After the hell that we survived, Tehran was a different world. 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. My lungs were also affected, a condition which has dogged me all my life. 'Za pierwszego Sovieta'. The author of this blog denies to any person or entity of copyright management the authority to charge third parties for reproducing the contents of this blog. In January 1948, the Commissioner of the East African Refugee Administration wrote a letter about the deportation of the Polish refugees from the Abercorn camp. Only the Communist Party was allowed to exist, with organizations subordinated to it. 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. A one-time Amnesty for Polish citizens in the Soviet Union was declared by Stalin. The Mass Deportation of Poles to Siberia-This book is a historical narrative based on the written testimony of the Polish Siberian survivors. People were dying like flies. But there was a crime quantitatively greater and as unknown as that by the general public. Lessons were held in the open air. You will not receive any email related to other purposes. The over-riding feeling was that of perpetual hunger and fear. Bogdan Harbuz stayed at Koja camp: "We did not receive any money for food, we only got 5 shillings a month for our expenses. Political Migrations on Polish Territories (19391950). Exiled to Siberia. If at any time you want to unsubscribe, you only just have to click the link that you will find at the bottom of each newsletter. 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. 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. The arrested members of the Polish intelligentsia included former prime ministers Leon Kozowski and Aleksander Prystor, Stanisaw Grabski and Stanisaw Gbiski, and the Baczewski family. Wiesawa Paskiewicz, who stayed at Kolhapur, wrote: "Our daily activities were marked by school, church and scouting. Entdecke Eine polnische Frauenerfahrung im Zweiten Weltkrieg - 9781350178090 in groer Auswahl Vergleichen Angebote und Preise Online kaufen bei eBay Kostenlose Lieferung fr viele Artikel! The However, in 2020, Russian President Valdimir Putin went as far as blaming Poland for starting World War II. Forced deportations of Polish citizens to Russia is one of the most tragic pages in our history, wrote Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki in a letter to the participants of the opening ceremony of the Siberian Memorial Museum. I remember one day my mother gave me a slice of bread and my eldest brother, who had to work very hard, another. Because we were travelling in animal trucks, there were hardly any sanitary provisions. (And that is another moment that has always stayed with me). Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this sites owner is strictly prohibited. The formerly sovereign Lithuania was moved into the Soviet sphere of influence and absorbed into the USSR as the brand new Lithuanian SSR among the Soviet republics. 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. This meant that all remaining Poles were re-granted Soviet citizenship and received Soviet passports. The cooking was done in a large kitchen situated in the middle. Their migration began was encouraged by local noblemen, often Polish landlords, who wanted to develop their significant land-holdings in the area for agricultural use. The NKVD deported not just Poles and Balts, but tens of thousands of Jews to Siberia and Kazakhstan between 1939 and 1941. On June 16, 2005, the website of the World Jewish Congress published very significant information that highlighted the curious coincidence of Hitler's initial anti-Semitic plans with Stalin's deportations of Jews : "The Nazis wanted to deport all Jews to the Soviet Union, a newly discovered document suggests. The fourth and final wave occurred in June 1941, deporting 300,000. For some reason that I cannot explain the sight of my brothers face awash with tears has always stayed in my memory. There were a lot of accidents, where Those arrested included Wadysaw Broniewski, Aleksander Wat, Tadeusz Peiper, Leopold Lewin, Anatol Stern, Teodor Parnicki, Marian Czuchnowski and many others. The journey from Poland to Siberia to Central Asia will be told not only by Asher and Shifra Scharf but also by several other Polish Jews, each detailing a particular leg of the journey. Some months later we the orphans and civilians were moved to Uzbekistan to a place called Guzar. 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. It had a clubroom, a hospital, and a gym. But, actual conferral of citizenship required individual consent and residents were strongly pressured for such consent. [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. The children and the adults were then transported to the North Island, to a town of Pahiatua, where Polish Children's CampPahiatuawas opened in former military barracks. [8], The fate of the deported Poles improved in mid-1942, after the signing of the SikorskiMayski agreement. 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. This invaluable database has details of many of the deported in the 1940s to Russia / Siberia. Faced with those who claim that Stalin had strategic reasons for allying with Germany in 1939, Snyder added: "in moral discussions of the war, strategic justifications are not usually admitted as legitimate excuses for collaboration with the Nazis. On January 16, 1943, the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs issued a note to the Polish embassy, informing it about closing down Polish consulates in the Soviet Union and voiding the decision of granting Polish citizenship to the people who had lived in the Kresy before September 1939. However, in October 1946, the Secretary of State in London pronounced that refugees who could get a job in the area for at least 6 months, or had a sum of money sufficient to sustain themselves, could stay. The main street of the camp was named after General Tadeusz Br-Komorowski. Asumiremos que est de acuerdo con esto, pero puede optar por no participar si lo desea. 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. [b][45], While Germans enforced their policies based on racism, the Soviet administration justified their Stalinist policies by appealing to Soviet ideology. [57] The death toll of the initial Soviet-inspired terror campaign remains unknown. During those three weeks of meandering through Russia, it was well nigh impossible to have a proper wash. In 1944, the prime minister of New Zealand, Peter Fraser, agreed to take a limited number of Polish orphans and half-orphans, whose parents had died either in Soviet Union or Tehran, or whose fathers had fought at the front. Further Polish transports went to India by sea, from the port of Ahvaz to Bombay. [56] Pre-war Poland was portrayed as a capitalist state based on exploitation of the working people and ethnic minorities. 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 adults were uneasy and afraid of the unknown, but us, the children, were happy for an adventure. And how did Auschwitz, previously the Polish town Oswiecim, come to bear that infamous name? Cedar, MI 49621-5106. 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. After the Polish Army had left the Soviet Union, the attitude of the Soviets towards the remaining Poles worsened. POLES DEPORTED TO SIBERIA IN THE YEARS 1940-1945. Legacy Google Analytics short-term technical cookie used along with __utmb to determine new users sessions. The date was 10th February, 1940 middle of severe winter in north eastern Poland, where I was born. She would share some of our food with those who were not so lucky. One day I saw my fathers shirt lying on the floor actually move with crawling lice. In Northern Rhodesia, 245 evacuees were accepted for permanent residence. MY STORY AS REMEMBERED FROM THE DISTANCE OF. 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.". World War Two: The deportation of Polish refugees to Abercorn "The complex story of Polish refugees in Iran", "Iran and the Polish Exodus from Russia 1942", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Evacuation_of_Polish_civilians_from_the_USSR_in_World_War_II&oldid=1096111774, Articles using infobox templates with no data rows, Articles with unsourced statements from June 2020, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, Over 30,000 military personnel and about 11,000 children evacuated from March 24 until the first days of April 1942, Over 43,000 military personnel and about 25,000 civilians evacuated by sea from August 10 to September 1, 1942, This page was last edited on 2 July 2022, at 11:09. Thus we all became separated from each other, and I remember crying myself to sleep every night, as it was the first time in my life that I was apart from my mother and the rest of the family. The following year, between 40,000 and 50,000 people - mostly from Upper Silesia - were deported to forced labor camps.[38]. We were then moved to some kind of barracks, with blankets hung up to separate family units. ", Deportation: a crime against humanity and a war crime. In the aftermath of the German and Soviet invasion of Poland, which took place in September 1939, the territory of Poland was divided in half between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. During the second evacuation, 69,247 persons left the Soviet Union, including 25,501 civilians (9,633 children). [4] Whether the number of victims could have reached or even exceeded 100,000 is only a matter of guessing,[4] considering the traditional taboos among the women incapable of finding "a voice that would have enabled them to talk openly" about their wartime experiences "while preserving their dignity. While the overall experiences of the survivors have commonalities, certain details of their stories are uniquely different. Those who were not quick enough to board the train, were simply left in the wilderness to find their way to the nearest railway station, or simply perished. 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. The Nazis considered several resettlement proposals, including sending all Jews to Madagascar, before starting their extermination policy. I was just a skeleton, simply skin and bones, and I lost touch with my family for quite a while. Perhaps that is why (in adulthood), much to the annoyance of our children, I developed an absolute phobia for neatness and tidiness. Regarding the ethnic composition of these areas: ca. 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. However, this was fraught with danger of being left behind. This book is a collection of individual stories written by survivors of the Polish genocide during the Second World War. 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. [5], The evacuation of the Polish people from the USSR lasted from March 24, 1942, for one week, and then again from August 10, 1942, until the beginning of September. Meantime, my mother, who by then was also in Teheran, found my brother Gustaf and me, and asked to be released from the womens service in order to be with us. [14] Their enthusiasm however faded with time as it became clear that the Soviet repressions were aimed at all peoples equally.[15]. [16] As the Soviet Union had not signed international conventions on rules of war, the Polish prisoners were denied legal status. I do not recall why we did not get any help from anybody. Young as I was, in my mind I resisted. To say that hygienic conditions of our living quarters were less than primitive is to make a gross overstatement. [15] The NKVD had to open dozens of ad-hoc prison sites in almost all towns of the region. In the end unable to bear it any longer, I crawled on to the floor of the bus and stayed there until we miraculously reached Teheran. World War Two: The deportation of Polish refugees to Abercorn camp in Northern Rhodesia. There, all were divided into several groups and began their education. Most of the time we survived on one slice of black bread a day. Russian historian Pavel Polian, now a professor at the University of Freiburg in Germany, said that Third Reich officials apparently approached Moscow in early 1940 with the idea of deporting all Jews in the German Reich to Birobidjan, a Siberian area that Stalin had designated as a Jewish autonomous region, and to western Ukraine. 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. The journey was an inhuman nightmare. deportation of Poles to Siberia. "Terminal horror suffered by so many millions of innocent Jewish, Slavic, and other European peoples as a result of this meeting of evil minds is an indelible stain on the history and integrity of Western civilization, with all of its humanitarian pretensions" (Note: "this meeting" refers to the most famous third (Zakopane) conference). There is some controversy as to whether the Soviet Union's policies were harsher than those of Nazi Germany until that time. This was a small fraction of the approximately 1.7 million Polish citizens who had been arrested by the Soviets at the beginning of the war. There we boarded a ship where we were exposed to more appalling conditions. 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