The train would, from time to time, also stop at stations for coke provisions, where hot water (kipiatok) could be obtained, together with some provisions. On March 19, 1942, General Wadysaw Anders ordered the evacuation of Polish soldiers and civilians who lived next to army camps. The NKVD (Russian Secret Police) had the overall command of these gulags, run by a mostly brutal local administator. Political Migrations on Polish Territories (19391950). The deportation of Poles by the Russians to slave labour camps in the Soviet Union during Start by marking The Mass Deportation of Poles to Siberia: A Historical Narrative Based on the Written Testimony of the Polish Siberian Survivors as Want to Read: Want to Read saving Want to Read Survivor accounts: Polish deportations to Russia. The Polish soldiers, after evacuating from Russia to Persia (now Iran) and undergoing health rehabilitation following their ordeal in the Russian camps, entered the war in the West fighting alongisde the Allies on all fronts land, Many Poles left Iran for India, thanks to the efforts of Polish consul in Bombay, Eugeniusz Banasinski. During those three weeks of meandering through Russia, it was well nigh impossible to have a proper wash. The Soviet Union took over 52.1% of the territory of Poland (circa 200,000km) with over 13,700,000 citizens at the end of the Polish Defensive War. Around 55% of the deportees to Siberia and Soviet Central Asia were Polish women. In 1940 and the first half of 1941, the Soviets deported a total of more than 1,200,000 Poles in four waves of mass deportations from the Soviet-occupied Polish territories. [64] Joanna Ostrowska and Marcin Zaremba of the Polish Academy of Sciences estimate that rapes of Polish women reached a mass scale following the Winter Offensive of 1945. They were so bad that we were continually covered in lice and bedbugs. Houses made of clay, in the heart of Africa. My brother Gustaf joined newly forming cadets in Teheran, and was transferred to Palestine and then Egypt. high up through Elburz Mountains, at break-neck speed (drivers often being drunk) through hairpin bends to Teheran. If we examine the war in terms of the Holocaust, why should Stalin's strategic actions be exempt from moral interrogation?" The Soviet Union never officially declared war on Poland and ceased to recognise the Polish state at the start of the invasion. year by Poles (wherever they are). And how did Auschwitz, previously the Polish town Oswiecim, come to bear that infamous name? [28] The wave of arrests and mock convictions contributed to the forced resettlement of large categories of people ("kulaks", Polish civil servants, forest workers, university professors, "osadniks") to the Gulag labour camps and exile settlements in remote areas of the Soviet Union. Once you have entered your email in this box and press the "Click to subscribe" black button, you will receive a confirmation email in your mailbox to activate your subscription. There was one circular cast iron stove in the middle, which did not supply anywhere near the required degree of warmth. orphanages, separating boys from girls. About one third of the civilians were children. We were not first the Poles in Africa. [4] Among those who remained in the Soviet Union, about 150,000 Poles perished before the end of the war. It had a clubroom, a hospital, and a gym. This story has been placed in the following categories. [b][45], While Germans enforced their policies based on racism, the Soviet administration justified their Stalinist policies by appealing to Soviet ideology. Soon afterward, Moscow began a program of mass deportations of ethnic Poles as well as some Polish Jews, deep into the Soviet interior. While drilling in Maria Gabiniewicz spent six years in Africa, at a camp in Bwana Mkubwa, Northern Rhodesia: "To us, it all looked like a scene from Henryk Sienkiewicz's book In Desert and Wilderness. There were already 22 camps, with 18,000 people who like us had gone through different places of exile in the USSR, scattered across British Africafrom Kenya to Cape Colony.[12]. From the meagre money that my family were paid, we. A very appropriate way of qualifying the crime committed by Stalin against those hundreds of thousands of Jews, sending them to remote places and subjecting us to hardships that led many to death. This book is a collection of individual stories written by survivors of the Polish genocide during the Second World War. The Soviet forces murdered almost all captured officers, and sent numerous ordinary soldiers to the Soviet Gulag. 1939 wrzesie 17, Moskwa Nota rzdu sowieckiego nie przyjta przez ambasadora Wacawa Grzybowskiego, "Decision to commence investigation into Katyn Massacre", "The Katyn Controversy: Stalin's Killing Field, "ledztwo w sprawie zabjstwa w dniu 22 wrzenia 1939 r. w okolicach miejscowoci Sopokinie generaa brygady Wojska Polskiego Jzefa Olszyny-Wilczyskiego i jego adiutanta kapitana Mieczysawa Strzemskiego przez onierzy b. Zwizku Radzieckiego. Because we were travelling in animal trucks, there were hardly any sanitary provisions. Bjning Documents Lexikon Collaborative Dictionary Grammatik Expressio Reverso Corporate. After the joint German-Soviet invasion of Poland, it had been assigned to Germany in the treaty on borders and friendship in September 1939. The fourth and final wave occurred in June 1941, deporting 300,000. -2- Maria Gabiniewicz, one of the refugees, later wrote: "We managed to leave the Soviet Union in the last transport. Malnutrition was evident everywhere. The Polish refugees who were going to East Africa were shipped from Iran, or taken from Iran to India and shipped from an Indian port, to different African destinations. The Polish consulates in the USSR issued in-land temporary passports for those being evacuated: These had to be presented at the border crossings in order to proceed. The main street of the camp was named after General Tadeusz Br-Komorowski. Once It was a hellhungry, sick people, children in rail cars, filled with louse. She hoped we would return to Poland some day. I cannot remember how long it took us to reach port Pahlavi in Persia (now Iran). The next transfer took place in 195559, after Stalin's death. News spread like wildfire through the village, and almost everybody gathered outside our house. The Mass Deportation of Poles to Siberia, 1863-1880 pp.151-175 Andrew A. Gentes Four thousand Poles were sentenced to the penal labor category of Siberian exile. There is some controversy as to whether the Soviet Union's policies were harsher than those of Nazi Germany until that time. The resettlement from Abercorn was called Operation Polejump. [12] By this new and final arrangement often described as a fourth partition of Poland,[2] the Soviet Union secured the lands east of the rivers Pisa, Narew, Bug and San. Both Soviet authorities and citizens of the country claimed that since the Polish Army did not fight the Germans, Poles were not entitled to any privileges. It was here that I went down with severe dysentery and it was here that dead bodies were found in water wells. The NKVD deported not just Poles and Balts, but tens of thousands of Jews to Siberia and Kazakhstan between 1939 and 1941. We were very poor, there were no jobs, kids had their classes in the open, there were no books." La intencin es mostrar anuncios que sean relevantes y atractivos para el usuario individual y, por tanto, ms valiosos para los editores y los anunciantes de terceros. Follow me Polish at Heart, 2020. Her request was granted. Living in Africa was very difficult for the Poles who were unfamiliar with local customs and languages and were not used to tropical weather. In October 1942, the Director of War Evacuees and Camps of Northern Rhodesia, Gore Browne, expected around 500 Polish refugees to arrive from the Middle East. [60] The events of the late 1940s amounted to a full-scale civil war according to some historians, especially in the eastern and central parts of the country (see: the Cursed soldiers). Este sitio utiliza diferentes tipos de cookies. Between 1939 and 1941, Stalin was Nazi collaborator number one. We were transported on board a warship, through Persian Gulf. Many of them committed treason against the Polish state by assisting in round-ups and executions of Polish officials. As a result of the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland (as agreed by the Nazis and Soviets in their As the new border between the postwar Poland and the Soviet Union along the Curzon Line (requested by Stalin at Yalta) has been ratified, the ensuing population exchange affected about 1.1 million Poles (including Polish Jews) as well as close to half a million ethnic Ukrainians. [citation needed] The Soviets lobbied the Western Allies to recognize the pro-Soviet Polish puppet government of Wanda Wasilewska in Moscow. Hope came in July, 1941. [22] The Soviets also executed all the Polish officers they captured after the Battle of Szack, on 28 September. In recognition of my father volunteering, as. As luck would have it, he was at home when the Russian soldiers burst in, which was just as well, because they would have arrested the rest of us anyway, and we would not have had him with us to take care of us. Somehow, at some point, my brother Gustaf found me and brought me a piece of bread (his ration for the day I later learned). However, this was fraught with danger of being left behind. The second wave of deportations by the Soviet occupational forces across the Kresy macroregion, affected 300,000 to 330,000 Poles, sent primarily to Kazakhstan. [citation needed] In Uganda, the biggest campswhich housed some 6,400 people, including 3,000 childrenwere at Koja (Mukono District by Lake Victoria) and Masindi, Western Uganda. How did Poles deported to Russia in World War 2 escape, to fight on? Luckily, my mother managed to pack enough cooked food, which, with careful rationing, just about lasted long enough till we reached our destination. One day I saw my fathers shirt lying on the floor actually move with crawling lice. During the unrest in 1905 he was deported to Siberia by the Tsarist authorities. According to one of the evacuees, Wanda Ellis: The hunger was terrible, we did not get a loaf of bread a day, as we had in Siberia. My lungs were also affected, a condition which has dogged me all my life. To say that hygienic conditions of our living quarters were less than primitive is to make a gross overstatement. Thousands of Poles took advantage of this, although not all managed to get out, because news did not reach them in time, before Stalin stoped it. The last camp that was built in Northern Rhodesia at Abercorn (today's Mbala, Zambia). Las cookies son pequeos archivos de texto que los sitios web pueden utilizar para hacer que la experiencia del usuario sea ms eficiente. In addition to sharing information to combat the Polish resistance, the NKVD handed over to the Gestapo Jews who had taken refuge in the USSR. Following repeatedly impatient loud knocks and shouts to open up, my father opened the front door when a group of Russian solders, with bayonets fixed to their rifles, burst in, ordered arms up, rounded us up and stood us against a wall with rifles pointing at us and searched us for weapons. I was just a skeleton, simply skin and bones, and I lost touch with my family for quite a while. . This page has been archived and is no longer updated. one chamber, the ceiling collapsed on him. In an official letter from the British Authorities it was said: "It has been agreed that the welfare work in the Polish settlements must continue and the minimum staff stays to ensure this must be retained." While the overall experiences of the survivors have commonalities, certain details of their stories are uniquely different. Polish evacuees had to travel by train to Krasnovodsk, where they took a ship across the Caspian Sea to Iran. NKVD agents issued Soviet passports to Poles in February-May 1943. Ornamental Plants - Biennials / Perennials, 303 Squadron: The Legendary Battle of Britain Fighter Squadron - Softcover, Code Name: Zegota Rescuing Jews in Occupied Poland, 1942-1945: The Most Dangerous Conspiracy in Wartime Europe, The Color of Courage: A Boy at War: The World War II Diary of Julian Kulski, No Greater Ally - The Untold Story Of Poland's Forces In World War II, Inside A Gestapo Prison - Letters of Krystyna Wituska 1942-1944, A Homeland Denied: In the Footsteps of a Polish POW. In the second stage of evacuation from the interior, more than 43,000 military personnel and about 25,000 civilians left with General Wadysaw Anders across the Caspian Sea to Iran. Tribute was paid in the eastern Polish city of Lublin on Sunday to Poles expelled from the former eastern borderlands and deported to Siberia by the Soviet authorities. Reproduction of the contents of this blog is prohibited without the author's consent. Altogether, in the two evacuations of 1942, 115,742 left: 78,470 soldiers and 37,272 civilians (13,948 children). Among some 14,471 victims were top Polish Army officers, including political leaders, government officials, and intellectuals. This was in August 1920, and ever since terrified of heights, so it was a nightmare journey for me. Legacy Google Analytics short-term technical cookie used along with __utmb to determine new users sessions. The journey was an inhuman nightmare. I do not remember the names of towns we went through, but at some point we crossed southern Ural mountains into the southern Asian Russia, the beginning of Syberia. [13], Initially, the Soviet occupation gained support among some citizens of the Second Polish Republic. As a result, I fell further and further behind our group walking to the nearest tent shelter, and I dont know what would have happened to me if my mother had not found me. On top of not being able to see in the dusk, I suffered from eye infection, which caused swelling of my eyelids and heavy yellow discharge. The Mass Deportation of Poles to Siberia-This book is a historical narrative based on the written testimony of the Polish Siberian survivors. That is where I went to Polish school for the first time in my life. [17][18] In one notorious atrocity ordered by Stalin, the Soviet secret police systematically shot and killed 22,000 Poles in a remote area during the Katyn massacre. The train driver never gave notice of moving off, he simply started off, when people frantically climbed on board snatching their pots at the same time. For nearly two years following the invasion, the two occupiers continued to discuss bilateral plans for dealing with the Polish resistance during Gestapo-NKVD Conferences until Germany's Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, in June 1941.[8]. "In the 1939-1941 period alone, Soviet-inflicted suffering on all citizens in Poland exceeded that of Nazi-inflicted suffering on all citizens. Note that you need to include Polish characters when searching i.e. Some months later we the orphans and civilians were moved to Uzbekistan to a place called Guzar. [56] Pre-war Poland was portrayed as a capitalist state based on exploitation of the working people and ethnic minorities. The victims of that crime must be rescued from oblivion. [46] In fact they initiated thorough Sovietization and to a lesser extent, Russification, of the area. Las cookies de preferencias permiten a una web recordar informacin que cambia la forma en que se comporta o se ve la web, como tu idioma preferido o la regin en la que te encuentras. The first major operation took place on February 10, 1940, with more than 220,000 people sent primarily to far north and east Russia, including Siberia and Khabarovsk Krai. 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