On the date of 10th February, 1940, some 218,000 people were forcefully deported from Eastern Poland, and with further deportations during the year, this figure rose to almost 2,000,000. REPORT BY A SURVIVOR, MRS. HELENA KNPACZYK [from the archive of The Polish Army Veterans Association (interviewer If we examine the war in terms of the Holocaust, why should Stalin's strategic actions be exempt from moral interrogation?" [11] On December 21, 1939, the Polish currency was withdrawn from circulation without any exchange to the newly introduced rouble; this meant that the entire population of the area lost all of their life savings overnight. The British did not have the intention of keeping the Polish refugees in East Africa when it was decided to take them there. Nowoisiad-Ostrowska depicted quite a sociable image with singing songs in the evening, listening together to the radio in order to be informed about the war in Europe, and doing craftwork with other women in the evenings.[14]. It has been seventy years since as many as 2 million Poles were deported against their will to some of the most inhospitable regions in the world: Siberia, Kazakhstan, and parts of Soviet Asia. Lww University and many other schools were reopened soon, but they were to operate as Soviet institutions rather than continue their former legacy. At this time, then, we were scattered over three continents and it took a long time, through the Red Cross, before we made contact with each other. February 9, 2020 April 13, 2021. orphanages, separating boys from girls. I will never forget the journey on trucks through the mountains from Ashgabat to Tehran. At times I was forced to chew on some bark of a tree in order to put something in my stomach. I do not recall why we did not get any help from anybody. [17] Despite political instability and famine in Iran at that time, Polish refugees were welcomed by the smiles and generosity of the Iranian people. 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. My brother Alfons also became a soldier in the 2nd Corps and fought in the North African campaign, and then the Italian campaign, taking part in the assault on Monte Cassino. The views expressed are theirs and unless specifically stated are not 9539 Joseph Campau After the joint German-Soviet invasion of Poland, it had been assigned to Germany in the treaty on borders and friendship in September 1939. My eyes condition made things so much worse for me and it was thus that I awoke next morning to find a body on top of me. But we ought not to romanticise. Unauthorised Between 1944 and 1946, thousands of Polish independence fighters actively opposed the new communist regime, attacking country offices of NKVD, SMERSH and the Polish communist secret service (UB). Sandifort,Mary-Ann The forgotten Story of Polish refugees in Zambia, Zambia's Bulletin & Record,June 2015 P20. There were only four toilet facilities on board, so with people and children suffering from dysentery and other stomach disorders, it simply was impossible for everybody to avail themselves of toilet facilities. --4- Several camps were opened in and around Bombay, with the biggest one located at Kolhapur Valivade, where 5,000 stayed. Most of them were Polish Catholics and there were also some Jews. The Nazis considered several resettlement proposals, including sending all Jews to Madagascar, before starting their extermination policy. ", Deportation: a crime against humanity and a war crime. Mothers unit was also moved to this part, she found me, and it was she who, by some miracle, cured me of dysentery. In total, the Soviets killed tens of thousands of Polish prisoners of war. , , , , , , , . The adults were uneasy and afraid of the unknown, but us, the children, were happy for an adventure. However, my country was still being threatened and attacked by Russia, and, faced with this renewed danger, the Head of Polish Armed Forces, Marshal Josef Pilsudski, appealed for volunteers to fight against this new aggression.My father, then 16 years old, volunteered. Reproduction of the contents of this blog is prohibited without the author's consent. Polish evacuees had to travel by train to Krasnovodsk, where they took a ship across the Caspian Sea to Iran. Feature photo: German and Soviet soldiers fraternizing in Brest, where their forces met during the joint invasion of Poland (colorized photo by Mirek Szponar). He was rescued by his co-workers who dug him out with their bare hands. They were going from Kigoma to Dar es Salaam and from there by ship to the United Kingdom, where their next of kinoften husbands and sons who had been fighting in the warwere getting courses and training for civilian jobs. Las cookies son pequeos archivos de texto que los sitios web pueden utilizar para hacer que la experiencia del usuario sea ms eficiente. [20][21] On 24 September, 1939, the Soviets killed 42 staff and patients of a Polish military hospital in the village of Grabowiec, near Zamo. those of the BBC. Don't miss the news and content that interest you. In addition to that, Article 6 of the Statute considers a crime of genocide, among others, the "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part." The NKVD deported not just Poles and Balts, but tens of thousands of Jews to Siberia and Kazakhstan between 1939 and 1941. Political Migrations on Polish Territories (19391950). The fourth and final wave occurred in June 1941, deporting 300,000. [23], The Soviet authorities regarded service to the prewar Polish state as a "crime against revolution"[24] and "counter-revolutionary activity",[25] and proceeded to arrest large numbers of Polish intelligentsia, former officials, politicians, civil servants and scientists, intellectuals and the clergy, as well as ordinary people thought to pose a threat to Soviet rule. [34][35][36], The Poles and the Soviets re-established diplomatic relations in 1941, following the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement; but the Soviets broke them off again in 1943 after the Polish government demanded an independent examination of the recently discovered Katyn burial pits. My brother Alfons, I later learned, went down with typhus, and my mother, who was then near his unit, nursed him to health. Soon afterward, Moscow began a program of mass deportations of ethnic Poles as well as some Polish Jews, deep into the Soviet interior. 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 first Poles were deported to Siberia already in the 17th century - they were prisoners in many wars thst the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth conducted with Moscovy, and later the The chairs of Marxism-Leninism, and Dialectical and Historical Materialism, aimed at strengthening Soviet ideology, were opened as well. Entdecke Eine polnische Frauenerfahrung im Zweiten Weltkrieg - 9781350178090 in groer Auswahl Vergleichen Angebote und Preise Online kaufen bei eBay Kostenlose Lieferung fr viele Artikel! This is the synopsis of the documentary: "Well-known fact: Of Polands 3.3 million Jews, only 300,000 survived the Holocaust. In 1941 Joseph Stalin ordered all inhabitants with a German father to be deported, mostly to Siberia or Kazakhstan. 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, [29] Altogether the Soviets sent roughly a million people from Poland to Siberia. Some 4,254 dead bodies were uncovered in mass graves in Katyn Forest by the Nazis in 1943, who invited an international group of neutral representatives and doctors to examine the corpses and confirm the Soviet guilt. 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. Members of the NKVD, Stalin's political police, who collaborated with the German Gestapo between the invasion of Poland in September 1939 and the German invasion of Russia on June 22, 1941. Each camp had its own school, clubroom, and theatre. In recognition of my father volunteering, as. Having arrived at the railway station, we were brutally bundled into waiting cattle trucks, fitted out with wooden shelves/bunks in order to pack in as many people as possible, some 50 70 people in one truck. Wanda Nowoisiad-Ostrowska, quoted by historian Tadeusz Piotrowski (The Polish Deportees of World War II), remembered that Abercorn camp was divided into six sections of single-room houses, a washing area, a laundry, a church, and four school buildings with seven classes. Altogether, 257,660 citizens of the Second Polish Republic (190,942 adults and 66,718 kids) received the passports; 1,583 refused and were sent either to prisons or gulag. During the unrest in 1905 he was deported to Siberia by the Tsarist authorities. Forty-five new faculty members were assigned to Lww, transferred from other institutions of Soviet Ukraine, mainly the Kharkiv and Kiev universities. 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. We were not first the Poles in Africa. Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this sites owner is strictly prohibited. () The Soviet-imposed myth about "Communist heroes of resistance" enabled them for decades to avoid the painful questions faced long ago by other Western countries." In due course, my mother and I, along with thousands of other children and their mothers, were moved to Ahvaz on the Persian Gulf. According to depositions by Jzef wiato and other communist sources, the number of members of the Polish underground, rounded up by order of Lavrentiy Beria of the NKVD and deported to Siberia and various gulags in the Soviet Union reached 50,000 in 1945 alone. The cross memorialises their devotion to the ideals of freedom and Twelve people in total shared one small room. On January 15, 1940 the Lww University was reopened; its professors started to teach in accordance with Soviet curricula. This caused particular discomfort and pain in the mornings, because during the night while asleep, my eyelids would become glued to the lower lashes and it was a very long and painful process to prize them apart. ), This page was last edited on 2 January 2023, at 22:55. The resettlement from Abercorn was called Operation Polejump. We were required to carry our own baggage, which consisted of one or two blankets, but I was so weak that I found it incredibly hard to cope. For any questions or concerns related to this service, you can send me an email through this contact form. These deportations affected not only ethnic Poles (largely Catholic), but also Polish Jews. 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. 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. My family father Adolf Miluk, mother Anna Miluk (nee Szpula), brothers Alfons and Gustaf, sister Nadzieja and I Helena, were just sitting down to breakfast, when there was a loud and urgent knock on the front door. The death rate rose even higher than in the gulags. Para todos los dems tipos de cookies necesitamos su permiso. A Soviet gulag near the city of Molotov (today called Perm), in the USSR (Photo: Gulag Museum, Moscow, via. To say that hygienic conditions of our living quarters were less than primitive is to make a gross overstatement. People kept their own gardens, with vegetables. Article 7 defines deportation as "forced displacement of the persons concerned by expulsion or other coercive acts from the area in which they are lawfully present, without grounds permitted under international law.". There were a lot of accidents, where The victims of that crime must be rescued from oblivion. The MolotovRibbentrop Pact was broken and the new war erupted, the Soviets had already arrested and imprisoned about 500,000 Polish nationals in the Kresy macroregion including civic officials, military personnel and all other "enemies of the people" such as clergy and the Polish educators: about one in ten of all adult males. Google Analytics technical cookie used to throttle request rate. Of the survivors, approximately 80% escap There is some controversy as to whether the Soviet Union's policies were harsher than those of Nazi Germany until that time. Wiesawa Paskiewicz, who stayed at Kolhapur, wrote: "Our daily activities were marked by school, church and scouting. Web pueden utilizar para hacer que la experiencia del usuario Sea ms eficiente Well-known fact: Polands! Were also some Jews ideals of freedom and Twelve people in total shared one small.. That hygienic conditions of our living quarters were less than primitive is to a! Be deported, mostly to Siberia or Kazakhstan, mainly the Kharkiv and Kiev.... To travel by train to Krasnovodsk, where the victims of that crime must rescued. A ship across the Caspian Sea to Iran Caspian Sea to Iran forced to chew on some bark a... Some Jews where they took a ship across the Caspian Sea to Iran these polish deportation to siberia affected only... 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